Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography
10 best books like Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (Jean Rhys): The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, The Book of X, Possessing the Secret of Joy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography, Runaway Horses, Nightwood, The Love of a Good Woman, A Life of My Own, Falconer, Saville
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
| Author | Giorgio Bassani |
| ISBN | 1400044227 |
Giorgio Bassani's acclaimed novel of unrequited love and the plight of the Italian Jews on the brink of World War II has become a classic of modern Italian literature.
Made into an Academy Award winning film in 1970, "The Garden of the Finzi Continis "is a richly evocative and nostalgic depiction...
| Author | Sarah Rose Etter |
| ISBN | 1937512819 |
There is a quarry made of meat, marbled rich with fat. There is a family who lives at the meat quarry’s edge. There is a girl who lives with a knotted body, as does her mother, as does her mother’s mother. There is a girl who yearns to be seen with kind eyes, to be touched with soft hands, to be loved by an open...
| Author | Alice Walker |
| ISBN | 0671789457 |
Possessing the Secret of Joy is the story of Tashi, a tribal African woman who lives much of her adult life in North America. As a young woman, a misguided loyalty to the customs of her people led her to voluntarily submit to the tsunga's knife and be genitally mutilated (pharoanoically circumcised)....
The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography
A searching examination of all the dimensions of love, marriage, mourning, and kinship from two-time Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy.
To strip the wallpaper off the fairy tale of The Family House in which the comfort and happiness of men and children has been the priority is to find behind...
| Author | Yukio Mishima |
| ISBN | 0099282895 |
Isao is a young, engaging patriot, and a fanatical believer in the ancient samurai ethos. He turns terrorist, organising a violent plot against the new industrialists, who he believes are threatening the integrity of Japan and usurping the Emperor’s rightful power. As the conspiracy unfolds and...
| Author | Djuna Barnes |
| ISBN | 0811216713 |
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (TLS). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—a...
| Author | Alice Munro |
| ISBN | 0099287862 |
**Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature**
Alice Munro has a genius for entering the lives of ordinary people and capturing the passions and contradictions that lie just below the surface. In this brilliant new collection she takes mainly the lives of women - unruly, ungovernable, unpredictable,...
Acclaimed biographer Claire Tomalin, the bestselling author of The Invisible Woman and Jane Austen, turns her critical eye to another fascinating literary life: her own.
In this intimate and insightful memoir, Claire remembers moments of national literary history as well as intense personal...
| Author | John Cheever |
| ISBN | 0679737863 |
Falconer Correctional Facility certainly sounds dreary and no place I’d want to spend any time, but it doesn’t seem nearly as bad as many fictional prisons. In fact, it seems pretty dull. There weren’t any beatings from brutal guards. There’s no racial tension evident. No one gets shivved...
| Author | David Storey |
| ISBN | 0380018896 |
Saville centers around Colin, a young boy growing up in the fictional Yorkshire mining village of Saxton during the Second World War and the postwar years.
This is the story of a miner's son, and his growth from the 1930s on, his rise in the world by way of grammar school and college. At first there...
| Author | Lilian Pizzichini |
| ISBN | 0393058034 |
A groundbreaking biography of a psychologically traumatized novelist who forever changed the way we look at women in fiction.
Jean Rhys (1890–1979) is best known for her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea. A prequel to Jane Eyre, Rhys’s revolutionary work reimagined the story of Bertha Rochester—the...
From prizewinning author Michael Crummey comes a spellbinding story of survival in which a brother and sister confront the limits of human endurance and their own capacity for loyalty and forgiveness.
A brother and sister are orphaned in an isolated cove on Newfoundland's northern coastline....
| Author | Laurie Colwin |
| ISBN | 0060955325 |
Guido and Vincent are childhood best friends—third cousins, really—living in Cambridge and dreaming about their futures. Guido plans to write poetry while Vincent feels confident he will win a Nobel prize for physics. When Guido spots Holly while exiting a museum, he can immediately sense that...
| Author | Diana Athill |
| ISBN | 0802138624 |
A founding editor of the prestigious publishing house Andre Deutsch, Ltd., Athill takes us on a guided tour through the corridors of literary London, offering a keenly observed, devilishly funny, and always compassionate portrait of the glories and pitfalls of making books.
Stet is a must-read...
Lowborn: Growing Up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain’s Poorest Towns
| Author | Kerry Hudson |
| ISBN | 1784742457 |
What does it really mean to be poor in Britain today? A prizewinning novelist revisits her childhood and some of the country's most deprived towns
'When every day of your life you have been told you have nothing of value to offer, that you are worth nothing to society, can you ever escape that sense...
| Author | Shirley Jackson |
| ISBN | 1567230644 |
Elizabeth is a demure twenty-three-year-old wiling her life away at a dull museum job, living with her neurotic aunt, and subsisting off her dead mother’s inheritance. When Elizabeth begins to suffer terrible migraines and backaches, her aunt takes her to the doctor, then to a psychiatrist. But...
Things I Don't Want to Know
| Author | Deborah Levy |
| ISBN | 1907903631 |
Marketed as a feminist response to Orwell’s “Why I Write,” Things I Don’t Want to Know tracks how a soft-spoken girl became a prolific writer. Across four fast-moving sections, novelist Deborah Levy recounts her childhood spent in South Africa at the height of apartheid, with her father incarcerated...
Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty
| Author | Jacqueline Rose |
| ISBN | 0571331432 |
Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty is guided by a simple argument: that motherhood is the place in our culture where we lodge - or rather bury - the reality of our own conflicts, of psychic life, and what it means to be fully human. Mothers are the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings,...
