Sunflower
10 best books like Sunflower (Gyula Krúdy): Jazz, Embers, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Transit, Skylark, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, Omer Pacha Latas, Alles umsonst, The Gate, In the House in the Dark of the Woods
| Author | Toni Morrison |
| ISBN | 0452269652 |
In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse. This passionate, profound story...
| Author | Sándor Márai |
| ISBN | 0375707425 |
Originally published in 1942 and now rediscovered to international acclaim, this taut and exquisitely structured novel by the Hungarian master Sandor Marai conjures the melancholy glamour of a decaying empire and the disillusioned wisdom of its last heirs.
In a secluded woodland castle...
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
| Author | Marcel Proust |
| ISBN | 0143039075 |
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is Proust’s spectacular dissection of male and female adolescence, charged with the narrator’s memories of Paris and the Normandy seaside. At the heart of the story lies his relationships with his grandmother and with the Swann family. As a meditation on different...
| Author | Anna Seghers |
| ISBN | 3746651530 |
“Transit” is the perfect title for this masterpiece of refugee fiction!
There are so many layers of meaning in that short word, all symbolically integrated in the straightforward, realistic story, mirroring Anna Seghers’ own odyssey during the Second World War.
The most...
| Author | Dezső Kosztolányi |
| ISBN | 1590173392 |
It is 1900, give or take a few years. The Vajkays—call them Mother and Father—live in Sárszeg, a dead-end burg in the provincial heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Father retired some years ago to devote his days to genealogical research and quaint questions of heraldry. Mother keeps house....
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller
| Author | Carlo Ginzburg |
| ISBN | 0801843871 |
The Cheese and the Worms is a study of the popular culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, a miller brought to trial during the Inquisition. Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records of Domenico Scandella, a miller also known as Menocchio, to show how one person responded to the...
| Author | Ivo Andrić |
| ISBN | 2842611470 |
Andric's final novel has moments of insight and beauty, but at times its incompleteness is obvious. In his introduction, Vollmann calls it a strange novel and I would have to agree. Ostensibly about the titular character, this novel is really a collection of stories about individuals within the Pasha's...
| Author | Walter Kempowski |
| ISBN | 3813502643 |
Winter, January 1945. It is cold and dark, and the German army is retreating from the Russian advance. Germans are fleeing the occupied territories in their thousands, in cars and carts and on foot. But in a rural East Prussian manor house, the wealthy von Globig family tries to seal itself off from the...
| Author | Natsume Sōseki |
| ISBN | 0720612500 |
One of the central masterpieces of 20th-century Japanese literature, The Gate describes the everyday world of the humble clerk Sosuke and his wife Oyone, living in quiet obscurity in a house at the bottom of a cliff. Seemingly cursed with the inability to have children, the couple find themselves having...
In the House in the Dark of the Woods
| Author | Laird Hunt |
| ISBN | 0316411051 |
"Once upon a time there was and there wasn't a woman who went to the woods."
In this horror story set in colonial New England, a law-abiding Puritan woman goes missing. Or perhaps she has fled or abandoned her family. Or perhaps she's been kidnapped, and set loose to wander in the dense woods of...
