The Disenchanted
10 best books like The Disenchanted (Budd Schulberg): Riders in the Chariot, How Far Can You Go?, The Groves of Academe, Darconville’s Cat, The Parade's Gone By..., Dangerous Curves Atop Hollywood Heels: The Lives, Careers, and Misfortunes of 14 Hard-Luck Girls of the Silent Screen, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema; 1930-1934, Silent Movies: The Birth of Film and the Triumph of Movie Culture, Sweet Dreams, The Anti-Death League
| Author | Patrick White |
| ISBN | 1590170024 |
Patrick White's brilliant 1961 novel, set in an Australian suburb, intertwines four deeply different lives. An Aborigine artist, a Holocaust survivor, a beatific washerwoman, and a childlike heiress are each blessed—and stricken—with visionary experiences that may or may not allow them...
| Author | David Lodge |
| ISBN | 0140057463 |
This 1980 novel by Lodge (whom you may have noticed I've been reading a lot of and enjoying this year) follows a group of young English Catholics over a period of about 20 years, enabling us to see the ways their religion affects their lives (and their lives affect their religion), particularly in the shadow...
| Author | Mary McCarthy |
| ISBN | 0156027879 |
Henry Mulcahy, a literature instructor at progressive Jocelyn College, is informed that his appointment will not be continued. Convinced he is disliked by the president of Jocelyn because of his abilities as a teacher and his independence of mass opinion, Mulcahy believes he is being made the victim...
| Author | Alexander Theroux |
| ISBN | 0805043659 |
The main story is a love affair between Alaric Darconville, an English professor at a Virginia women's college, and one of his students, Isabel.
The style relies on complex syntax and unusual words. The satire is broad, and uses southern culture cliches but is often very funny. Some of the names...
| Author | Kevin Brownlow |
| ISBN | 0520030680 |
I knew this book would be a good resource since I've seen several other resources cite it, but I still cannot help but be impressed. This is a work of love and passion in chronicling the silent film era. Not only does it discuss the stars, but it goes into great detail about the technical aspects and how they...
Dangerous Curves Atop Hollywood Heels: The Lives, Careers, and Misfortunes of 14 Hard-Luck Girls of the Silent Screen
| Author | Michael G. Ankerich |
| ISBN | 1593936052 |
"We were like dragonflies. We seemed to be suspended effortlessly in the air, but in reality, our wings were beating very, very fast." - Mae Murray "It is worse than folly for persons to imagine that this business is an easy road to money, to contentment, or to that strange quality called happiness." -...
| Author | Thomas Doherty |
| ISBN | 0231110952 |
Pre-Code Hollywood explores the fascinating period in American motion picture history from 1930 to 1934 when the commandments of the Production Code Administration were violated with impunity in a series of wildly unconventional films--a time when censorship was lax and Hollywood made the most...
| Author | Peter Kobel |
| ISBN | 0316117919 |
A gorgeous, lavish history of silent movies - with more than 400 amazing images - captures the birth of film and icons like Chaplin, Garbo, Clara Bow, and Valentino.
Drawing on the extraordinary collection of The Library of Congress, one of the greatest repositories for silent film and...
| Author | Michael Frayn |
| ISBN | 0140040633 |
An utter delight.
Even though it was written in the 1970s, it still feels completely fresh & topical today. It's a lovely, optimistic satire of man & covers many of the Big Ideas. I know when Life of Pi was so very popular, various reviews said it would affirm/renew your faith in God (a...
| Author | Kingsley Amis |
| ISBN | 0575008156 |
Brian Leonard, a Monty Python of secret agents, meets James Churchill, a young officer at an English army base where preparations are under way for Operation Apollo. To complicate matters, Churchill has gone round-the-bend for a parole from the mental ward. Thrown amongst these loose cannons is a...
The most beloved comic figure in English literature decides that history hasn't done him justice -- it's time for him to tell the whole unbuttoned story, his way. Irascible and still lecherous at eighty-one, Falstaff spins out these outrageously bawdy memoirs as an antidote to legend, and in the process...
| Author | Angus Wilson |
| ISBN | 0586049029 |
Set in a near future (the novel was first published in 1961 and is set in the period 1970–73), this is Angus Wilson's most allegorical novel, about a doomed attempt to set up a reserve for wild animals. Simon Carter, secretary of the London Zoo, has accepted responsibility and power to the prejudice...
| Author | Richard Hughes |
| ISBN | 0940322293 |
A tale of enormous suspense and growing horror, The Fox in the Attic is the widely acclaimed first part of Richard Hughes's monumental historical fiction, "The Human Predicament." Set in the early 1920s, the book centers on Augustine, a young man from an aristocratic Welsh family who has come of age...
| Author | Martin Gottfried |
| ISBN | 0306808374 |
Winner of an Oscar for Cabaret, a Tony for Pippin’, and an Emmy for Liza with a ‘Z’—all in one year, 1972—Bob Fosse (1927–1987) was one of America’s greatest choreographers and directors. Born in Chicago, young Fosse began his career tap-dancing as part of the Riff Brothers in sleazy...
| Author | Nadine Gordimer |
| ISBN | 0140056149 |
Liz Van Den Sandt's ex-husband, Max, an ineffectual rebel, has drowned himself. In prison for a failed act of violence against the government, he had betrayed his colleagues. Now Liz has been asked to perform a direct service for the black nationalist movement, at considerable danger to herself. Can...
| Author | L.P. Hartley |
| ISBN | 0241901685 |
The dystopian society that emerges after World War Three is based on a collective sense of guilt. Citizens of this new world, officially labelled 'delinquents' by their Dictator, are named after murderers and are obliged to wear sackcloth and ashes. Individualism is stamped out. Privilege, which...
| Author | Mordecai Richler |
| ISBN | 0771075103 |
In the swinging culture of sixties’ London, Canadian Mortimer Griffin is a beleaguered editor adrift in a sea of hypocrisy and deceit. Alone in a world where nobody shares his values but everyone wants the same things, Mortimer must navigate the currents of these changing times. Richler’s eccentric...
| Author | Rex Warner |
| ISBN | 1566630258 |
First published in 1941, The Aerodrome is one of the few works of fiction in the twentieth century to understand the dangerous yet glamorous appeal of fascism and the less than satisfactory answer of traditional democracy - and to transmute their deadly opposition into terms of enduring art. Rex Warner...
| Author | Bernard Malamud |
| ISBN | 0374528829 |
With a new introduction by Thomas Mallon
Dubin's Lives (1979) is a compassionate and wry commedia, a book praised by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times as Malamud's "best novel since The Assistant. Possibly, it is the best he has written of all."
Its protagonist is one...
| Author | Brian Moore |
| ISBN | 0586087397 |
I read this book for the 2019 Mookse Madness Tournament.
Famously The Prime Minister’s wife blackballed The Doctor’s Wife for the Booker due to the sex scenes.
Trying to find out more about Moore the author, and a little underwhelmed with this book, I came across an obituary in...
| Author | C.P. Snow |
| ISBN | 1842324284 |
'Time of Hope' is the first in narrative order (despite being published later than 'George Passant' and 'The Light and the Dark', in the 'Strangers and Brothers' series and tells the story of Lewis Eliot's early life.
As a child he is faced with his father's bankruptcy. As a young man, he finds...
| Author | Eleanor Keaton |
| ISBN | 0810942275 |
Known for his legendary "stone face" and incredible physical gags, Buster Keaton (1895-—1966) was a genius of silent-film comedy. Decades after their release, his movies remain unsurpassed marvels of comic invention and mechanical timing. In Buster Keaton Remembered, a unique illustrated...
A Girl Like I: An Autobiography
| Author | Anita Loos |
| ISBN | 0345246535 |
I've made two great author discoveries this year; authors I'd long heard of and occasionally even fondled, but never actually read; authors I'll now have as friends for years. The first is Iain M Banks, about whom I have raved elsewhere. And the second, in an almost complete contrast to to all that sci-fi...
Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man
| Author | Mick LaSalle |
| ISBN | 0312283113 |
Using the same mix of accessibility and insider knowledge he used so successfully in Complicated Women, author and film critic Mick LaSalle now turns his attention to the men of the pre-Code Hollywood era.
The five years between 1929 and mid-1934 was a period of loosened censorship that finally...
Room 1219: The Life of Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood
| Author | Greg Merritt |
| ISBN | 1613747926 |
In 1921, one of the biggest movie stars in the world was accused of killing a woman. What followed was an unprecedented avalanche of press coverage, the original “trial of the century,” and a wave of censorship that altered the course of Hollywood filmmaking.
It began on Labor Day, when...
