The Friday Book

Author

Thomas Pynchon

Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humor, The Crying of Lot 49 opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executrix of a former lover's estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd...

Author	Flannery O'Connor
ISBN	0151365040

This now classic book revealed Flannery O'Connor as one of the most original and provocative writers to emerge from the South. Her apocalyptic vision of life is expressed through grotesque, often comic situations in which the principal character faces a problem of salvation: the grandmother, in...

Author	Robert M. Sapolsky
ISBN	1594205078

Why do we do the things we do?
More than a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky's genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful...

Author	Flannery O'Connor
ISBN	0374530637

Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor’s astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is a story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher...

Author	Arthur Ransome
ISBN	0613789776

Apparently Evgenia, Mrs Ransome, didn't like this one at all. I really can't understand why: this is probably my favourite of the series, even though it lacks the Swallows. Perfectly paced, beautifully plotted, and back in the Lakes. What's not to like?

I have also always thought that this...

Author	Jane Bennett
ISBN	0822346338

In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman...