The Good Lord Bird
10 best books like The Good Lord Bird (James McBride): The Underground Railroad, Middle Passage, Paco's Story, The Flamethrowers, Morte D'Urban, Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, The Two Hotel Francforts, The End of the Point, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877, Woke Up Lonely
| Author | Colson Whitehead |
| ISBN | 0385542364 |
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad,...
| Author | Charles R. Johnson |
| ISBN | 0684855887 |
It is 1830. Rutherford Calhoun, a newly freed slave and irrepressible rogue, is desperate to escape unscrupulous bill collectors and an impending marriage to a priggish schoolteacher. He jumps aboard the first boat leaving New Orleans, the Republic, a slave ship en route to collect members of a legendary...
| Author | Larry Heinemann |
| ISBN | 1400076838 |
Paco Sullivan is the only man in Alpha Company to survive a cataclysmic Viet Cong attack on Fire Base Harriette in Vietnam. Everyone else is annihilated. When a medic finally rescues Paco almost two days later, he is waiting to die, flies and maggots covering his burnt, shattered body. He winds up back...
| Author | Rachel Kushner |
| ISBN | 1439142009 |
The year is 1975 and Reno—so-called because of the place of her birth—has come to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity in the art world—artists have colonized a deserted and industrial SoHo, are staging...
| Author | J.F. Powers |
| ISBN | 0940322234 |
Winner of The 1963 National Book Award for Fiction.
The hero of J.F. Powers's comic masterpiece is Father Urban, a man of the cloth who is also a man of the world. Charming, with an expansive vision of the spiritual life and a high tolerance for moral ambiguity, Urban enjoys a national reputation...
| Author | Carla Kaplan |
| ISBN | 0060882387 |
One of the nation's foremost scholars of ethnic and gender studies offers a new perspective of the 1920s in this lively, groundbreaking group biography of the white women of the Harlem Renaissance
The 1920s in New York was a time of passion and freedom, in which new forms of art, including jazz...
| Author | David Leavitt |
| ISBN | 1596910429 |
It is the summer of 1940, and Lisbon, Portugal, is the only neutral port left in Europe—a city filled with spies, crowned heads, and refugees of every nationality, tipping back absinthe to while away the time until their escape. Awaiting safe passage to New York on the SS Manhattan, two couples meet:...
A precisely observed, superbly crafted novel, The End of the Point by Elizabeth Graver charts the dramatic changes in the lives of three generations of one remarkable family, and the summer place that both shelters and isolates them.
A place out of time, Ashaunt Point - a tiny finger of land...
Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877
| Author | Brenda Wineapple |
| ISBN | 0061234575 |
A New York Times Notable Book of 2013
A Kirkus Best Book of 2013
A Bookpage Best Book of 2013
Dazzling in scope, Ecstatic Nation illuminates one of the most dramatic and momentous chapters in America's past, when the country dreamed big, craved new lands and new freedom, and...
| Author | Fiona Maazel |
| ISBN | 1555976387 |
Woke Up Lonely is an original and deeply funny novel that explores our very human impulse to seek and repel intimacy with the people who matter to us most.
Thurlow Dan is the founder of the Helix, a cult that promises to cure loneliness in the twenty-first century. With its communes and speed-dating,...
| Author | Jaimy Gordon |
| ISBN | 0929701836 |
A brilliant novel that captures the dusty, dark, and beautiful world of small-time horse racing, where trainers, jockeys, grooms and grifters vie for what little luck is offered at a run-down West Virginia track .
Tommy Hansel has a plan: run four horses, all better than they look on paper,...
| Author | John O'Hara |
| ISBN | 0394448146 |
Ten North Frederick by John O’Hara
There is here, in the biography of Joe Chapin, nothing that could not have been seen or heard by the people whose lives were touched by Joe Chapin’s life. Whatever he thought, whatever he felt has always been expressed to or through someone else, and the...
| Author | Isaac Bashevis Singer |
| ISBN | 0374516243 |
It's been nearly 30 years since I last looked at this excellent collection of short stories, but some of them still visit my thoughts regularly. My favorite is the guy who seduces his neighbor by turning up in her bedroom one night and saying that he's a demon from Hell. It's pitch black, and she's not sure...
| Author | Wright Morris |
| ISBN | 0451027612 |
Winner of the National Book Award
"Wright Morris seems to me the most important novelist of the American middle generation. Through a large body of work —which, unaccountably, has yet to receive the wide attention it deserves— Mr. Morris has adhered to standards which we have come to identify...
| Author | Mary Lee Settle |
| ISBN | 1570030979 |
In a novel that begins with accidental death and ends with deliberate murder, Mary Lee Settle tells the story of an eclectic collection of American and European expatriates who take refuge in an ancient Turkish city and, once there, wreak havoc on the Aegean paradise. At first the characters appear...
From the time of its first publication in 1960, Conrad Richter's The Waters of Kronos sparked lively debate about the extent to which its story of a belated return to childhood scenes mirrored key events of Richter's own life. As was well known at the time, Richter had spent several years in the Southwest,...
| Author | David Fuller |
| ISBN | 1401323316 |
The year is 1862, and the Civil War rages through the South. On a Virginia tobacco plantation, another kind of battle soon begins. There, Cassius Howard, a skilled carpenter and slave, risks everything--punishment, sale to a cotton plantation, even his life--to learn the truth concerning the murder...
"Emotionally, it’s astounding. 'Linked' doesn’t begin to describe the complex web Silber has woven…Beautiful, intricate and wise."—New York Times Book Review
When is it wise to be a fool for something? What makes people want to be better than they are? From New York to India to Paris,...
| Author | Tom Drury |
| ISBN | 0802119999 |
In a triumphant return to the characters that launched his career two decades ago, Tom Drury travels back to Grouse County, the setting of his landmark debut, The End of Vandalism. Drury’s depictions of the stark beauty of the Midwest and the futility of American wanderlust have earned him comparisons...
| Author | Leonard Pitts Jr. |
| ISBN | 1932841644 |
Freeman, the new novel by Leonard Pitts, Jr., takes place in the first few months following the Confederate surrender and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Upon learning of Lee's surrender, Sam--a runaway slave who once worked for the Union Army--decides to leave his safe haven in Philadelphia...
At Night We Walk in Circles
| Author | Daniel Alarcón |
| ISBN | 1594631719 |
Nelson’s life is not turning out the way he hoped. His girlfriend is sleeping with another man, his brother has left their South American country and moved to the United States, leaving Nelson to care for their widowed mother, and his acting career can’t seem to get off the ground. That is, until he...
| Author | Karen Shepard |
| ISBN | 1935639552 |
In June of 1870, seventy-five Chinese laborers arrived in North Adams, Massachusetts, to work for Calvin Sampson, one of the biggest industrialists in that busy factory town. Except for the foreman, the Chinese didn't speak English. They didn't know they were strikebreakers. The eldest of them was...
| Author | Kent Wascom |
| ISBN | 0802121187 |
One of the most powerful and impressive debuts Grove/Atlantic has ever published, The Blood of Heaven is an epic novel about the American frontier in the early days of the nineteenth century. Its twenty-six-year-old author, Kent Wascom, was awarded the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival...
| Author | Bob Shacochis |
| ISBN | 0802119824 |
Renowned through four award-winning books for his gritty and revelatory visions of the Caribbean, Bob Shacochis returns to occupied Haiti in The Woman Who Lost Her Soul before sweeping across time and continents to unravel tangled knots of romance, espionage, and vengeance. In riveting prose, Shacochis...
