The Magic Barrel

Author	James Baldwin
ISBN	0679744738

An interesting transition between the raw passion of Notes of a Native Son and the prophetic rhetoric of The Fire Next Time, Nobody Knows My Name is as eloquent as either work. The essays collected here range from an analysis of the ties between racial and national identity in America through a memoir...

Author	Pete Dexter
ISBN	0140122060

In this novel of social drama, a casual murder in the small Georgia town of Cotton Point just after World War II and the resulting court case cleave open the ugly divisions of race and class. The man accused of shooting a black girl, a storekeeper named Paris Trout, has no great feeling of guilt, nor fear...

Author	Andrea Barrett
ISBN	0393316009

1996 National Book Award Winner for Fiction.

The elegant short fictions gathered hereabout the love of science and the science of love are often set against the backdrop of the nineteenth century. Interweaving historical and fictional characters, they encompass both past and present as...

Author	James Sallis
ISBN	1641290803

A spare, sparkling tour de force about one woman's journey to becoming a cop, by master of noir James Sallis, author of Drive

Sarah Jane Pullman is a good cop with a complicated past. From her small-town chicken-farming roots through her runaway adolescence, court-ordered Army stint, ill-advised...

Author	John P. Marquand
ISBN	0316735671

A modern classic restored to print -- the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that charts the diminishing fortunes of a distinguished Boston family in the early years of the 20th century. Sweeping us into the inner sanctum of Boston society, into the Beacon Hill town houses and exclusive private clubs where...

Author	Wallace Stegner
ISBN	0140139400

This tour-de-force of American literature and a winner of the National Book Award is a profound, intimate, affecting novel from one of the most esteemed literary minds of the last century and a beloved chronicler of the West.

Joe Allston is a cantankerous, retired literary agent who is, in...

Author	Nelson Algren
ISBN	1583220089

Nelson Algren's devastating of that savage, subterranean world go gamblers, junkies, alcoholics, prostitutes, thieves, and degenerates remains unsurpassed as an authentic portrait of human depravity.

Only a master like Algren could create such a passionate and dramatic novel of so...

Author	Ellen Gilchrist
ISBN	0316313076

This book was recommended to me last summer by a former teacher who is also an Episcopalian minister. In December, I entered a "Secret Santa" drawing involving alumni of my alma mater (Grinnell College whaaaaat) and, per statistical probability, drew a woman I'd never met (Which is a good thing! This...

Author	Peter Matthiessen
ISBN	0679640193

Peter Matthiessen’s great American epic–Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone–was conceived as one vast mysterious novel, but because of its length it was originally broken up into three books. In this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has cut nearly a third of the overall...

Author	Paula Fox
ISBN	0312425198

Born in the 1920s to nomadic, bohemian parents, Paula Fox is left at birth in a Manhattan orphanage, then cared for by a poor yet cultivated minister in upstate New York. Her parents, however, soon resurface. Her handsome father is a hard-drinking screenwriter who is, for young Paula, "part ally, part...

Author	Ernest Poole
ISBN	1594624089

In this 1918 Pulitzer Prize winning story, widower Roger Gale struggles to deal with the way his children and grandchildren respond to the changing society. His Family is the story of a sixty-year-old New York man who reflects on his life and the lives of his three daughters. The women represent three...

Author	Tillie Olsen
ISBN	0385290101

This collection of four stories, "I Stand Here Ironing," "Hey Sailor, what Ship?," "O Yes," and "Tell me a Riddle," had become an American classic.  Since the title novella won the O. Henry Award in 1961, the stories have been anthologized over a hundred times, made into three films, translated into...

Author	Cynthia Ozick
ISBN	0679729267

Cynthia Ozick is a premier short story writer and novelist in this country. The Shawl and Rosa, published together in one volume, each won awards for best American fiction or short story the year they were published. My entry for "classic short story" in classic Bingo in the group catching up on classics,...

Author	Joyce Carol Oates
ISBN	0060565543

A tribute to the brilliant craftsmanship of one of our most distinguished writers, providing valuable insight into her inspiration and her method

Joyce Carol Oates is widely regarded as one of America's greatest contemporary literary figures. Having written in a number of genres -- prose,...

Author	Philip Roth
ISBN	0679752935

Patrimony, a true story, touches the emotions as strongly as anything Philip Roth has ever written. Roth watches as his eighty-six-year-old father—famous for his vigor, charm, and his repertoire of Newark recollections—battles with the brain tumor that will kill him. The son, full of love,...