The Rise of Life on Earth
10 best books like The Rise of Life on Earth (Joyce Carol Oates): Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol), Leave Her to Heaven, Toys in the Attic, The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers, Lilith, Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and the Stories, Original Bliss, A Carnivore's Inquiry, The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith
| Author | Breanne Fahs |
| ISBN | 1558618481 |
Too drastic, too crazy, too "out there," too early, too late, too damaged, too much—Valerie Solanas has been dismissed but never forgotten. She has become, unwittingly, a figurehead for women's unexpressed rage, and stands at the center of many worlds. She inhabited Andy Warhol's Factory scene,...
This classic bestselling novel about a man who encounters a woman whose power to destroy is as strong as her power to love evokes Hemingway in its naturalistic portrayal of elemental forces in both nature and humanity.
Ellen’s beauty was radiant, and Harland had been so struck with...
| Author | Lillian Hellman |
| ISBN | 0822211637 |
I wasn't really thrilled with this play and I think it's flatness on paper can only be fixed by really good acting. I had heard this was inspired by Chekhov and initially it definitely echoes Three Sisters - with the sisters talking about a trip to Europe that never happens. But the play is spoiled by extremely...
| Author | Virginia Spencer Carr |
| ISBN | 0820325228 |
The Lonely Hunter is widely accepted as the standard biography of Carson McCullers. Author of such landmarks of modern American fiction as Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Ballad of the Sad Café, Carson McCullers was the enfant terrible of the literary world of the 1940s and 1950s. Gifted but tormented,...
this is, without question, one of the most haunting books that I've ever read. I just thought about it again, and I became unsettled again. I got a literal shiver. This is a fantastic read. It is like Lolita, but the story has a better narrative arc and a more dramatic feeling instead of satirical. This book...
| Author | Carole Seymour-Jones |
| ISBN | 0385499930 |
This astonishing portrait of Vivienne Eliot, first wife of poet T.S. Eliot, gives a voice to the woman who, for seventeen years, had shared a unique literary partnership with Eliot but who was scapegoated for the failure of the marriage and all but obliterated from historical record. In so doing, Painted...
| Author | Nella Larsen |
| ISBN | 0385721005 |
A light-skinned beauty who spends years passing for white finds herself dangerously drawn to an old friend's Harlem neighborhood. A restless young mulatto tries desperately to find a comfortable place in a world in which she sees herself as a perpetual outsider. A mother's confrontation with tragedy...
| Author | A.L. Kennedy |
| ISBN | 0375702784 |
Emotionally numb, crippled with insomnia, and caught in a frightening, abusive marriage, Helen Brindle believes that God has recently left her. She spends her days performing banal domestic chores in front of a blaring television. On the BBC one day she watches a self-help guru expound on, among other...
| Author | Sabina Murray |
| ISBN | 0802142001 |
Twenty-three year old Katherine has just left Italy for New York City, but what has propelled her there is a mystery. She strikes up an affair with an older Russian �migr� novelist met on the subway and moves into his apartment. But her allusions to a frighteningly eccentric mother and tyrannical...
| Author | Patricia Highsmith |
| ISBN | 0393327728 |
Best known for her novels (The Talented Mr. Ripley, Strangers on a Train, A Suspension of Mercy, and others) Highsmith is an all-too-frequently forgotten master of the short story. These stories in this volume examine the dark soul of humanity in a deceptively simple voice that draws you in and won't...
| Author | Madison Smartt Bell |
| ISBN | 0307741885 |
Mae, a blackjack dealer in a Las Vegas casino, spends her free time wandering the desert with a rifle, or sitting in her trailer obsessively watching replays of an old lover escaping the wreckage of 9/11. What she sees in those images is different from what the rest of us would see. She revels in the pure...
| Author | Ross Macdonald |
| ISBN | 0553635182 |
A young lawyer Bill Gunnarson ended up being a public defender for a nurse. She was caught trying to sell a stolen ring. There was a big series of robberies of rich people homes and the police was desperate for any help. No wonder they kept the woman in jail trying to get her to confess. She refused even to talk....
| Author | Joy Williams |
| ISBN | 0679726195 |
Nominated for the National Book Award in 1974, this haunting, profoundly disquieting novel manages to be at once sparse and lush, to combine Biblical simplicity with Gothic intensity and strangeness. It is the story of Kate, despised by her mother, bound to her father by ties stronger and darker than...
| Author | Kate Braverman |
| ISBN | 1583224718 |
Lithium for Medea is a tale of addiction: to drugs, physical love, and dysfunctional family chains. It is also a tale of mothers and daughters, their mutual rebellion and unconscious mimicry. Rose grew up with an emotionally crippled, narcissistic mother while her father, a veteran gambler, spent...
| Author | Thomas Berger |
| ISBN | 0743247035 |
Sometimes I'm baffled by the average scores on goodreads--this is one of those times. I only finished this awful book just to unleash a rare one star review!
This was just terrible, from start to finish, which was kind of a surprise because I've read a few other Berger books (Being Invisible,...
Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil
| Author | Rafael Yglesias |
| ISBN | 0446673323 |
I waver between 3 and 4 stars. I'm settling with 3 because I think many people will be baffled by this book. If you define yourself as a person who "likes to know what makes people tick" then I'd definitely recommend it. I am fascinated by psychology and the analyses of the human psyche. Be prepared for what...
| Author | Shirley Jackson |
| ISBN | 0965011798 |
"The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable," writes A. M. Homes. "It is a place where things are not what they seem; even on a morning that is sunny and clear there is always the threat of darkness looming, of things taking a turn for the worse." Jackson's characters-mostly unloved daughters...
| Author | Andrew Wilson |
| ISBN | 1582344116 |
The life of Patricia Highsmith was as secretive and unusual as that of many of the best-known characters who people her "peerlessly disturbing" thrillers and short stories. Yet even as her work has found new popularity in the last few years, the life of this famously elusive writer has remained a mystery.
For...
'Inge has presented with astounding veracity the oppressive banality of the lives of his characters: the events of their lives have the nerve-lightening regularity of a dripping faucet. His female characters especially are engulfed by the bathos of their lives, and Inge capitalizes on this fact...
| Author | Donald Bogle |
| ISBN | 1567430341 |
Dorothy Dandridge -- like Marilyn and Liz--was a dream goddess of the fifties. All audiences ever had to do was take one look at her -- in a nightclub, on television, or in the movies -- and they were hooked. She was unforgettable, Hollywood's first full-fledged African American movie star.
This...
| Author | Maxine Clair |
| ISBN | 0375506306 |
"The air cools to crisp, carries sound farther. Last pears ripen and fall, ferment on the ground; the aroma of their wine mixes with the pungency of leaf smoke from nowhere and everywhere. At nightfall, the wing-song shrill of crickets announces that this season has a natural pathos to it, the brief and...
| Author | Rupert Thomson |
| ISBN | 2253153184 |
At first glance, the thrillers of British author Rupert Thomson seem to have nothing in common except the expansiveness of his imagination and the lucid radiance of his writing. Air & Fire is about a group of French people sent to California at the end of the 19th century to build a church. The Insult...
