Showing 1 - 19 of 19
There are a total of 23 valid entries on the list.
Author:
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Formats:
Description:
The Age of Innocence is an intimate portrayal of East Coast American society in the 19th century—and the human lives that came into conflict with it. Newland Archer is heir to one of New York City's first families, and his bride-to-be is everything he ever hoped. Then his fiancee's older cousin leaves her European husband and appears in New York, where she refuses to conform to society and her family's wishes. Archer is at first angered
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2. Either/or
Author:
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
"Selin is the luckiest person in her family: the only one who was born in America and got to go to Harvard. Now it's sophomore year, 1996, and Selin knows she has to make it count. The first order of business: to figure out the meaning of everything that happened over the summer. Why did Selin's elusive crush, Ivan, find her that job in the Hungarian countryside? What was up with all those other people in the Hungarian countryside? Why is Ivan's weird...
Author:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Drawing on real historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humor, and intellectual fire for which award-winning author Rivka Galchen's writing is known, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is a tale for our time-the story of how a community becomes implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear"--
Author:
Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Notes:
RECOMMENDED BY ROZ CHAST DURING THE PROGRAM
Description:
A memoir done in the form of a graphic novel by a cult favorite comic artist offers a darkly funny family portrait that details her relationship with her father--a funeral home director, high school English teacher, and closeted homosexual.
Author:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Notes:
ROZ CHAST RECOMMENDED THIS AUTHOR DURING THE PROGRAM
Author:
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
In this beautiful story of adventure and survival from the New York Times bestselling author of Room, three men vow to leave the world behind them as they set out in a small boat for an island their leader has seen in a dream, with only faith to guide them. In seventh-century Ireland, a scholar and priest called Artt has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind. Taking two monks--young Trian and old Cormac--he rows down the river Shannon...
Author:
Average Rating:
3.6 stars
Description:
"From her place in the store that sells artificial friends, Klara--an artificial friend with outstanding observational qualities--watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, she is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans. In this luminous tale,...
Author:
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
Manhattan Beach opens in Brooklyn during the Great Depression. Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to the house of Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men. She becomes the first female diver, the...
Author:
Average Rating:
3.6 stars
Formats:
Description:
"It's the early 1980s. In American colleges, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to the Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes--the charismatic...
Author:
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Notes:
RECOMMENDED BY ROZ CHAST DURING THE PROGRAM
Description:
The author-illustrator traces his father's imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp through a series of disarming and unusual cartoons arranged to tell the story as a novel
Author:
Average Rating:
5 stars
Notes:
RECOMMENDED BY ROZ CHAST DURING THE PROGRAM
Description:
In a comic-book-style tale of the author's parents, Vladek and Anja, Vladek survives Auschwitz, is reunited with Anja, and sires young Art
An autobiographical and biographical cartoon in which the author explores his strained relationship with his father, an Auschwitz survivor, while also relating the story of his parent's experiences as Jews in wartime Poland, as told to him by his dad during a series of conversations they had years later in New...
Author:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Formats:
Description:
Franz Kafka's 1915 novella of unexplained horror and nightmarish transformation became a worldwide classic and remains a century later one of the most widely read works of fiction in the world. It is the story of traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. This hugely influential work inspired George Orwell, Albert Camus, Jorge Louis Borges, and Ray Bradbury, while continuing to unsettle...
13. Outline
Author:
Series:
Outline volume 1.
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"Rachel Cusk's Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinners and discourse. She goes swimming with an elderly Greek bachelor. The people she encounters speak, volubly, about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and...
Author:
Series:
Patrick Melrose novels volume 4.
Average Rating:
4 stars
Notes:
RECOMMENDED BY ROZ CHAST DURING THE PROGRAM
Description:
Follows the life of Patrick Melrose, a member of an upper class English family, through his traumatic childhood with an abusive father, drug addiction, fatherhood, and the possible loss of his family home.
15. Persepolis
Author:
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Notes:
RECOMMENDED BY ROZ CHAST DURING THE PROGRAM
Description:
The great-granddaughter of Iran's last emperor and the daughter of ardent Marxists describes growing up in Tehran in a country plagued by political upheaval and vast contraditions between public and private life.
Author:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders guides the reader through seven classic Russian short stories he's been teaching for twenty years as a professor in the prestigious Syracuse University graduate MFA creative writing program. Paired with stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, these essays are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it's more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. Saunders approaches...
Author:
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Charles Dickens', A Tale of Two Cities, begins with these famous words. On the eve of the French Revolution of 1789, the story follows Charles Darney, a French aristocrat-turned-revolutionary, and Sydney Carton, a purposeless British lawyer in love with Darney's wife, Lucie. Sydney's love for Lucie inspires him to join the Revolution alongside his friend Darney, at a time when both
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