Jazz by Toni Morrison (1992). In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life.

Total Points: 3 (CN 3)

Lies of Silence by Brian Moore (1990). A failed Irish poet who loathes his country decides to run away with his mistress to London. But then IRA terrorists snatch his shrewish wife, threatening to kill her unless he parks an explosive-laden car outside a hotel where a Protestant minister will be speaking. That is only the first moral vise that squeezes him in this fast-paced, philosophical thriller.

Total Points: 3 (AS 3)

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain (1883). This isn’t a book, but a two-part time machine. The first part is a work of literature, as Twain reimagines his salad days as a cub pilot learning to navigate the “fickle Mississippi.” His vivid you-are-there prose transports readers to the untamed land filled with rough-hewn people. The book’s second section, a travelogue begun seven years later, in 1882, is memoiristic and meditative. Having lived so long in the West and East, Twain sought to reconnect with the land of his youth and wellspring of his art, taking readers on a journey of discovery and rediscovery down a still fickle river.

Total Points: 3 (PCap 3)

Light Years by James Salter (1975). This compact novel offers achingly perceptive scenes from a marriage during a twenty-year period. As Viri and Nedra Berland host dinner parties, shop in New York City, summer on Long Island, and take on lovers, they experience happiness, bereavement, isolation, and divorce. Through this portrait, Salter suggests that each person’s life is “mysterious, it is like a forest; from far off it . . . can be comprehended, described, but closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density blinds one.”

Total Points: 3 (PCam 3)

Maigret series of detective novels by Georges Simenon (1903–89).

Appreciation of Georges Simenon’s Maigret Detective Novels by Iain Pears

The Maigret series of detective stories, written by the Belgian Georges Simenon, are part of that rare breed of books—the mass-market entertainment that also works as great literature. Simenon is the master of atmosphere; with the lightest of touches he is able to conjure up Paris in the 1940s and 1950s, a seedy, largely poor city of shabby concierges and downtrodden traveling salesmen, of cheap hotels and squalid nightclubs, of hissing steam radiators and grubby shirt collars.

Much of the narrative is liquor soaked—Maigret begins drinking after breakfast, interviews witnesses over brandy, and suspects over beer. Only rarely is a case concluded by unraveling clues; these are not whodunits. Rather, they are studies in character, of place, and of people. Simenon would have been a brilliant analyst. As often as not, the books end when Maigret (and through him, the reader) so understands the criminal that the suspect confesses all. Indeed, the reader is usually left sympathizing with the criminal, whose crime is reacting to limited choices and desperate circumstances.

The books are so compressed they could almost be short stories, but Simenon populates them with an extraordinary range of characters—the overweight, perpetually sweating Maigret, his eternally patient wife (more acute, in many ways, than her husband), his juniors, and the gallery of pimps and prostitutes, petty criminals, shopkeepers, bartenders, small tradesmen, and canal barge pilots who make up his world. There is no reveling in the grime of the underworld; most of the characters dream of better things and live a life of disappointment. Out of their lives, Simenon created some of the most enduring and compelling works of the twentieth century.

Total Points: 3 (IP 3)

Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon (1997). Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatched pair—one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic—from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back, through the strange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason.

Total Points: 3 (TJ 3)

Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, a trilogy by Samuel Beckett (1951–54). Like the runner’s high or Zen meditation, Beckett’s opus yields the transcendence that succeeds tedium and pain. The trilogy chronicles a descent into living death by three narrators: vagabond, cripple, misfit. These characters are by degrees banished from the landscape, stripped of their paltry possessions, thrown back on the scatological world of the body, and ultimately confined to the madhouse of their heads, where language alone sustains and betrays them. Beckett’s trademark black humor and the stubborn, paradoxical endurance of these voices lighten a terminally bleak vision.

Total Points: 3 (PA 2) (LMill 1)

Montana 1948 by Larry Watson (1993). In language that is as direct and spare as the title, twelve-year-old David Hayden tells of the summer when his father, the sheriff of Mercer County, Montana, is forced to choose between justice and family. Watson evokes the Montana landscape and mindset masterfully, but his true accomplishment is the unadorned but subtle portrayal of a flawed man seeking to do the right thing in the face of terrible pressure.

Total Points: 3 (GDG 3)

New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891). One of the earliest examples of English naturalism, this grim chronicle of literary life in late-Victorian London bitterly portrays its author’s own struggles to live from his writing. In contrasting dedicated artist Edwin Reardon’s commercial failure with superficial romancer Jasper Milvain’s popular success, Gissing pointedly skewers the distorted values of the marketplace, while tirelessly enumerating the many forces working against artistic purity and sincerity. The novel is a diatribe, yet lucid characterizations (particularly that of Reardon’s depressed, demanding wife) and raw accusatory intensity give it a claustrophobic, nagging power.

Total Points: 3 (JL 3)

Ninety-two in the Shade by Thomas McGuane (1973). McGuane has always been fascinated by people who seek a truer life by living on the edge. Here he tells the story of a refugee from America’s consumer society who returns to Key West, where he lives in an old airplane fuselage and tries to realize his dream of becoming a skiff guide in the tropical waters. But that hope makes him seem threatening to a rival guide, who will kill to protect his turf.

Total Points: 3 (CH 3)

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus (1989). Smart, funny, sharp-tongued Lucy Marsden was seventeen when she married a fifty-year-old veteran of the Civil War, Captain William Marsden. Now ninety-nine, she recalls her historic life—especially her husband’s military service and the psychological trauma it inflicted, a slave’s journey from Africa, and Sherman’s march through the South—in vivid, colorful language.

Total Points: 3 (EDon 3)

Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie (1904). “All children, except one, grow up,” reads the opening line of this swashbuckling tale of that boy, named Peter Pan, who takes the Darling children to Neverland. There they encounter a host of immortal figures, including Tinker Bell and Tiger Lily, the Lost Boys, and Captain Hook, as readers learn that the best hedge against old age is to believe in our imaginations (and fairies). Initially produced as a play, the story was published as a book in 1911 under the title Peter and Wendy.

Total Points: 3 (MGait 3)

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov (1953). This episodic novel details the often comic, unexceptional life of Timofey Pnin, a Russian teaching at an American college who has never mastered English or learned how to drive a car (like Nabokov himself). It is the telling of the tale that matters here, as Nabokov shifts time, mood, and perspective, eventually introducing a character, Mr. N., who makes us wonder about all we’ve seen and heard.

Total Points: 3 (HaJ 3)

Red the Fiend by Gilbert Sorrentino (1995).

Appreciation of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Red the Fiend by Lydia Millet

Gilbert Sorrentino’s most accessible, straightforward, and flawless novel, Red the Fiend (1989), explores the practical and psychic tribulations of young Red. He’s a dirty urchin full of frustrated want and suppressed rage who lives in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood (circa 1940) with his weak-willed mother and grandfather and, most important, his bitterly cruel, tyrannical grandmother. She makes his misery her first priority, calculating every move to maximize his exquisitely perfect emotional torment; for his part Red gradually learns to parry each of her sly thrusts with an equally sly one of his own. Eventually, he derives the lion’s share of his meager joy in life from the daily toil of returning her loathing and attempting to give as bad as he gets. In brutal simplicity, with recourse to uniquely effective listing devices, the precise and beautiful prose lays bare the excruciating particularities of Red’s pain and shame and makes palpably real his journey from, if not innocence, at least relative neutrality toward craftiness and deft manipulation. With the grace and rigor of thought and language that earned Sorrentino’s reputation as a master of stylistic play and cold humor, Red the Fiend describes in direct terms this increasingly dangerous battle of wills as it rises to its unbearable boiling point. No other novel in recent memory evokes the desolation of lovelessness with such blunt passion.

Total Points: 3 (LMill 3)

River of Earth by James Still (1940). Hailed upon its publication, then forgotten until it was reissued in 1978, this classic of Appalachian literature is narrated by a young boy whose Kentucky family is at a crossroads: Do they continue to lead their poor but independent life on the farm or go to work at the mining company? In portraying a changing world, Still evokes the constants of life: love, dignity, land.

Total Points: 3 (LS 3)

Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski (1982). Tom Bissell said this “the work that showed me how nonfiction can be as artful and beautiful as fiction.”

Total Points: 3 (TBiss 3)

Stories and Texts for Nothing by Samuel Beckett (1955). The Nobel Prize–winning playwright’s fiction shares the elliptical, elusive qualities of his celebrated dramas Waiting for Godot and Endgame. The Stories are bitterly comic acknowledgments of sexual failure and mortality (such as the masterly “Assumption”) that clearly foreshadow the later Texts for Nothing. These thirteen nonnarrative prose pieces are fatalistic outcries uttered by moribund outcasts awaiting oblivion: the resigned, the dying, and the dead—all saved from meaninglessness by the grave, eloquent music of a measured style that redeems, even as it snatches away, their humanity.

Total Points: 3 (BM 3)

Street of Lost Footsteps by Lyonel Trouillot (1998). Although set during a single night of horrific violence in Port-au-Prince, this fierce, surreal novel resonates with Haiti’s long history of blood and broken dreams. With irony and black humor, three narrators—a madam, a taxi driver, and a postal employee—witness chaotic clashes between forces of the Prophet and the vicious dictator Deceased Forever-Immortal, while reflecting on a society where “you can count yourself lucky . . . whenever you find you’re still alive.”

Total Points: 3 (MSB 3)

The Big Sky by A. B. Guthrie, Jr. (1947). Set in the 1830s and 1840s this epic tale of adventure captures the American West when it truly was wild, primitive, and free. Its central character is Boone Caudill, a Kentucky mountain man whose desire for virgin earth and clear skies pushes him across rough and glorious landscapes, where he encounters other intrepid searchers, while winning the love of an Indian chief’s daughter.

Total Points: 3 (JLB 3)

The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano (1989). “Why does one write, if not to put one’s pieces together?” the Uruguayan author asks in this work of “literary collage.” Through scores of brief pieces both whimsical and earnest, Galeano recalls his personal life—including years of political exile and his heart attack—and topics large and small, ranging from his wife’s dreams to the art of graffiti to repression in Latin America. Together with his imaginative drawings, they render a vivid portrait of this compassionate and visionary author’s life and mind.

Total Points: 3 (SC 3)

The Branch Will Not Break by James Wright (1963). A poet with finely honed social and political concerns, Wright wrote beautiful lines about outcasts and human suffering. This collection marks the poet’s turn from more conventional forms toward lyrical free verse. Wright’s Collected Poems was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1971.

Total Points: 3 (SA 3)

The Castle by Franz Kafka (1926). K. has been summoned to work as a land surveyor at a giant castle, which he is never allowed to enter. As his confusion grows, he breaks a series of laws he cannot understand. Such is the stuff of dreams—and of Kafka’s final novel, which uses K.’s strange plight to portray the absurd, nightmare logic of the bureaucratic state.

Total Points: 3 (PA 3)

The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron (1967). Based on an 1831 uprising, this Pulitzer Prize–winning novel is narrated by Nat, a slave who feels commanded by God to lead a rebellion. Yet even as he plots the murders of white slave-owners, Nat recognizes that all men are slaves to their own passions and greed. Poetically narrated, the book probes the essence of subjugation and freedom, the peculiar bonds that complicated the relationships of slaves and masters, and the meaning of history itself.

Total Points: 3 (BU 3)

The Famished Road by Ben Okri (1991). Azaro, the hero of Nigerian-born Okri’s spellbinding and hallucinatory novel, is a spirit child, or abiku, born to mortals. Though other spirits insist that he return to their comfy land, he chooses to stand by his suffering mother and bombastic, foolhardy father amid the poverty, violence, and instability of modern Africa. “It is more difficult to love than to die,” Azaro’s father says in this Booker Prize–winning novel that is equal parts dark mythology and political satire.

Total Points: 3 (DAD 3)

The Life of Henri Brulard by Stendhal (1890).

Appreciation of Stendhal’s The Life of Henri Brulard by William Boyd

“Stendhal” is a pseudonym. The author’s real name was Marie-Henri Beyle. Stendhal is best known for the great and classic 19th century French novels The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839). He was born in Grenoble in 1793 and died in Paris in 1842.

I have chosen his strange autobiography instead of one of his novels because I think it is an extraordinary 19th century text, one that was only published in 1890, long after Stendhal’s death. It’s not clear why Stendhal chose the title, however. Very quickly he reveals that he himself is “Henri Brulard”—another false identity—and in a way this fact illustrates the astonishing modernity of this memoir. It is both playful, in a literary sense, and very frank.

Stendhal hated his father (and doesn’t spare him) and he hated his native city, Grenoble—“The capital of boredom.” Moreover, the book’s narrative is the opposite of chronological. Ostensibly an account of the author’s early years, it in fact skips forward and back through Stendhal’s life as he pleases, almost as if it were a record of his meandering thoughts. It is also illustrated with copious little hand drawn sketches, done by Stendhal himself—plans of houses or city streets, schematic landscapes and so forth, that flesh out the story of his life.

The whole concept of the book is wonderfully out-of-left-field. Stendhal’s honesty is very compelling and his spirit seems very contemporary—all his grumbles and irritations, his love affairs—requited and unrequited—his professional ups and downs are candidly and mercilessly recounted. You could imagine Stendhal living today—the tone of voice is so surprisingly contemporary—as there is nothing remotely dated about this autobiography thinly disguised as a biography. Even if you knew nothing about Stendhal or his famous novels you would be held and beguiled, I believe. A unique piece of 19th century life-writing, as we would now describe it.

Total Points: 3 (WBoyd 3)