Red the Fiend by Gilbert Sorrentino (1995).

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

Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy (1899). As a juror on a Moscow murder trial, the middle-aged dandy Prince Nekhlyudov recognizes the defendant as a girl from his family’s country estate whom he had once seduced and abandoned. Blaming himself for her fate, he follows her into exile in Siberia to atone for his actions and the loss of his youthful idealism.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (1961). Trying to avoid the conformity of their suburban neighbors on Revolutionary Road, Frank and April Wheeler talk of moving to France where Frank might write the great book or think the great thoughts April believes he is capable of.

Right Ho, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse (1934). Including perhaps the funniest scene in the Wodehouse canon—Gussie Fink-Nottle’s drunken speech at the Market Snodsbury Grammar School—this madcap farce once again finds Bertie Wooster and his brilliant manservant Jeeves working to point Cupid’s arrows toward other hearts.

Rites of Passage by William Golding (1980). The first volume of Golding’s sea trilogy, this Booker Prize–winning novel is set on an early nineteenth-century ship bound for Australia. The story, told through the journal entries of aristocrat Edmund Talbot, centers on the death of a parson on board.

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?

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare (1595). The story of star-crossed Veronese lovers, this early romantic tragedy painfully depicts the fatal course of young lovers ruined by circumstances beyond their control, belonging as they do to two families who hate each other for long forgotten reasons.

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719). This rollicking yet existential adventure with deep religious undertones begins with fatherly advice: pursue a stable career. But the wastrel son denies his father because he is tempted by the sea. This salty path gets young Robinson kidnapped by Moorish pirates, sold into slavery, and shipwrecked on a remote island filled with cannibals.

Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks (1995). Holden Caulfield meets Dean Moriarty in this sprawling coming-of-age story narrated with crisp assurance by a fourteen-year-old runaway. A victim of parental neglect, this lost, angry boy who names himself Bone commits crimes and acts of violence.

Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje (1982). In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India, " Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family in this inspired travel narrative and family memoir.