Stories of Anton Chekhov (1860–1904). The son of a freed Russian serf, Anton Chekhov became a doctor who, between the patients he often treated without charge, invented the modern short story. The form had been overdecorated with trick endings and swags of atmosphere.
Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871–72). Dorothea Brooke is a pretty young idealist whose desire to improve the world leads her to marry the crusty pedant Casaubon. This mistake takes her down a circuitous and painful path in search of happiness.
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy (1979).This novel tells the story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege with his prominent family to live in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River near Knoxville. Remaining on the margins of the outcast community there--a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters--he rises above the physical and hu
Charming Billy by Alice McDermott (1998). In a small bar somewhere in the Bronx, a funeral party has gathered to honor Billy Lynch. Through the night, his friends and family weave together the tale of a husband, lover, dreamer, and storyteller, but also that of a hopeless drunk whose immense charm was but a veil over a lifetime of secrets and all-consuming sorrow.
A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence; a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting from occupied Iraq; a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list; a teenage runaway who is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena; a cabal of dangerous mystics and their enemies – these are some of the characters in David Mitchell’s acclaimed new novel, The Bone Clocks. As in his previous five novels, Mitchell rearranges time and space – transporting readers through six different worlds, from the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a hotel in Shanghai to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future – to tell the interlocking stories of his far-flung characters.
“Ever since her stunning debut novel Final Payments in 1978,” Fran Hawthorne writes in The National Journal, “Mary Gordon has been one of the premier fiction writers in the US, although too often pigeonholed as an “Irish Catholic” author. Her 16 books, including novels, short-story collections, essays, memoirs and a biography of Joan of Arc, have won multiple awards.”
It seems fitting that Lev Grossman would receive a dream review in the New York Times Book Review for the final volume of his fantasy trilogy:
Please help us welcome Amy Bloom to Top Ten Land. The celebrated novelist and short story writer is joining us at a high point: She is receiving warm reviews for her second novel, Lucky Us.
It’s the story of two half-sisters, Iris, who dreams of becoming a star, and Eva, her knock-kneed sidekick who narrates the story. They set off together in 1940s America in search of fame and fortune. Iris’s ambitions take the pair across the America of Reinvention in a stolen station wagon, from small-town Ohio to an unexpected and sensuous Hollywood, and to the jazz clubs and golden mansions of Long Island. With their friends in high and low places, Iris and Eva stumble and shine though a landscape of big dreams, scandals, betrayals, and war.
It’s a Top Ten role-reversal - not once, nor twice, but thrice! – in the New York Times Book Review as famous authors don their critic’s caps.
Jonathan Lethem is something better than talented and brilliant – he’s interesting and surprising. This helps explain his latest project, editing and slightly recasting a novel by a talented yet largely unheralded author, Fridays at Enrico’s by Don Carpenter.