 | Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace
Buy new: $9.74 / Used from: $7.25 People have assailed this book as inferior to Infinite Jest, and it certainly is, but it's also inferior to Ulysses. I'm not complaining.
|
 | Plowing the Dark: A Novel by Richard Powers
Buy used from: $0.01 He is as good as he's always been, and though he lacks the reputation of Moody or Wallace, they both realize he's one of the best living writers in America.
|
 | Schooling by Heather McGowan
Buy used from: $0.01 It doesn't come out until mid-June, but I read it in galley and it floored me. An astonishing stream-of-consciousness first novel.
|
 | Demonology by Rick Moody
Buy used from: $0.01 The short story will not die while Rick Moody is plugging away. He's as good as Dubus, Tobias Wolff, or Raymond Carver
|
 | Meditations from a Movable Chair by Andre Dubus
Buy new: $10.40 / Used from: $3.07 Before the Oprah-mania surrounding Dubus III, there was the great short story writer. Paralyzed, he wrote these beautiful and sad meditations not long before his untimely death.
|
 | All We Know of Heaven by Remy Rougeau
Buy used from: $0.01 a cloistered monk with an MFA? Sounds hopeless, but this semi-autobiographical tale of life in a Trappist Monestery challenges our very definition of what it means to be a person in the 21st century.
|
 | The Name of the World: A Novel by Denis Johnson
Buy used from: $0.01 It got mixed reviews, but the schizophrenic Johnson-as-prophet-of-darkness vs. Johnson-as-stoic-novelist qualities only made me like it more.
|
 | Underworld: A Novel by Don DeLillo
Buy new: $12.92 / Used from: $0.22 I haven't read the most recent -- the Body Artist -- so I can't recommend it. But this is great: a sprawling, beautiful novel.
|
 | Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
Buy new: $10.17 / Used from: $2.00 Lethem just published a long story (it is not very good, in my opinion) with McSweeney's, but this will be the one that holds up. A deserved winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
|
 | Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers
Buy new: $13.22 / Used from: $1.11 Powers' best novel by far. It's a few years old, but this story shaped like DNA and Bach's Goldberg Variations is in the league of, say, Gravity's Rainbow.
|
 | Provinces of Night by William Gay
Buy used from: $0.33 William Gay may be the best writer in the South. Certainly this book calls to mind Walker Percy and William Faulkner more than most Southern fiction.
|
 | Mason & Dixon: A Novel by Thomas Pynchon
Buy used from: $0.60 I liked this book. Some people did not. Some people say that he is over the hill. I disagree. So it goes.
|
 | The Poisonwood Bible (Oprah's Book Club) by Barbara Kingsolver
Buy used from: $0.01 Sometimes people think that because someone is popular, they are not good. This is not, in fact, the case, as Kingsolver's hugely popular novel shows.
|
 | A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius : A Memoir Based on a True Story by Dave Eggers
Buy used from: $1.18 Some people say that his day in the Sun has come and gone. But I still like McSweeney's now and again, and I still liked this book an awful lot. Not, technically, fiction. Oh well.
|
Listmania!
