 | Selected Stories by Andre Dubus
Buy new: $10.85 / Used from: $2.04 This is, simply, the best book of fiction published in this century, if one measures by truth rather than bombast.
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 | Airships by Barry Hannah
Buy new: $11.20 / Used from: $4.32 But what's wrong with bombast? Not a damn thing, if it's done right, as it is here.
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 | Wise Blood: A Novel by Flannery O'Connor
Buy used from: $0.44 Here is the book that woke me up to the scream of my own psychic landscape. It throbs with intensity, urgency.
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 | All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories by Lee K. Abbott
Buy new: $13.51 / Used from: $0.01 Here is the one book that marries a maximal vision of language to a true preoccupation with the craft of plot, and I marvel at its complexities.
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 | The Corrections: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen
Buy new: $10.88 / Used from: $0.01 The novel-in-five-novellas structure creates a sum greater than its parts. Franzen marries the daily truth of the domestic situation with a broader social commentary. Brilliant.
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 | The Good Life: Stories by Erin McGraw
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $0.01 This book is a lumber yard for opening gambits
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 | The Power and the Glory (Penguin Classics) by Graham Greene
Buy new: $9.75 / Used from: $3.60 Ditto my Wise Blood comments. The Catholic writers know how to get bloody. I deeply admire this book.
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 | In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War by Tobias Wolff
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $1.82 This is the coming of age book powered by the steadying hand of a mature intellect. The anti-Catcher in the Rye.
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 | Selected Poems by James Wright
Buy new: $16.00 / Used from: $5.89 Here is how you get at what-it-feels-like.
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 | All of Us: The Collected Poems by Raymond Carver
Buy new: $12.82 / Used from: $4.65 Ditto this.
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 | The Least You Need to Know: Stories by Lee Martin
Buy new: $13.25 / Used from: $2.01 Here's how you pare away the fat without biting into the lean. This is the most overlooked short story book I know.
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 | A New and Glorious Life (Short Fiction Series) by Michelle Herman
Buy new: $14.35 / Used from: $0.99 This book helped me figure out character.
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 | The Assignation by Joyce Carol Oates
Buy new: $11.07 / Used from: $3.95 Ditto this one.
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 | Child of God by Cormac McCarthy
Buy new: $10.08 / Used from: $7.89 Let this one stand in for all of McCarthy's work, which is wholly necessary for its cadences and its dark vision.
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 | Babylon in a Jar: Poems by Andrew Hudgins
Buy new: $10.95 / Used from: $0.37 "But what life is new?"
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 | Questions for Ecclesiastes by Mark Jarman
Buy used from: $1.39 The title poem is a better short story than anything you'll find in this year's Best American or O. Henry collections.
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 | Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers
Buy new: $10.17 / Used from: $1.19 My essay "You Shall Go Out with Joy and Be Led Forth with Peace" appears in this anthology, and the sixteen books listed above are the education that made possible its writing.
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