21 May 2016

21 Brilliant Books


<p>Zadie Smithsuggests <strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Little-Virtues-Natalia-Ginzburg/dp/0856355534?mbid=synd_msnentertainment">Le Piccole Virtù (The Little Virtues)</a></strong> by <strong>Natalia Ginzburg</strong> (1962)</p><p>I really love and admire Le piccole virtù by Natalia Ginzburg. I don’t know how unsung she is—she’s very well-known in Italy but perhaps less well-known in the Anglophone world. She writes beautiful, short essays about very simple things: shoes, food, children, writing itself. Her sentences have great precision and clarity, and I learn a lot when I read her.</p>


Click for more of an  amazing article:
(from MSN Lifestyle)

 <p>Junot Díazsuggests <strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Motion-Light-Water-Science-Fiction/dp/0816645248/ref=sr_1_1?mbid=synd_msnentertainment">The Motion of Light in Water</a></strong> by <strong>Samuel R. Delany</strong> (1988)</p><p>I cannot imagine confessional literature without this genre-shattering novel. To see how this queer black young artist came into himself during the tectonic delirium of the ’60s is to be given a revelation of near biblical intensity.</p><p>C. E. Morgansuggests <strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Time-Man-Elizabeth-Madox-Roberts/dp/0813109817/ref=sr_1_1?mbid=synd_msnentertainment">The Time of Man</a></strong> by <strong>Elizabeth Madox Roberts</strong> (1926)</p><p>A portrait of a poor woman’s life rendered in sublime prose and granted bone-deep dignity, this is a modernist masterpiece by a once internationally acclaimed writer. It should be read by everyone who loves truly great literature.</p><p>Marlon Jamessuggests <strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Riddley-Walker-Expanded-Russell-Hoban/dp/0253212340/ref=sr_1_1?mbid=synd_msnentertainment">Riddley Walker</a></strong> by <strong>Russell Hoban</strong> (1980)</p><p>There aren’t many post-apocalyptic novels as post as Riddley Walker, which opens 2,000 years after we finally push the red button and drop the big one. In an instantly recognizable England that nobody remembers, humans are back to being hunter-gatherers, scrapping for iron that they’ve forgotten how to make. Killer dogs roam the roads, priests with belly scars preach prophecy by watching Punch and Judy, and Riddley Walker—just named at 12—is trying to become a man. But the shock of the book, especially in its dazzling language, is the old, not the new. What does 2,000 years in the future sound like? Two thousand years in the past, “Beowulf” smashed into “Be-Bop-A-Lula.” Riddley Walker was nominated for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Nebula Award back in 1981, but if it wasn’t for Salman Rushdie, I would never have heard of it.</p><p>Jonathan Franzensuggests <strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Loved-Children-Novel/dp/0312280440/ref=sr_1_1?mbid=synd_msnentertainment">The Man Who Loved Children</a></strong> by <strong>Christina Stead</strong> (1940)</p><p>As in a dream where I’m shouting at the top of my lungs and nobody can hear me, I’ve been advocating for Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children for 20 years, describing it as the greatest family novel ever written and one of the greatest 20th-century novels of any kind, and waiting for even one person to tell me I’m right. Only in Australia, where Stead was born and lived until she was 25, do I regularly encounter people who’ve even heard of it. But here, I’ll say it again: For psychological depth, for indelible characterizations, for savage humor, for muscular prose, for disciplined insanity, The Man Who Loved Children has very few peers in world literature. Please, will someone who is reading this get back to me and say I’m right?</p><p>Ben Fountainsuggests <strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Little-Big-Man-Thomas-Berger/dp/0385298293/ref=sr_1_1?mbid=synd_msnentertainment">Little Big Man</a></strong> by <strong>Thomas Berger</strong> (1964)</p><p>If you crossed Moby-Dick with Huck Finn, set it in the American West of the 19th century, and threw in big dollops of Don Quixote and magical realism, you might get within range of one of the great American novels of the last century or any century, Little Big Man by Thomas Berger. “I am a white man and never forgot it, but I was brought up by the Cheyenne Indians from the age of 10.” Thus begins the tale of Jack Crabb, the 111-year-old Little Big Man himself, who, in his long life, roams the West like a frontier Zelig, rumbling with Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok, fighting for and against Custer, living and loving amidst the Cheyenne, and surviving the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the self-proclaimed only white man to achieve this distinction. Berger’s novel is a rollicking masterpiece, one I return to over and over again.</p>



HIDDEN TREASURES

Ever come across a book—on a nightstand in an Airbnb, in a box of your mom’s college junk, on a shelf at a friend’s Bachelor viewing party—that’s so energizingly rip-roaring, so envelopingly world-building, that you can’t really believe you’ve never heard of it before? A book that you find was admired in its time but is now sorta shoved to the side and forgotten, except by the most trusted reader-friends in your life? Well, these are those books. And your reader-friends, in this case? They’re 21 of our favorite writers from the past several years. Kick back and listen to them stump for the most criminally underappreciated books on their shelves.
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