If Beale Street Could Talk: James Baldwin
An intensely emotional portrayal of the loyalty of true love in the midst of total crisis. Harlem in the early 70's. A black man is in jail, falsely accused; his fiancee is pregnant. She turns the world upside down to free him. The violence coursing through much of Baldwin's other work is subdued here.
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| Andre Malraux in 1935. |
A cinematic account of the existential situations of individual humans involved in the failed Communist uprising in Shanghai in 1927.
Death With Interruptions: Jose Saramago
A lyrical meditation on the politics and romantic implications of death, it begins with the lines:
The following day, no one died. This fact, being absolutely contrary to life's rules, provoked enormous and, in the circumstances, perfectly justifiable anxiety in people's minds. . .Martin Dressler: Tale of an American Dreamer: Stephen Millhauser
This book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1997. Given the simplicity and brevity of the prose, it's astoundingly ambitious, thematically. It's set in the late 19th century in New York City, when anything dreamable was possible.
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor: John Barth
Barth is most known for The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy, and Lost in the Funhouse. But this novel is the most accessible piece of "metafiction" out there, and the most pleasantly reticulated and just-plain-fun treatment of narrative conventions I've come across. You will not be able to stop reading it. Again: you will not be able to stop reading it.
