God’s Little Acre Erskine Caldwell

God’s Little Acre Erskine Caldwell

Overview:

Like Tobacco Road, this novel chronicles the final decline of a poor white family in rural Georgia. Exhorted by their patriarch Ty Ty, the Waldens ruin their land by digging it up in search of gold. Complex sexual entanglements and betrayals lead to a murder within the family that completes its dissolution. Juxtaposed against the Waldens' obsessive search is the story of Ty Ty's son-in-law, a cotton mill worker in a nearby town who is killed during a strike.First published in 1933, God's Little Acre was censured by the Georgia Literary Commission, banned in Boston, and once led the all-time best-seller list, with more than ten million copies in print.

More bluntly than any white southern writer of the 1930s, Erskine Caldwell used the economic blight of the Depression to dramatize the dehumanizing effects of poverty in America. Caldwell’s climb to nationwide popularity after the publication of Tobacco Road in 1932 was crucial to the rise of proletarian writing in the United States.

Unlike many of his southern literary contemporaries, Caldwell wrote next to nothing about the southern past and saw no wistful splendor in it. He focused instead on the sorry southern present and its suffering underclass, white and black. At least as a young author, he believed that he could intervene in the Thirties environment of oppression and that what he wrote could improve the lives of the hungry and mistreated. Caldwell thus became the first southern white male author to extend the social protest tradition of naturalistic American novelists like Stephen Crane, Jack London, Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser. In his most productive years, Caldwell’s originality sprang from specifically regional sources, especially Depression-era agriculture in the South. Less well known but of continuing relevance is Caldwell’s treatment of southern factory work.

In God’s Little Acre (1933) Caldwell offers an indictment of the South’s anti-labor business culture, its opposition to industrial unionism, and its authoritarian textile mills. Yet he also gives hope for regional economic uplift and social betterment in the struggle for a democratic workplace.

Little Acre is a classic dark comedy, a satire that lampoons a broken South while holding a light to the toll that poverty takes on the hopes and dreams of the poor themselves.


"What William Faulkner implies, Erskine Caldwell records."--Chicago Tribune

"Caldwell is one of the best . . . a master illusionist who can create, as Hemingway did, an impression of absolute reality."--Time Magazine

"A beautifully integrated story of the barren southern farm and the shut southern mill, and one of the finest studies of the southern poor white which has ever come into our literature. Writing in the brutal images of the life of his poor white people, Mr. Caldwell has caught in poetic quality the debased and futile aspiration of men and women restless in a world of long hungers which must be satisfied quickly, if at all."--Saturday Review of Literature

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Jim Morrison’s Adventures in the Afterlife Mick Farren

Jim Morrison’s Adventures in the Afterlife Mick Farren

Overview:

A riotous fantasy in which rock-star novelist Farren  imagines Jim Morrison wandering through the shades of hell looking for a way out. Don Juan had it comparatively easy in hell. To begin with, he knew where he was and why he was there, while poor Jim can—t even remember his name. —Sometime, someplace, someone had royally flamed his memory, though he couldn’t recall where or when

Part devil, part angel, the specter of Jim Morrison has haunted America's consciousness since his premature death in 1971. His spirit seemed dark, and the graphic despair of his Lizard King persona reigned supreme in his lifetime, but Jim Morrison died with a smile on his face. Was his journey through the afterlife as tumultuous as his journey through life? This is the question Mick Farren answers in his fascinatingly complex novel based on one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic figures.

Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife picks up the story of Morrison as he hurtles through a purgatory-like afterlife in search of some way to bring his soul to peace. Along the way he finds Doc Holliday--and together they find themselves chasing the restless fire-and-brimstone evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, whose soul has broken after death into two warring halves. McPherson's sexier half becomes the object of Jim's obsession, and as the two struggle to find each other in this disordered land, their wild, careening chase through a dozen dystopiae recalls imagined worlds as diverse as Burgess's A Clockwork Orange or Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

This is a daring, hilarious romp through the landfill of millennial society. Possessed of an imagination that rivals that of any of our edgiest fantasists, steeped in the detritus and ephemera of three decades of pop culture, Mick Farren has crafted in this new novel a bizarre and compelling fantasia.

“What Mick Farren was smoking while he wrote this, I'll never know, but what I do know is that the book is so pleasingly trippy with so many allusions and cameos (such as Dylan Thomas reincarnated as a talking goat), I enjoyed every moment of it.”

”Farren's concept of the afterlife is fascinating and I do remember hearing what it was based on once (a small sect of Latter-Day Saints?) but it was interesting to consider a different notion of heaven and hell and reflect on ones own beliefs.”

“There's a certain kind of audience that this book will appeal to: those who have an appreciation for the absurd. If you can deal with Jim Morrison and Doc Holliday trapsing about the afterlife ... and 1920's Prohibition champion Aimee Semple MacPherson becoming two entities ... and Godzilla running around, being controlled by Jesus Christ ... and the Egyptian God Anubis controlling a Las Vegas-like city and having a neutron bomb. If the idea of that makes you smile in just the least little bit, the sheer insanity of this book is perfect.”

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The Vietnam Reader Stewart O’Nan

The Vietnam Reader Stewart O’Nan

Overview:

O’Nan, himself the author of a well-received novel about the struggles of a Vietnam vet to readjust to civilian life (The Names of the Dead, 1996), has compiled a lengthy, varied, and somewhat idiosyncratic anthology of fiction and nonfiction by American writers about the war and its aftermath. 

The book was inspired, he notes in his preface, by his discovery that there was no wide-ranging compilation on the subject. O’Nan’s selections, primarily excerpts from full-length works, include fiction by Tim O’Brien (Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried), James Webb (Fields of Fire), Larry Heinemann (Paco’s Story), Stephen Wright (Meditations in Green), and John Del Vecchio (The 13th Valley), plus excerpts from memoirs by Robert Mason (Chickenhawk), Ronald J. Glasser (365 Days), and Michael Lee Lanning (The Only War We Had). O’Nan also includes the lyrics of a variety of period songs (“The Ballad of the Green Berets,” “Born in the USA—), critical summaries of films about the war, and some poetry. 

His adroit notes point out some of the most salient features of this literature (the relative neglect of the Vietnamese experience of war; the evolution of the American soldier protagonist from hero to cynical survivor; the persistent attempt to puzzle out what the war tells us about our society and government), and a glossary, bibliography, and chronology further help set the work in context. While the inclusion of more less-familiar writers would have been welcome, this is nonetheless a powerful, deeply revealing collection, and the best available introduction to a major body of modern American literature.

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Oswald's Tale Norman Mailer

Oswald's Tale  Norman Mailer

Overview:

Mailer's "non-fiction novel" of Lee Harvey Oswald is stunning, not just for the new information he has uncovered about Oswald's life in Russia between 1959 and 1961, but because Mailer has ordered this information to provide true insight into Oswald's psyche. At nineteen and just out of the Marines when he flew to Moscow, Oswald intended to apply for Soviet citizenship, believing that Marxism was "purer" than capitalism. Remaining in the USSR for two and a half years, he married Marina and fathered a child before becoming disillusioned with his poverty and deciding to return to the US.

Mailer here explores not only the mysteries surrounding the murder of JFK but those involving the personality of the alleged assassin, Oswald. Employing the same technique that was so successful in The Executioner's Song (1979), Mailer arranges a vivid mosaic of hundreds of moments in his subject's life, recalled by scores of people and interspersed with extracts from his diary and from various official documents. In doing so, he gives us the daily textures of Oswald's life as vividly as he did that of Gary Gilmore. This is an impressive artistic achievement that offers irresistible, hypnotic reading. A substantial contribution to Kennedy assassination literature, it is, like Armies of the Night (1968) and The Executioner's Song, an essential book for comprehending American life in the second half of the 20th century.

Presenting all the information available to him, Mailer maintains a balanced point of view. Though he mentions contacts Oswald made with the FBI, his attempt to go to Cuba, Mafia attempts to kill Castro, and Oswald's strange connection with Baron George De Mohrenschildt, a Russian emigre with some CIA ties, he draws no conclusions due to lack of evidence, leaving those to the reader. This fine novel organizes mountains of raw material, some of it new, to provide glimpses of who Oswald was and what may have motivated him.

"MARVELOUS . . . BREATHTAKING."
--The New York Times Book Review

"MAILER SHINES . . . Explaining Kennedy's assassination through the flaws in Oswald's character has been attempted before, notably by Gerald Posner in Case Closed and Don Delillo in Libra. But neither handled Oswald with the kind of dexterity and literary imagination that Mailer here supplies in great force. . . . Oswald's Tale weaves a story not only about Oswald or Kennedy's death but about the culture surrounding the assassination, one that remains replete with miscomprehensions, unravelled threads and lack of resolution: All of which makes Oswald's Tale more true-to-life than any fact-driven treatise could hope to be. . . . Vintage Mailer."
--The Philadelphia Inquirer

"FASCINATING . . . A MASTER STORYTELLER . . . Mailer gives us our clearest, deepest view of Oswald yet. . . . Inside three pages you are utterly absorbed."
--Detroit Free Press

"MAILER AT HIS BEST . . . LIVELY AND CONVINCING . . . EXTREMELY
LUCID . . . Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance. . . . He has found a way to make the dry bones of KGB tapes and his own interviews stand up and perform. . . . From the American master conjurer of dark and swirling purpose, a moving reflection."
--Robert Stone

"THIS IS A NARRATIVE OF TREMENDOUS ENERGY AND PANACHE; THE AUTHOR AT THE TOP OF HIS FORM."
--Christopher Hitchens

"Mailer has written some pretty crazy books in his time, but this isn't one of them. Like its predecessor, Harlot's Ghost, it is the performance of an author relishing the force and reach of his own acuity."
--Martin Amis

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Marilyn: A Biography Norman Mailer

Marilyn: A Biography  Norman Mailer

Overview:

It's the glossiest of glossy books--the sexy waif-goddess spread out in over 100 photographs by two dozen photographers plus the Mailer text and all on shiny coated paper. It's a rich and creamy book, an offensive physical object, perhaps even a little sordid. On the jacket, her moist lips parted in a color photograph by Bert Stern taken just before her death in 1962. Marilyn Monroe has that blurry, slugged look of her later years: fleshy but pasty. A sacrificial woman--"Marilyn" to put beside "Zeeda." This glassy-eyed goddess is not the funny bunny the public wanted, it's Lolita become Medusa. The book was "produced" by the same Lawrence Schiller who packaged the 1962 Hedda Hopper story congratulating 20th Century-Fox for firing Monroe from her last picture; now there are new ways to take her. The cover-girl face on "Marilyn" is disintegrating; and the astuteness of the entrepreneurs in exploiting even her disintegration, using it as a Pop icon, gets to one. Who knows what to think about Marilyn Monroe or about those who turn her sickness to metaphor? I wish they'd let her die.

In his opening, Mailer describes Marilyn Monroe as "one of the last of cinema's aristocrats" and recalls that the sixties, which "began with Hemingway as the monarch of American arts, ended with Andy Warhol as its regent." Surely he's got it all wrong? He can't even believe it; it's just a conceit. Hemingway wasn't the monarch of American arts but our official literary celebrity--our big writer--and by the end of the sixties, after "An American Dream" and "Cannibals and Christians" and "The Armies of the Night" and "Miami and the Siege of Chicago," the title had passed to Mailer. And Marilyn Monroe wasn't a cinema aristocrat (whatever nostalgia reverie of the "old stars" is implied); a good case cold be made for her as the first of the Warhol superstars (funky caricatures of sexpot glamour, impersonators of stars) Jean Harlow with that voice of tin may have beat her to it, but it was Monroe who used her lack of an actress's skills to amuse the public. She had the wit or crassness or desperation to turn cheesecake into acting--and vice versa; she did what others had the "good taste" not to do, like Mailer, who puts in what other writers have been educated to leave out. She would bat her Bambi eyelashes, lick her messy suggestive open mouth, wiggle that pert and tempting bottom, and use her hushed voice to caress us with dizzying innuendos. Her extravagantly ripe body bulging and spilling out of her clothes, she dress herself at us with the off-color innocence of a baby whore. She wasn't the girl men dreamed of or wanted to know but the girl they wanted to go to bed with. She was Betty Grable without the coy modesty, the starlet in flagrante delicto forever because that's where everybody thought she belonged.

Her mixture of wide-eyed wonder and cuddly drugged sexiness seemed to get to just about every male; she turned on even homosexual men. And women couldn't take her seriously enough to be indignant; she was funny and impulsive in a way that made people feel protective. She was a little knocked out; her face looked as if, when nobody was paying attention to her, it would go utterly slack--as if she died between wolf calls.

She seemed to have become a camp siren out of confusion and ineptitude; her comedy was self-satire, and apologetic- -conscious parody that had begun unconsciously. She was not the first sex goddess with a trace of somnambulism; Garbo was often a little out-of-it, Dietrich was numb most of the time, and Hedy Lamarr was fairly zonked. But they were exotic and had accents, so maybe audiences didn't wonder why they were in a daze; Monroe's slow reaction time made her seem daffy, and she tricked it up into a comedy style. The mystique of Monroe--which accounts for the book "Marilyn"--is that she became spiritual as she fell apart. But as an actress she had no way of expressing what was deeper in her except in moodiness and weakness. When she was "sensitive" she was drab.

Norman Mailer inflates her career to cosmic proportions. She becomes "a proud, inviolate artist," and he suggests that "one might literally have to invent the idea of a soul in order to approach her." He pumps so much wind into his subject that the reader may suspect that he's trying to make Marilyn Monroe worthy of him, a subject to compare with the Pentagon and the moon. Laying his career calibrations before us, he speculates that "a great biography might be constructed some day" upon the foundation of Fred Lawrence Guiles's "Norma Jean" and proceeds to think upon himself as the candidate for the job: "By the logic of transcendence, it was exactly in the secret scheme of things that a man should be able to write about a beautiful woman, or a woman to write about a great novelist--that would be transcendence, indeed!" Has he somehow forgotten that even on the sternest reckings the "great" novelists include Jane Austen and George Eliot?

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Tell Me Lisa Jackson

Tell Me  Lisa Jackson

Overview:

"#1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Jackson creates her most electrifying thriller to date, as a mother's unspeakable crime sparks a new killing spree. . .

The most hated woman in Savannah, Georgia, is about to be set free. Twenty years ago, Blondell O'Henry was convicted of murdering her eldest daughter and wounding her two other children. The prosecution argued that beautiful, selfish Blondell wanted to be rid of them to be with her lover.

Now Blondell's son, Niall, has recanted his testimony and demolished the case in the process. Reporter Nikki Gillette is determined to get the true story, and not just for professional reasons. Blondell's murdered daughter, Amity, was Nikki's childhood friend. The night she died, Amity begged Nikki to meet with her, insisting she had a secret to tell, but Nikki didn't go. Her guilt is compounded by other complications--Nikki's favorite uncle, Alexander, was the attorney who helped save Blondell from execution. And rumors swirl that he was one of her many lovers.

Nikki's fiancé, Detective Pierce Reed, is concerned she may be compromising the case. As she digs for answers during one of the most sweltering summers in Savannah's history, he also worries for her safety. Everyone involved seems to have secrets, from Blondell's old boyfriend and his fundamentalist, snake-handling in-laws to the cop who led the original investigation. And somehow, the events of that tragic night connect to Nikki's own fractured family. But now the killing has begun again. Is Amity's murderer still at large, or is this a new, darker danger? Soon Nikki will discover what really happened twenty years ago, but the answers may come too late to save her life.

A fabulous read.... A fragile line between professional and personal lives is being balanced here by the two main characters.

Lisa Jackson shows yet again why she is one of the best at romantic suspense. A pure nail biter. -- Harlan Coben

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The Naked and the Dead Norman Mailer

The Naked and the Dead   Norman Mailer

Overview:

The Naked and the Dead is a 1948 novel by Norman Mailer. It was based on his experiences with the 112th Cavalry Regiment during the Philippines Campaign in World War II. It was later adapted into a film of the same name in 1958.

In 1998, the Modern Library ranked The Naked and the Dead 51st on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

Hailed as one of the finest novels to come out of the Second World War, The Naked and the Dead received unprecedented critical acclaim upon its publication and has since become part of the American canon. This fiftieth anniversary edition features a new introduction created especially doe the occasion by Norman Mailer.

Written in gritty, journalistic detail, the story follows an army platoon of foot soldiers who are fighting for the possession of the Japanese-held island of Anopopei. Composed in 1948, The Naked and the Dead is representative of the best in twentieth-century American writing.

Set on an island in the South Pacific where the American Army under General Cummings is trying to drive out the Japanese, The Naked and the Dead focuses on a single reconnaissance platoon. The novel is split between alternating chapters depicting ongoing action on the island and retrospective chapters focusing on a particular character's personality and past. The Naked and the Dead contains several combat scenes and a great deal of description of Army protocol, as well as detailed descriptions of the many trials and agonies of the enlisted man. The novel deals with the difficulties of the campaign, the danger posed by the Japanese, the conflict between officers and regulars, each man's own internal conflicts and fears, and the aggression between squad members. Everyone, from the General down, has character flaws, and there are few depictions of lasting happy family life or of good male-female relations. Later in the book, a former general's aide, Hearn, becomes the Lieutenant of the squad, to the ire of Croft, the ruthless Sergeant previously in command, who withholds information from Lieutenant Hearn, leading to Hearn's death in combat.

The novel questions the competence and motives of high-ranking officers, as well as the integrity of each of the many men depicted. The men suffer physical hardship and even casualties, but there is little mourning or kindness. There is no mercy shown to the Japanese. Occasionally, individual soldiers show sparks of sensitivity or thoughtfulness.

The Naked and the Dead was Mailer's first published novel and is still his top ranked novel by sales; it established his reputation as a novelist and brought international recognition.

"The best novel to come out of the . . . war, perhaps the best book to come out of any war."—San Francisco Chronicle

"Best novel yet about World War II."—Time

"Brutal, agonizing, astonishingly thoughtful."—Newsweek

"Nightmarish masterpiece of realism."—Cleveland News

"Vibrant with life, abundant with real people, full of memorable scenes. To call it merely a great book about the war would be to minimize its total achievement."—The Philadelphia Inquirer

"The most important American novel since Moby-Dick."—Providence Journal

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Zorba the Greek Nikos Kazantzakis

Zorba the Greek   Nikos Kazantzakis

Overview:

The novel tells the story of the narrator's friendship with a lively 60ish-year-old lover, fighter, adventurer, musician, chef, miner, storyteller, dancer ... the occupations are endless. This is Zorba, described by the narrator as "the man I had sought so long in vain". They spend a year on Crete together, Zorba managing the lignite mine that the narrator is financing as a project to bring him into closer contact with working-class men, whose honest, simple lifestyles the narrator admires but cannot emulate. It is a tale of Zorba's seductions, most memorably of Madame Hortense, the heavily made-up, big-buttocked, ageing courtesan who offers the two men hospitality and a little more, and of the narrator's melancholy "life-and-death struggle" to write an account of his Buddha while waiting for Zorba to return from the mine and make his supper.

Zorba the Greek is rich in the sights, sounds and smells – wild sage, mint and thyme, the orange-blossom scent worn by Madame Hortense, the citrus and almond trees – of life on Crete: the rabbits eaten, the sea that both men plunge into, the wine drunk. The lament of the santuri (the musical instrument Zorba carries with him everywhere and cares for like a child) provides the background accompaniment to their adventures. The novel was aptly described by Time Magazine in its 1953 review as "nearly plotless but never pointless".

Even though it opens in a cafe with fishermen sheltering from a storm, a novel set on a Greek island should be the perfect summer read. Yet although sea, sand and sex abound in the pages, a cloud passes in front of the hot Cretan sun in the final third of the novel. Zorba the Greek opens with the narrator grieving over the departure of his friend, Stavridaki, who has gone away to fight; it ends with the narrator grieving again for Stavridaki, and for the loss of much more. This is a novel of many deaths, from the butterfly forced out of its cocoon too soon to die on the narrator's palm, to the unexpected brutality of the mob execution of the narrator's lover.

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Waiting for the Barbarians J. M. Coetzee

Waiting for the Barbarians   J. M. Coetzee

Overview:

For decades the Magistrate has run the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement, ignoring the impending war between the barbarians and the Empire, whose servant he is. But when the interrogation experts arrive, he is jolted into sympathy with the victims and into a quixotic act of rebellion which lands him in prison, branded as an enemy of the state. Waiting for the Barbarians is an allegory of oppressor and oppressed. Not just a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times, the Magistrate is an analogue of all men living in complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency.

The story presents the blurring of humanitarian considerations in the wake of nationalistic feelings and shows how completely compassion and justice are obscured when an appeal is made to the nationalistic feelings of people.

Nationalism as an ideal has been disputed by many people – by Tagore, to name one. Some of the material that I have read on the subject discuss the necessity to broaden one’s horizon, to accept all that is good (regardless of the nation of its origin) and other such issues.

While such writing criticise nationalism for its narrowness and limitedness, this book screams about the shameful grossness and wretchedness of nationalism.

For this story is on the subject of enemy torture – it describes in intimate detail, the treatment meted out to those human beings – some of them women, old men and children – labelled as enemy by the State, in the name of nationalism.
It is a very serious subject and cannot but make an impact.

The story makes one think about the nations currently at war where innocent people are being treated like worms. It makes you think about all the medals we give out to soldiers for killing innocent people on the other side of the border. It makes you think about the true place of patriotism in our ideology.

"A real literary event" —Irving Howe, The New York Times Book Review (front-page review)

"I have known few authors who can evoke such a wilderness in the heart of a man.... Mr. Coetzee knows the elusive terror of Kafka." —Bernard Levin, The Sunday Times (London)

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Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett

Waiting for Godot  Samuel Beckett

Overview:

A seminal work of twentieth-century drama, Waiting for Godot was Samuel Beckett’s first professionally produced play. It opened in Paris in 1953 at the tiny Left Bank Theatre de Babylone, and has since become a cornerstone of twentieth-century theater.

The story line revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone—or something—named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree on a barren stretch of road, inhabiting a drama spun from their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as a somber summation of mankind’s inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett’s language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existentialism of post-World War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and beautiful allegories of our time.

"Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!". That phrase, said by one of the main characters of "Waiting for Godot", somehow sums up the whole plot of this short tragicomedy in two acts. Strange??. You can bet on that!!!.

Ripe with symbolism, "Waiting for Godot" is a play more or less open to different interpretations. Why more or less open?. Well, because in order to have an interpretation of your own, you have to finish the play, and that is something that not all readers can do. "Waiting for Godot" is neither too long nor too difficult, but it shows a lack of action and purpose in the characters that is likely to annoy many before they reach the final pages, leading them to abandon the book in a hurry.

While the play's meagre plot of waiting for a God who never reveals himself is often seen as existentialist, reading the play reveals instead an absurdist perspective. Unlike those writers who felt that the absence of God forces Man to determine his purpose on his own, Beckett sees little possibility of purpose. Because of the lack of hope and the frustrations that fill the dialogue, WAITING FOR GODOT can be depressing and inexplicable to many.

“One of the true masterpieces of the century.” —Clive Barnes, The New York Times

“One of the most noble and moving plays of our generation, a threnody of hope deceived and deferred but never extinguished; a play suffused with tenderness for the whole human perplexity; with phrases that come like a sharp stab of beauty and pain.”
—The Times (London)

“Beckett is an incomparable spellbinder. He writes with rhetoric and music that . . . make a poet green with envy.” —Stephen Spender

“Reading Beckett for the first time is an experience like no other in modern literature.”
—Paul Auster

“Godot is among the most studied, monographed, celebrated and sent-up works of modern art, and perhaps as influential as any from the last century. The nonstory of two tramps at loose ends in a landscape barren of all but a single tree, amusing or distracting themselves from oppressive boredom while they wait for a mysterious figure who never arrives, the play became the ur-text for theatrical innovation and existential thought in the latter half of 20th century.” —Christopher Isherwood, The New York Times

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U.S.A John Dos Passos

U.S.A   John Dos Passos

Overview:

Unique for its epic scale and panoramic social sweep, Dos Passos' masterpiece comprises three novels--"The 42nd Parallel," "1919," and "The Big Money"--which create an unforgettable collective portrait of modern America. This one-volume edition includes detailed notes and a chronicle of the world events which serve as a backdrop.

Lots of people try to find America. Dos Passos found the America of 1910-1930 and gave it to us, in almost 1300 pages spread across three novels - all collected in this one volume. He presents it to us as a tapestry, woven from four types of thread: stories focused on any of the 12 principle characters, actual news items from the period, biographical sketches of key figures from that time, and stream-of-consciousness narratives. It's dark and smoky, gritty and real. It's America.

As the focus moves from character to character, we fall in love with all twelve of them, despite their flaws. They take us all over North America, and even to Europe for World War I. Rich and poor, male and female, worker, labor organizer, aviation millionaire or government official, all have their own stories to tell, and each represents a bit of America.

Such a grand fabric contains many themes: drink destroys the great and the small alike, illicit sex seduces people into giving up their money, their families, and their health, and everyone takes advantage of the working man - even his so-called friends. Nevertheless, the book never seems to be making a moral point, and the characters don't come across as good or evil, heroes or villains; they're just people.

One does become uncomfortably aware much the America of 100 years ago resembles the Third World countries of today. Read Rohinton Mistry's "A Fine Balance" to compare and contrast.

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Tobacco Road Erskine Caldwell

Tobacco Road  Erskine Caldwell

Overview:

As a comedy, Tobacco Road is a modest failure; as a tragedy, it’s an abject failure. And yet Erskine Caldwell’s novel, 80 years after its publication, remains a giddy, obscene joy. It as indelible as a freak show or car crash. Nobody knew what to make of Caldwell in 1932, and nobody much talks about him now, but his legacy persists. He is a progenitor of what could be called the degenerate school of American fiction. Descendents include writers like William S. Burroughs, Harry Crews, Katherine Dunn, and Barry Gifford. Tobacco Road is crass and deranged and irreducibly American.

The novel received censorious reviews upon publication, but after it was adapted into a play in 1935 and became the longest-running show in the history of Broadway, it went on to sell 10 million copies. It is not surprising that critics were made uneasy by the story of the Lesters (rhymes with festers, molesters, and incesters), a family of cruel, illiterate savages in west-central Georgia. In the early years of the Great Depression, the intellectual preoccupations of the ’20s were swiftly discarded. No longer did artists and critics gripe that America was a mechanized, standardized, puritanical country, governed by Babbitts, prudes, and dimwitted businessmen. As Frederick Lewis Allen writes in Since Yesterday, his history of America in the ’30s, the conversation had turned, with a thud, to economic reform. It was held that “the masses of the citizenry were the people who really mattered, the most fitting subjects for writer and artist, the people on whose behalf reform must be undertaken.” Writers needed to depict conditions as they were for the most unfortunate members of society—that was the only way to bring about social change. It was an innocent time in America, and writers still believed that fiction could bring about change.

Tobacco Road is grim, but never tragic. Caldwell’s characters lack the dignity of tragic figures—they are too cruel and hateful. The reversals they suffer are not surprising; there is never any doubt that they will end in ruin, in large part because they begin in ruin and show no real desire to escape their fate. For the same reason the novel does not succeed as a comedy. It is funny, but in the way that a tasteless joke is funny: you shouldn’t be laughing, you don’t want to laugh, but you laugh until you’re sick. And when the laughter stops, you wonder whether you’re not so different from a wild animal either.

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The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises   Ernest Hemingway

Overview:

The quintessential novel of the Lost Generation, The Sun Also Rises is one of Ernest Hemingway's masterpieces and a classic example of his spare but powerful writing style. A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway's most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. It is an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions. First published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises helped to establish Hemingway as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.

The Sun Also Rises first appeared in 1926, and yet it's as fresh and clean and fine as it ever was, maybe finer. Hemingway's famously plain declarative sentences linger in the mind like poetry: "Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that." His cast of thirtysomething dissolute expatriates--Brett and her drunken fiancé, Mike Campbell, the unhappy Princeton Jewish boxer Robert Cohn, the sardonic novelist Bill Gorton--are as familiar as the "cool crowd" we all once knew. No wonder this quintessential lost-generation novel has inspired several generations of imitators, in style as well as lifestyle.

Jake Barnes, Hemingway's narrator with a mysterious war wound that has left him sexually incapable, is the heart and soul of the book. Brett, the beautiful, doomed English woman he adores, provides the glamour of natural chic and sexual unattainability. Alcohol and post-World War I anomie fuel the plot: weary of drinking and dancing in Paris cafés, the expatriate gang decamps for the Spanish town of Pamplona for the "wonderful nightmare" of a week-long fiesta. Brett, with fiancé and ex-lover Cohn in tow, breaks hearts all around until she falls, briefly, for the handsome teenage bullfighter Pedro Romero. "My God! he's a lovely boy," she tells Jake. "And how I would love to see him get into those clothes. He must use a shoe-horn." Whereupon the party disbands.

But what's most shocking about the book is its lean, adjective-free style. The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway's masterpiece--one of them, anyway--and no matter how many times you've read it or how you feel about the manners and morals of the characters, you won't be able to resist its spell. This is a classic that really does live up to its reputation.

The Sun Also Rises is the sound of people trying to find a purpose for themselves in an increasingly shallow world. And lest that not convince you to read it, it happens to rock .... Rarely have I read more bitingly acerbic insults and comebacks, wry and cynical remarks, and deadly accurate observations. Actually, rarely have I ever felt so drawn in to the world of a book as much as here. I identified with Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton and that Englishman they met while fishing and with the boozing Mike and with Cohn. I understood their copious drinking and verbal barb-flinging because I was struck by the moments of absolutely believable fragile vulnerability that lay underneath the surface. The subtle gestures, the shifts in tone, the tough, terse prose all added to the various effects when necessary. When I was done, the book left an indelible stamp on my mind. And what higher recommendation could anyone possibly give a book than that?

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The Sheltering Sky Paul Bowles

The Sheltering Sky  Paul Bowles

Overview:

The Sheltering Sky is a landmark of twentieth-century literature. In this intensely fascinating story, Paul Bowles examines the ways in which Americans' incomprehension of alien cultures leads to the ultimate destruction of those cultures.

A story about three American travelers adrift in the cities and deserts of North Africa after World War II, The Sheltering Sky explores the limits of humanity when it touches the unfathomable emptiness and impassive cruelty of the desert.

In Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, three still-young Americans travel to the post WWII North African desert in search of themselves and new experiences.

Port and Kit Moresby, in the tenth year of marriage, have become both sexually and emotionally estranged, and Port hopes their sojourn into the desert will bring them closer together and restore the love they once shared. Kit, not so keen on either the desert or Port, has nevertheless agreed to Port's wishes, albeit reluctantly. The third person in their party, their friend, George Tunner, accompanies them more on a whim than anything else.

Seeking the exotic, the trio really doesn't know what to do with it when they find it. The sun is too bright, the labyrinth of city streets too dark, the excess of sensual delights a surfeit that imprisons rather than frees.

Becoming more and more dissatisfied with both themselves and with those around them, they decide to leave the restrictiveness of the city behind and venture farther south, into the wild, harsh, dazzling beauty of the Sahara. They meet the Lyles, ostensibly mother and son, who claim to be writing a travel book but whose real business appears to be far more sinister, much like the duo's own obsessive Freudian tangles..

The real setting of The Sheltering Sky is not the vast, uncharted Sahara, but the vast, uncharted reaches of the modern soul. Like Bowles' characters, we won't find the journey to the depths an easy one, but if we are going to do more than live on the periphery of life we should, however, find the journey necessary.

"It stands head and shoulders above most other novels published in English since World War II."--"The New Republic"

"The Sheltering Sky is one of the most original, even visionary, works of fiction to appear in this century."--Tobias Wolff

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The Postman Always Rings Twice James M. Cain

The Postman Always Rings Twice   James M. Cain

Overview:

An amoral young tramp.  A beautiful, sullen woman with an inconvenient husband.  A problem that has only one grisly solution--a solution that only creates other problems that no one can ever solve.

First published in 1934 and banned in Boston for its explosive mixture of violence and eroticism, The Postman Always Rings Twice is a classic of the roman noir. It established James M. Cain as a major novelist with an unsparing vision of America's bleak underside, and was acknowledged by Albert Camus as the model for The Stranger.

Cain, along with Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Nathanael West and later Ross MacDonald created a kind of southern California milieu that Hollywood has mined again and again with such postmodern films as, e.g., Chinatown (1974) and L.A. Confidential (1997).

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The Magus John Fowles

The Magus  John Fowles

Overview:

Initially The Magus seems intimidating, boasting 650 pages of dense type. Then there is its reputation as one of the great cult books; described as being a cascade of literary, philosophical and psychological pretensions in Gina McKinnon’s 500 Essential Cult Books (2010). Whilst such descriptions are relevant, the novel offers far more than these perfunctory summations, being one of those genuine masterpieces that can both challenge and enthrall the reader. Fowles spent over ten years writing the book and also ended up rewriting sections for a new edition released in 1977. The Magus is a complex novel and will take you on an enthralling journey if you are prepared to invest both time and patience.

Set in post WWII Britain, the novel’s protagonist – Nicholas Urfe, is both inhibited by his upbringing and restless within his own middle class society. The novel is divided into three sections, with the first being concerned with Nicholas’ life in the shadow of his parents and the stifling conformity of early 1950’s Britain and also his early days in Greece. This initial section is by no means a dull prologue, with Fowles revealing an unpretentious narrative style that displays a clear and sparse beauty, particularly in the later sections set in Greece.

Fowles has been described as one of the first British post-modern writers. I can’t personally judge the validity of this claim, however the novel does invite the reader to make their own judgments about the meaning of Nicholas’s experiences at the hands of the duplicitous Conchis and his never-ending ‘masque’. Fowles has famously refused to explain the meaning of The Magus, except on one rare occasion, of which I suggest you read after you’ve tackled the novel and thought about it yourself. I came to three conclusions about the meaning of what Fowles was portraying during the course of the novel, two of which correspond roughly with his summation and a third that did not. I’m not going to talk about what I believe the novel is about because each new reader will need to come to his or her own conclusions. Let me know what you thought or contact me if you want to know what I thought.

The third and final section of the novel finds Nicholas back in England a changed man in search of answers. This section’s bleak tone and slow pacing is in stark contrast to the intense middle section, but works well as a necessary coda to the events of the rest of the book. The ending is famous for being inconclusive and baffling, however after thinking about it for some time I realized that it is totally apt and fits well with my own conclusions about the book; in fact it serves to push you in the right direction if your eyes are open.

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