a years reading in preferential order
Discover a curated year of exceptional reading, ranked in preferential order. From Robert Walser's *The Robber* and *Jakob von Gunten* to Flann O'Brien's *The Third Policeman* and José Saramago's *Blindness*, explore masterpieces of fiction and drama by Dostoyevsky, Borges, and Chesterton. A definitive literary list for discerning book lovers seeking profound, unconventional narratives.
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Labyrinths
by Jorge Luis Borges
Forty short stories and essays have been selected as representative of the Argentine writer's metaphysical narratives.
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The Robber
by Robert Walser
The Robber, Robert Walser?s last novel, tells the story of a dreamer on a journey of self-discovery. It is a hybrid of love story, tragedy, and farce, with a protagonist who sweet-talks teaspoons, flirts with important politicians, plays maidservant to young boys, and uses a passerby?s mouth as an ashtray. Walser?s novel spoofs the stiff-upper-lipped European petit bourgeois and its nervous reactions to whatever threatens the stability of its worldview.
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Le Grand Meaulnes
by Alain-Fournier
The classic French novel written by a soldier, who would later die during World War I, tells the story of Auguste Meaulnes and the "domain mysterieux."
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Jakob von Gunten
by Robert Walser
The Swiss writer Robert Walser is one of the quiet geniuses of twentieth-century literature. Largely self-taught and altogether indifferent to worldly success, Walser wrote a range of short stories, essays, as well as four novels, of which Jakob von Gunten is widely recognized as the finest. The book is a young man's inquisitive and irreverent account of life in what turns out to be the most uncanny of schools. It is the work of an outsider artist, a writer of uncompromising originality and disconcerting humor, whose beautiful sentences have the simplicity and strangeness of a painting by Henri Rousseau.
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Death Sentence
by Maurice Blanchot
A man finds himself witnessing the death of a young female friend. Years later, he is overcome by the suspicion that his current lover is the deceased friend--come back from the dead?
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The Idiot
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Revealing Dostoevsky's acute artistic sense and penetrating psychological insight, this new translation is meticulously faithful to the original.
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The Blind Owl
by Ṣādiq Hidāyat
"A haunting tale of loss and spiritual degradation. Replete with potent symbolism and terrifying surrealistic imagery, Sadegh Hedayat's masterpiece details a young man's despair after losing a mysterious lover ... [as he] gradually drifts into frenzy and madness."--Back cover
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The Third Policeman
by Flann O'Brien
With the publication of The Third Policeman, Dalkey Archive Press now has all of O'Brien's fiction back in print.
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The Man who was Thursday
by Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The Supreme Anarchists Council is dedicated to overthrowing the world order. To keep their identities a secret, each of the members has been named after a day of the week. Gabriel Syme, an eccentric poet, is recruited by Scotland Yard to infiltrate the group. He tracks down the six other men and manages to win a place on the council. But after a bizarre twist of events, Syme quickly realizes that appearances are never what they seem in the dangerous world of the political underground.
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Blindness
by José Saramago
A stunningly powerful novel of man's will to survive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature. "This is a shattering work by a literary master."--The Boston Globe A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers--among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears--through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man's worst appetites and weaknesses--and man's ultimately exhilarating spirit.
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A High Wind in Jamaica
by Richard Hughes
Richard Hughes's celebrated short novel is a masterpiece of concentrated narrative. Its dreamlike action begins among the decayed plantation houses and overwhelming natural abundance of late nineteenth-century Jamaica, before moving out onto the high seas, as Hughes tells the story of a group of children thrown upon the mercy of a crew of down-at-the-heel pirates. A tale of seduction and betrayal, of accommodation and manipulation, of weird humor and unforeseen violence, this classic of twentieth-century literature is above all an extraordinary reckoning with the secret reasons and otherworldly realities of childhood.