A1 100 Percent A-OK Americans
Discover the best books about America with our curated list of 100% A-OK reads, featuring literary gems by Michael Chabon, Anne Tyler, and Kurt Vonnegut.
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Gob's Grief
by Chris Adrian
The literary debut of an electrifying talent that gives the historical novel an exhilarating dose of originality, style, and visionary energy. Gob's Grief recounts the lives of Gob and Tomo Woodhull, fictional twin sons of the real Victoria Woodhull, the nineteenth-century proto-feminist. In August of 1863, Tomo, who is eleven years old, runs off to the Civil War and dies in his first battle. Gob grows up in a profound state of grief, and by the time that he's an adult studying to be a doctor in New York City, he has begun to make real a dream to build a machine that might bring Tomo--indeed, all the war dead--back to life. As Gob's obsessions deepen, we are taken from the battlefields at Chickamauga Creek to the society balls of New York, from innocent childhoods in Homer, Ohio, to the building of the Brooklyn Bridge; and as the machine grows, so does the amazing cast of real and imagined characters: Walt Whitman, ministering lovingly to the Civil War wounded; Mrs. Woodhull and her sister Tennessee, doing business on Wall Street and riding churning tides of scandal; Gob's friend Will Fie, a war veteran who builds a house from glass images of suffering and death; Maci Trufant, Victoria Woodhull's protege and Gob's great love; and even unnatural Pickie Beecher, a child who seems to float sinisterly between the living and the dead. These disparate lives come together in support of Gob's endeavor, but the abolition of death and the success of his machine may come at a price more hideous and awful than any of them can know. Both convincing in its portrayal of the collective madness America went through after the carnage of the Civil War, and otherworldly in its contemplation ofobsessive grief and longing, Gob's Grief is at once an announcement of a major talent, and an extraordinary achievement in literary art.
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The Yiddish Policemen's Union
by Michael Chabon
For sixty years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. Proud, grateful, and longing to be American, the Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant, gritty, soulful, and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. For sixty years they have been left alone, neglected and half-forgotten in a backwater of history. Now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end: once again the tides of history threaten to sweep them up and carry them off into the unknown. But homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. He and his half-Tlingit partner, Berko Shemets, can't catch a break in any of their outstanding cases. Landsman's new supervisor is the love of his life—and also his worst nightmare. And in the cheap hotel where he has washed up, someone has just committed a murder—right under Landsman's nose. Out of habit, obligation, and a mysterious sense that it somehow offers him a shot at redeeming himself, Landsman begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy. But when word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, Landsman soon finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, hopefulness, evil, and salvation that are his heritage—and with the unfinished business of his marriage to Bina Gelbfish, the one person who understands his darkest fears. At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, an homage to 1940s noir, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.
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Returning to Earth
by Jim Harrison
In his latest novel, the acclaimed author of "Saving Daylight" delivers a tender, profound, and magnificent novel about origins and endings, how to make sense of loss, and how to live with honor for the dead.
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Digging to America
by Anne Tyler
This luminous novel brims with tender observations about what it is to be an American, and about Iranian-born Maryam Yazdam, who after 35 years in this country must finally come to terms with her "outsiderness."
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The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint
by Brady Udall
Half Apache and orphaned, Edgar's trials begin on an Arizona reservation at the age of seven when he is run over by the mailman's jeep, after which he is taken from the hospital to a school for delinquents to a Mormon foster family, and eventually to an unexpected home on a quest for the mailman. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.
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Galapagos
by Kurt Vonnegut
“A madcap genealogical adventure . . . Vonnegut is a postmodern Mark Twain.”—The New York Times Book Review Galápagos takes the reader back one million years, to A.D. 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galápagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, and totally different human race. In this inimitable novel, America’ s master satirist looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry–and all that is worth saving. Praise for Galápagos “The best Vonnegut novel yet!”—John Irving “Beautiful . . . provocative, arresting reading.”—USA Today “A satire in the classic tradition . . . a dark vision, a heartfelt warning.”—The Detroit Free Press “Interesting, engaging, sad and yet very funny . . . Vonnegut is still in top form. If he has no prescription for alleviating the pain of the human condition, at least he is a first-rate diagnostician.”—Susan Isaacs, Newsday “Dark . . . original and funny.”—People “A triumph of style, originality and warped yet consistent logic . . . a condensation, an evolution of Vonnegut’s entire career, including all the issues and questions he has pursued relentlessly for four decades.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “Wild details, wry humor, outrageous characters . . . Galápagos is a comic lament, a sadly ironic vison.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch “A work of high comedy, sadness and imagination.”—The Denver Post “Wacky wit and irreverent imagination . . . and the full range of technical innovations have made [Vonnegut] America’s preeminent experimental novelist.”—The Minneapolis Star and Tribune
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Consider the Lobster
by David Foster Wallace
Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of a vicious presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in American letters.
