Ashleys Must-read Modern Fiction #1
Discover Ashley's top modern fiction picks! Explore must-read books from Ashley's curated list of captivating contemporary reads for every book lover.
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Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands
by Jorge Amado
It surprises no one that the charming but wayward Vadinho dos Guimaraesâa gambler notorious for never winningâdies during Carnival. His long suffering widow Dona Flor devotes herself to her cooking school and her friends, who urge her to remarry. She is soon drawn to a kind pharmacist who is everything Vadinho was not, and is altogether happy to marry him. But after her wedding she finds herself dreaming about her first husbandâs amorous attentions; and one evening Vadinho himself appears by her bed, as lusty as ever, to claim his marital rights.
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The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes)
by Henri Alain-Fournier
An unforgettable French masterpiece in the spirit of The Catcher in the Rye-in a dazzling new translation When Meaulnes first arrives in Sologne, everyone is captivated by his good looks, daring, and charisma. But when he attends a strange party at a mysterious house with a beautiful girl hidden inside, he is changed forever. Published here in the first new English translation since 1959, this evocative novel has at its center both a Peter Pan in provincial France-a kid who refuses to grow up-and a Parsifal, pursuing his love to the ends of the earth. Poised between youthful admiration and adult resignation, Alain- Fournier's narrator compellingly carries the reader through this indelible portrait of desperate friendship and vanished adolescence. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Winesburg, Ohio
by Sherwood Anderson
Winesburg, Ohio, gave birth to the American story cycle, for which William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and later writers were forever indebted. Defying the prudish sensibilities of his time, Anderson never omitted anything adult, harsh, or shocking; instead he embraced frankness, truth, and the hidden depths everyone possesses. Here we meet young George Willard, a newspaper reporter with dreams; Kate Swift, the schoolteacher who attempts to seduce him; Wing Biddlebaum, a berry picker whose hands are the source of both his renown and shame; Alice Hindman, who has one last adventure; and all the other complex human beings whose portraits brought American literature into the modern age. Their stories make up a classic and place its author alongside the best of American writers. With an Introduction by Irving Howe and an Afterword by Dean Koontz
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Surfacing
by Margaret Atwood
From the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testamentsâthis story of an artist who goes in search of her missing father on a remote island in northern Quebec is a provocative blend of literary mystery, psychological thriller, and spiritual journey. Accompanied by her boyfriend and a young married couple, the artist searches her abandoned childhood home for clues her parents may have left. But in the disorienting, transformative isolation of the wilderness, her friendsâ marriage begins to crumble, sex becomes a catalyst for conflict, and violence and death lurk just beneath the surface. As her relentless probing leads to an electrifying confrontation with her own suppressed secrets, she rapidly descends into what could be either madness or the starkest self-knowledge. Margaret Atwoodâs haunting masterpiece is permeated with suspense, complex with layered meanings, and written in brilliant, diamond-sharp prose.
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The New York Trilogy
by Paul Auster
First published by Sun & Moon Press in three volumes in 1985 and 1986, The New York Trilogy has since been translated into many languages. It was ranked 87 in The ĂLondonĂš Observer's list of "The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time."
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Complete Works of Isaac Babel
by Isaac Babel
"A celebration of literary genius framed by 20th-century tragedy."--Richard Bernstein, New York Times Finally in paperback, this "monumental collection; gathers all of Babel's deft and brutal writing, including a wide array of previously unavailable material, from never-before-translated stories to plays and film scripts" (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times). Reviewing the work in The New Republic, James Woods wrote that this groundbreaking volume "represents a triumph of translating, editing, and publishing. Beautiful to hold, scholarly and also popularly accessible, it is an enactment of love." Considered one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, Isaac Babel has left his mark on a generation of readers and writers. This book will stand as Babel's final, most enduring legacy. Winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award; A New York Times Notable Book, a and Library Journal Best Book, a Washington Post Book World Rave, a Village Voice Favorite Book of the Year.
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Giovanni's Room
by James Baldwin
Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
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Sweet Hereafter
by Russell Banks
In The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks tells a story that begins with a school bus accident. Using four different narrators, Banks creates a small-town morality play that addresses one of life's most agonizing questions: when the worst thing happens, who do you blame?
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Regeneration Trilogy
by Pat Barker
This box set contains Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road. The Eye in the Door won the 1993 Guardian Fiction Prize and The Ghost Road won the 1995 Booker Prize.
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Herzog
by Saul Bellow
In one of his finest achievements, Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow presents a multifaceted portrait of a modern-day hero, a man struggling with the complexity of existence and longing for redemption. A Penguin Classic This is the story of Moses Herzog, a great sufferer, joker, mourner, and charmer. Although his life steadily disintegrates around himâhe has failed as a writer and teacher, as a father, and has lost the affection of his wife to his best friendsâHerzog sees himself as a survivor, both of his private disasters and those of the age. He writes unsent letters to friends and enemies, colleagues and famous people, revealing his wry perception of the world and the innermost secrets of his heart. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Philip Roth.
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Ficciones. C Edited and with an Introduction by Anthony Kerrigan
by Jorge Luis Borges
Seventeen short stories.
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Nadja
by André Breton
"Nadja, " originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's attitude toward everyday life. The principal narrative is an account of the author's relationship with a girl in teh city of Paris, the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life. The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work -- pictures of various "surreal" people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in naja's presence and which inspire him to mediate on their reality or lack of it. "The Nadja of the book is a girl, but, like Bertrand Russell's definition of electricity as "not so much a thing as a way things happen, " Nadja is not so much a person as the way she makes people behave. She has been described as a state of mind, a feeling about reality, k a kind of vision, and the reader sometimes wonders whether she exists at all. yet it is Nadja who gives form and structure to the novel.
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The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
A mysterious stranger appears in a Moscow park. Soon he and his retinue have astonished the locals with the magic show to end all magic shows. But why are they really here, and what has it got to do with the beautiful Margarita, or her lover, the Master, a silenced writer? A carnival for the senses and a diabolical extravaganza.
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Naked Lunch
by William S. Burroughs
Since its original publication in Paris in 1959, Naked Lunch has become one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Exerting its influence on the relationship of art and obscenity, it is one of the books that redefined not just literature but American culture. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volumeâthat contains final-draft typescripts, numerous unpublished contemporaneous writings by Burroughs, his own later introductions to the book, and his essay on psychoactive drugsâis a valuable and fresh experience of a novel that has lost none of its relevance or satirical bite.
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Possession
by A. S. Byatt
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER âą NATIONAL BESTSELLER âą A tale of two young scholars researching the secret love affair of two Victorian poets that's an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, an intellectual mystery, and a triumphant love story. âGorgeously written ⊠A tour de force.â âThe New York Times Book Review Winner of Englandâs Booker Prize and a literary sensation, Possession traces the lives of a pair of young academics as they uncover a clandestine relationship between two long-dead Victorian poets. As they unearth their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshireâfrom spiritualist sĂ©ances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittanyâwhat emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas.
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If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
by Italo Calvino
Introduction by Peter Washington; Translation by William Weaver Italo Calvinoâs masterpiece combines a love story and a detective story into an exhilarating allegory of reading, in which the reader of the book becomes the bookâs central character. Based on a witty analogy between the readerâs desire to finish the story and the loverâs desire to consummate his or her passion, IF ON A WINTERâS NIGHT A TRAVELER is the tale of two bemused readers whose attempts to reach the end of the same bookâIF ON A WINTERâS NIGHT A TRAVELER, by Italo Calvino, of courseâare constantly and comically frustrated. In between chasing missing chapters of the book, the hapless readers tangle with an international conspiracy, a rogue translator, an elusive novelist, a disintegrating publishing house, and several oppressive governments. The result is a literary labyrinth of storylines that interrupt one anotherâan Arabian Nights of the postmodern age.
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The Outsider
by Albert Camus
Meursault leads a bachelor life until he commits a random act of violence. His lack of emotion and failure to show remorse serve to increase his guilt in the eyes of the law. This novel explores the predicament of the individual who refuses to pretend and is prepared to face the indifference of the universe, courageously and alone.
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Tower of Babel
by Elias Canetti
Auto-da-FĂ©, Elias Canetti's only work of fiction, is a staggering achievement that puts him squarely in the ranks of major European writers such as Robert Musil and Hermann Broch. It is the story of Peter Kien, a scholarly recluse who lives among and for his great library. The destruction of Kien through the instrument of the illiterate, brutish housekeeper he marries constitutes the plot of the book. The best writers of our time have been concerned with the horror of the modern world--one thinks of Kafka, to whom Canetti has often been compared. But Auto-da-FĂ© stands as a completely original, unforgettable treatment of the modern predicament.
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Oscar and Lucinda
by Peter Carey
The Booker Prize-winning novel--now a major motion picture from Fox Searchlight Pictures. This sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel, is a romance, but a romance of the sort that could only take place in nineteenth-century Australia. For only on that sprawling continent--a haven for misfits of both the animal and human kingdoms--could a nervous Anglican minister who gambles on the instructions of the Divine become allied with a teenaged heiress who buys a glassworks to help liberate her sex. And only the prodigious imagination of Peter Carey could implicate Oscar and Lucinda in a narrative of love and commerce, religion and colonialism, that culminates in a half-mad expedition to transport a glass church across the Outback.
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The Bloody Chamber, and Other Stories
by Angela Carter
A reissue of a collection of short stories first published ten years ago.
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Journey to the End of the Night
by Louis-Ferdinand CĂ©line
Louis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every page of this novel. Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe, and later in America where it was first published by New Directions in 1952. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.
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Soldiers of Salamis
by Javier Cercas
Facing a firing squad at the end of the Spanish Civil War, Nationalist Rafael Snchez Mazas escapes his executioners into the nearby forest, where he is discovered by an unknown soldier who refuses to kill him, in a historical novel that sheds light on the events surrounding a real-life incident. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.
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The Stories of John Cheever
by John Cheever
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER âą NATIONAL BESTSELLER âą A seminal collection from one of the true masters of the short story. Spanning the duration of Cheeverâs long and distinguished career, these sixty-one stories chronicle and encapsulate the lives of what has been called âthe greatest generation.â From the early wonder and disillusionment of city life in âThe Enormous Radioâ to the surprising discoveries and common mysteries of suburbia in âThe Housebreaker of Shady Hillâ and âThe Swimmer,â these are tales that have helped define the form. Featuring a preface by the Pulizter Prize-winning author, The Stories of John Cheever brings together some of the finest short stories ever written. "Cheeverâs crowning achievement is the ability to be simultaneously generous and cynical, to see that the absurd and the profound can reside in the same moment, and to acknowledge both at the detriment of neither." âThe Guardian
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Disgrace
by J. M. Coetzee
In a novel set in post-apartheid South Africa, a fifty-two-year-old college professor who has lost his job for sleeping with a student tries to relate to his daughter, Lucy, who works with an ambitious African farmer.
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Cheri and The Last of Cheri
by Colette
Two volumes of Colette's most beloved works, with a new Introduction by Judith Thurman. Chéri, together with The Last of Chéri, is a classic story of a love affair between a very young man and a charming older woman. The amour between Fred Peloux, the beautiful gigolo known as Chéri, and the courtesan Léa de Lonval tenderly depicts the devotion that stems from desire, and is an honest account of the most human preoccupations of youth and middle age. With compassionate insight Colette paints a full-length double portrait using an impressionistic style all her own.
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A House and Its Head
by Ivy Compton-Burnett
A radical thinker, one of the rare modern heretics, said Mary McCarthy of Ivy Compton-Burnett, in whose austere, savage, and bitingly funny novels anything can happen and no one will ever escape. The long, endlessly surprising conversational duels at the center of Compton-Burnett's works are confrontations between the unspoken and the unspeakable, and in them the dynamics of power and desire are dramatized as nowhere else. New York Review Books is reissuing two of the finest novels of this singular modern geniusâworks that look forward to the blacky comic inventions of Muriel Spark as much as they do back to the drawing rooms of Jane Austen. A House and Its Head is Ivy Compton-Burnett's subversive look at the politics of family life, and perhaps the most unsparing of her novels. No sooner has Duncan Edgeworth's wife died than he takes a new, much younger bride whose willful ways provoke a series of transgressions that begins with adultery and ends, much to everyone's relief, in murder.
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Captain Corelli's Mandolin
by Louis De BerniĂšres
In 1941. Captain Antonio Corelli, a young Italian officer is posted to the Greek Island of Cephallonia as part of the occupying forces. Suitable for developing literacy and/or English language skills.
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Underworld
by Don DeLillo
A finalist for the National Book Award, Underworld is Don DeLilloâs most powerful and riveting novelââa great American novel, a masterpiece, a thrilling page-turnerâ (San Francisco Chronicle). Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep, clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of the Cold War. It is a novel that accepts every challenge of these extraordinary times -- Don DeLillo's greatest and most powerful work of fiction. Don DeLillo's mesmerizing novel opens with a legendary baseball game played in New York in 1951. The glorious outcome -- the home run that wins the game is called the Shot Heard Round the World -- shades into the grim news that the Soviet Union has just tested an atomic bomb. With cameo appearances by Lenny Bruce, J. Edgar Hoover, Bobby Thompson, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Toots Shor, âthis is DeLilloâs most affecting novelâŠa dazzling, phosphorescent work of artâ (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).
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Seven Gothic Tales
by Isak Dinesen
A selection of stories about romantics, adventurers and dreamers, ranging from Tuscany to Elisnore and Zanzibar: a jealous countess cannot bear her husband to admire her jewels; an Englishman embarks on an odyssey; a maiden lady believes herself to be a famous courtesan; and more.
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Once Were Warriors
by Alan Duff
Once Were Warriors is Alan Duff's harrowing vision of his country's indigenous people two hundred years after the English conquest. In prose that is both raw and compelling, it tells the story of Beth Heke, a Maori woman struggling to keep her family from falling apart, despite the squalor and violence of the housing projects in which they live. Conveying both the rich textures of Maori tradition and the wounds left by its absence, Once Were Warriors is a masterpiece of unblinking realism, irresistible energy, and great sorrow.
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The Lover
by Marguerite Duras
A modern classic and international bestseller with more than one million copies in print, The Lover has been celebrated by critics and readers across the globe since its first publication in 1984. Set in the prewar Indochina of Marguerite Duras's childhood, this is the haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her Chinese lover. In spare yet luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins of Saigon in the waning days of France's colonial empire, and its representation in the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts. This edition of The Lover includes a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen that looks back at Duras's iconic work, winner of Franceâs Prix Goncourt, as it approaches its fortieth anniversary in print.