Ashleys Must-Read Modern Fiction #3
Discover Ashley's top modern fiction picks with Must-Read #3! Explore captivating books from Ashley's curated list of best contemporary reads for every book lover.
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The Executioner's Song
by Norman Mailer
Re-creates the crime, trial and events leading to the execution of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, who requested the death sentence.
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God's Grace
by Bernard Malamud
Malamud's vision is personal, original, and almost wholly unrelated to the most characteristic or normative Jewish thought and tradition.
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An Imaginary Life
by David Malouf
In the first century A.D., Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverent poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the …
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The Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • A monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, The Magic Mountain is an enduring classic. With this …
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Embers
by Sandor Marai
Originally published in 1942 and now rediscovered to international acclaim, this taut and exquisitely structured novel by the Hungarian master Sandor Marai conjures the melancholy …
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Cakes and Ale
by W. Somerset Maugham
Cakes and Ale is a delicious satire of London literary society between the Wars. Social climber Alroy Kear is flattered when he is selected by …
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The Group
by Mary McCarthy
Portrays the lives of eight women graduated from the same class at Vassar.
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The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers
A quiet, sensitive girl searches for beauty in a small, but damned Southern town.
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Enduring Love
by Ian McEwan
From the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement—a brilliant and compassionate novel of love, faith, and suspense, and of how life can change …
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Cold Heaven
by Brian Moore
When an appalling boating accident off the coast of Nice allegedly kills Dr. Alex Davenport, his attractive young wife Marie finds herself in the ironic …
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
It is the mid-1800s. At Sweet Home in Kentuckhy, an era is ending as slavery comes under attack from the abolitionists. The worlds of Halle …
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The Progress of Love
by Alice Munro
Eleven stories, including "Miles City, Montana", "Lichen", and "White dump", reveal the nature of the power of love between children and parents, between siblings, and …
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The Sea, the Sea
by Iris Murdoch
Winner of the Booker Prize—a tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a playwright as he composes his memoirs Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's …
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Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
The novel that first established Nabokov's reputation with a large audience tour-de-force of comic satire on sex and the American ways of life.
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A House for Mr. Biswas
by V. S. Naipaul
From the Nobel Prize-winning author: an unforgettable comedy of manners inspired by the author's father that has been hailed as one of the twentieth century's …
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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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A Good Man is Hard to Find, and Other Stories
by Flannery O'Connor
The collection that established O'Connor's reputation as one of the american masters of the short story. The volume contains the celebrated title story, a tale …
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Where the Jackals Howl and Other Stories
by Amos Oz
A collection of short stories set in a kibbutz, highlighting individual Israelis against a background of community life.
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The Messiah of Stockholm
by Cynthia Ozick
A small group of Jews weave a web of intrigue and fantasy around a book reviewer's contention that he is the son of Borus Schultz, …
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The Nephew
by James Purdy
When Alma, a retired schoolteacher begins writing a memorial to the life of her nephew, Cliff Mason, who's reported missing in action in Korea, she …
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Interview with the Vampire
by Anne Rice
The spellbinding classic that started it all, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author—the inspiration for the hit television series “A magnificent, compulsively readable …
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Barney's Version
by Mordecai Richler
Barney Panofsky--whose trashy TV company has made him a small fortune--recalls with nostalgia and pain his young manhood in the Paris of the early '50s, …
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Hadrian the Seventh
by Fr. Rolfe
One day George Arthur Rose, hack writer and minor priest, discovers that he has been picked to be Pope. He is hardly surprised and not …
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The Radetzky March
by Joseph Roth
The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth's classic saga of the privileged von Trotta family, encompasses the entire social fabric of the Austro-Hungarian Empire just before World …
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The Human Stain
by Philip Roth
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral delivers “a master novelist's haunting parable about our troubled …
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The Satanic Verses
by Salman Rushdie
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “[A] torrent of endlessly inventive prose, by turns comic and enraged, embracing life in all its contradictions. In this …
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Pedro Páramo
by Juan Rulfo
Deserted villages of rural Mexico, where images and memories of the past linger like unquiet ghosts, haunted the imaginations of the author. In one such …
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Bonjour Tristesse
by Francoise Sagan
'That summer I was seventeen and perfectly happy ... '___
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The Complete Stories of Saki
by Saki
The extraordinary stories of 'Saki' are a mixture of humorous satire, irony and the macabre, in which the stupidities and hypocrisy of conventional society are …
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The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
J.D. Salinger's classic of adolescent angst is now available for the first time in trade paperback. Holden Caulfield, knowing he is to be expelled from …
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Staying On
by Paul Scott
Colonel Tusker and Lucy Smalley cling to their bungalow in the hills of Pankot after Indian independence deprives them of their colonial status. Lucy, fed …
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Austerlitz. English
by Winfried Georg Sebald
Shares the struggle of Jacques Austerlitz to uncover his identity as he follows the memory of his childhood back to the heart of war-torn Europe, …
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Last Exit to Brooklyn
by Hubert Selby
A raw depiction of life amongst New York's junkies, hustlers, drag queens and prostitutes. Meet Georgette, a hopelessly romantic and tormented transvestite; Vinnie, a disaffected …
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Unless
by Carol Shields
Forty-four-year-old Reta Winters, wife, mother, writer, and translator, is living a happy life until one of her three daughters drops out of university to sit …