Books that Changed Me Part Nine
Discover the books that changed me in Part Nine of this curated series. From Knut Hamsun's Hunger to John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra and James M. Cain's Double Indemnity, explore life-changing fiction and timeless literary classics that redefine perspective.
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Appointment in Samarra
by John O'Hara
A 20th century classic, "Appointment in Samarra" is the masterpiece by the writer Fran Leibowitz called "the real F. Scott Fitzgerald." With trademark verisimilitude, O'Hara captures the personal politics and easy bitterness of small-town life in this first and most widely read of his books.
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Hunger
by Knut Hamsun
From the Back Cover: A true classic of modern literature-and a forerunner of the psychologically driven fiction of Kafka, Camus, and Saramago. Hunger is the story of a Norwegian artist who wanders the streets of Christiana (now Oslo), struggling on the edge of starvation while trying to sell his articles to the local newspaper. As the hunger overtakes his body and his mind, the writer slides inexorably into paranoia and despair. The descent into madness is recounted by the unnamed narrator in increasingly urgent and disjointed prose as he loses his grip on his body and on reality itself. At the end-for reasons that remain unclear-he suddenly decides to sign on as a crewman aboard a ship and leave the city behind, saving himself from his otherwise certain death. Arising from Hamsun's belief that literature ought to be about the mysterious workings of the human mind-an attempt, as he wrote, to describe "the whisper of the blood and the pleading of the bone marrow"--Hunger is a landmark work that pointed the way toward a new kind of novel.
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Double Indemnity
by James M. Cain
ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • James M. Cain, virtuoso of the roman noir, gives us a tautly narrated and excruciatingly suspenseful story in Double Indemnity, an X-ray view of guilt, of duplicity, and of the kind of obsessive, loveless love that devastates everything it touches. Walter Huff was an insurance salesman with an unfailing instinct for clients who might be in trouble, and his instinct led him to Phyllis Nirdlinger. Phyllis wanted to buy an accident policy on her husband. Then she wanted her husband to have an accident. Walter wanted Phyllis. To get her, he would arrange the perfect murder and betray everything he had ever lived for.