Great Contemporary Authors
Discover the best contemporary authors and their must-read books. Explore top modern writers and acclaimed literature in our curated list of great works today.
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrisonâs Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past. One of The Atlanticâs Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Setheâs house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Sethe works at beating back the past, but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly in her memory and in the lives of those around her. When a mysterious teenage girl arrives, calling herself Beloved, Setheâs terrible secret explodes into the present. Combining the visionary power of legend with the unassailable truth of history, Morrisonâs unforgettable novel is one of the great and enduring works of American literature.
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Gravity's Rainbow (Classics Deluxe Edition)
by Thomas Pynchon
A Penguin Classic Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force. This Penguin Classics deluxe edition features a specially designed cover by Frank Miller along with french claps and deckle-edged paper. 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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ID: 055214228X
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A Bend in the River
by V. S. Naipaul
Widely hailed as the Nobel Prize-winning authorâs greatest work, this novel takes us into the life of a young Indian man who moves to an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. ⢠"Brilliant." âThe New York Times In this haunting masterpiece of postcolonial literature, short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1979, Naipaul gives us a convincing and disturbing vision of a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past. Salim is doubly an outsider in his new homeâan unnamed country that resembles the Congoâby virtue of his origins in a community of Indian merchants on the coast of East Africa. Uncertain of his future, he has come to take possession of a local trading post he has naively purchased sight unseen. But what Salim discovers on his arrival is a ghost town, reduced to ruins in the wake of the recently departed European colonizers and in the process of being reclaimed by the surrounding forest. Salim struggles to build his business against a backdrop of growing chaos, conflict, ignorance, and poverty. His is a journey into the heart of Africa, into the same territory explored by Joseph Conradâs Heart of Darkness nearly eighty years earlierâbut witnessed this time from the other side of the tragedy of colonization. Salim discovers that the nationâs violent legacy persists, through the rise of a dictator who calls himself the peopleâs savior but whose regime is built on fear and lies. "Confirms Naipaul's position as one of the best writers now at work." âNewsweek
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Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
The story of Saleem Sinal, born precisely at midnight, August 15, 1947, the moment India became independent. Saleem's life parallels the history of his nation.
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The Book of Evidence
by John Banville
Returning to Ireland to reclaim a painting that is part of his patrimony, a thirty-eight-year-old man commits a ghastly and motiveless murder, which he confesses in a novel-length narrative.
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The Voyeur
by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Mathias, the voyeur, returns to the island of his birth and wanders about for several days. When a thirteen-year-old girl is found drowned, murder is suspected. Did Mathias do it?
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Sexing the Cherry
by Jeanette Winterson
In the reign of Charles II, Jordon and his mother, the Dog-Woman, live on the banks of the stinking Thames, where they take in sights ranging from the first pineapple in London to Royalist heads on pikes.
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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 ĂLondonè Observer's list of "The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time."
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Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace
The story of an intelligent but zany dysfunctional family is set in a drug-and-alcohol addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy and follows such themes as heartbreak, philosophy, and advertising.
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Everyman
by Philip Roth
WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD ⢠NATIONAL BESTSELLER ⢠A candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The Pulitzer Prizeâwinning author of American Pastoral and âour most accomplished novelistâ (The New Yorker) turns his attention to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality. The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes. The terrain of this powerful novel is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.
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A Wild Sheep Chase
by Haruki Murakami
A New York Times bestselling authorâand âa mythmaker for the millennium, a wiseacre wisemanâ (New York Times Book Review)âdelivers a surreal and elaborate quest that takes readers from Tokyo to the remote mountains of northern Japan, where the unnamed protagonist has a surprising confrontation with his demons. An advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend and casually appropriates the image for an advertisement. What he doesnât realize is that included in the scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences.
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White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
NATIONAL BESTSELLER ⢠The blockbuster debut novel from "a preternaturally gifted" writer (The New York Times) and author of On Beauty and Swing Timeâset against London's racial and cultural tapestry, reveling in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, and embracing the comedy of daily existence. Zadie Smithâs dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smithâs voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own. At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of Englandâs irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesnât quite match her name (Jamaican for âno problemâ). Samadâs late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbalâs every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith. â[White Teeth] is, like the London it portrays, a restless hybrid of voices, tones, and texturesâŚwith a raucous energy and confidence.â âThe New York Times Book Review
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Music for Torching
by A. M. Homes
As A.M. Homes's incendiary novel unfolds, the Kodacolor hues of the good life become nearly hallucinogenic.Laying bare th foundations of a marriage, flash frozen in the anxious entropy of a suburban subdivision, Paul and Elaine spin the quit terors of family life into a fantastical frenzy that careens out of control. From a strange and hilarious encounter with a Stepford Wife neighbor to an ill-conceived plan for a tattoo, to a sexy cop who shows up at all the wrong moments, to a housecleaning team in space suits, a mistress calling on a cell phone, and a hostage situationat a school, A.M. Homes creates characters so outrageously flawed and deeply human that thery are entriely believable.