list 2- new and used gods fiction
Discover the best new and used fiction about gods, mythology, and existential themes in this curated book list—featuring timeless classics like *The Idiot* by Dostoevsky, *Heart of Darkness* by Conrad, and *Ulysses* by Joyce, alongside modern masterpieces such as *Suttree* by McCarthy and *The Catcher in the Rye*. Explore powerful narratives from literary giants that delve into faith, fate, and the human condition. Perfect for readers seeking profound, god-themed fiction, this collection blends philosophical depth with unforgettable storytelling from Achebe, Camus, Dickens, and more.
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Moby-Dick
by Herman Melville
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read First published in 1851, Herman Melville’s masterpiece is, in Elizabeth Hardwick’s words, “the greatest novel in American literature.” The saga of Captain Ahab and his monomaniacal pursuit of the white whale remains a peerless adventure story but one full of mythic grandeur, poetic majesty, and symbolic power. Filtered through the consciousness of the novel’s narrator, Ishmael, Moby-Dick draws us into a universe full of fascinating characters and stories, from the noble cannibal Queequeg to the natural history of whales, while reaching existential depths that excite debate and contemplation to this day.
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Suttree
by Cormac McCarthy
From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road, here is the story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege with his prominent family to live in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River near Knoxville. Remaining on the margins of the outcast community there—a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters—he rises above the physical and human squalor with detachment, humor, and dignity.
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Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.
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The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
In 1327, finding his sensitive mission at an Italian abbey further complicated by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William of Baskerville turns detective.
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Winter Birds
by Jim Grimsley
Eight-year-old southerner Danny Crell recounts his premature entry into manhood, precipitated by a violent quarrel between his father, an abusive drunk, and his mother, whose emotional detachment is nearly as frightening.
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The Idiot
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic tale of one man’s pure innocence in the face of a society obsessed with power, money, and manipulation The twenty-six-year-old Prince Myshkin, following a stay of several years in a Swiss sanatorium, returns to Russia to collect an inheritance and “be among people.” Even before he reaches home he meets the dark Rogozhin, a rich merchant’s son whose obsession with the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna eventually draws all three of them into a tragic denouement. In Petersburg the prince finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with money, power, and manipulation. Scandal escalates to murder as Dostoevsky traces the surprising effect of this “positively beautiful man” on the people around him, leading to a final scene that is one of the most powerful in all of world literature. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s masterful translation of The Idiot is destined to stand with their versions of Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Demons as the definitive Dostoevsky in English.
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Cancer Ward
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
One of the great allegorical masterpieces of world literature, Cancer Ward is both a deeply compassionate study of people facing terminal illness and a brilliant dissection of the "cancerous" Soviet police state. --Publisher
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All the King's Men
by Robert Penn Warren
Character study of a Southern demagogue whose career follows in some respects as that of Huey Long.
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
by Ken Kesey
Ken Kesey's bracing, inslightful novel about the meaning of madness and the value of self-reliance, and the inspiration for the new Netflix original series Ratched Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the seminal novel of the 1960s that has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy’s heroic attempt to do battle with the awesome powers that keep them all imprisoned.
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Ulysses
by James Joyce
This revised volume of the acclaimed novel follows the complete unabridged text as corrected in 1961. Set entirely on one day, 16 June 1904, Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus as they go about their daily business in Dublin. From this starting point, James Joyce constructs a novel of extraordinary imaginative richness and depth. Unique in the history of literature, Ulysses is one of the most important and enjoyable works of the twentieth century. This edition contains the original foreword by the author and the historic court ruling to remove the federal ban. It also contains page references to the first American edition of 1934.
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Last Exit to Brooklyn
by Hubert Selby
The decadence and violence of the urban streets is graphically portrayed in this novel set in a post-WWII Brooklyn slum.
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Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
In Conrad's haunting tale, Marlow, a seaman and wanderer, recounts his physical and psychological journey in search of the enigmatic Kurtz. Travelling to the heart of the African continent, he discovers how Kurtz has gained his position of power and influence over the local people. Marlow's struggle to fathom his experience involves him in a radical questioning of not only his own nature and values but the nature and values of his society. A masterpiece of twentieth-century writing, Heart of Darkness explores the workings of consciousness as well as the grim realities of imperialism. 'Heart of Darkness seems to reach into the heart of Conrad himself.' Peter Ackroyd, The Times
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The Stranger
by Albert Camus
With the intrigue of a psychological thriller, The Stranger—Camus's masterpiece—gives us the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach. With an Introduction by Peter Dunwoodie; translated by Matthew Ward. Behind the subterfuge, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd" and describes the condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life. “The Stranger is a strikingly modern text and Matthew Ward’s translation will enable readers to appreciate why Camus’s stoical anti-hero and devious narrator remains one of the key expressions of a postwar Western malaise, and one of the cleverest exponents of a literature of ambiguity.” –from the Introduction by Peter Dunwoodie First published in 1946; now in translation by Matthew Ward.
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White Noise
by Don DeLillo
The National Book Award-winning classic from the author of Underworld and Libra—an “eerie, brilliant, and touching” (New York Times) family drama about mass culture and the numbing effects of technology—soon to be a major motion picture starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, his fourth wife, Babette, and four ultramodern offspring as they navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event," a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys—radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings—pulsing with life, yet heralding something ominous.
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John Dos Passos: U.S.A. (LOA #85)
by John Dos Passos
Unique for its epic scale and panoramic social sweep, Dos Passos' masterpiece comprises three novels--The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money--which create an unforgettable collective portrait of modern America.
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The Mosquito Coast
by Paul Theroux
Allie Fox is going to re-create the world. Abominating the cops, crooks, junkies and scavengers of modern America, he abandons civilization and takes the family to live in the Honduran jungle. There his tortured, messianic genius keeps them alive, his hoarse tirades harrying them through a diseased and dirty Eden towards unimaginable darkness. �An epic of paranoid obsession that swirls the reader headlong to deposit him on a mudbank of horror� Christopher Wordsworth, Guardian.
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The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
The "brilliant, funny, meaningful novel" (The New Yorker) that established J. D. Salinger as a leading voice in American literature--and that has instilled in millions of readers around the world a lifelong love of books. "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth." The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caufield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days.
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The Spyglass Tree
by Albert Murray
By “our premier writer about jazz and the blues . . . and a fictional tale spinner in the grand Southern tradition” (Washington Post Book World), The Spyglass Tree is a deeply affecting novel of elegant, lyrical reminiscence and profound sophistication about a young black man’s advent into the world of academia—an imaginary Alabama college—in the 1930s. Admist the excitement of the world of ideas and adventures with new friends, Scooter sallies into “the territory of the blues,” where recollection becomes legend. Here he learns to deal with the vicissitudes of life—the complexities of family ties and camaraderie, his sexuality, pride of excellence in school, the darker realities of history and human passion—through confrontation and improvisation, and with style and courage. “[The Spyglass Tree] strikes a perfect balance between the black folk tradition and Faulknerian rumination. . . . One reads this very fine novel for the glissando effect of its language, the vibrancy of its characters and the unabashed pleasure Mr. Murray takes in nostalgia for its own sake . . . with level-headed clarity and honesty.”—The New York Times Book Review
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To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
The novel that established Virginia Woolf as a leading writer of the twentieth century, To the Lighthouse is made up of three powerfully charged visions into the life of one family living in a summer house off the rocky coast of Scotland. As time winds its way through their lives, the Ramseys face, alone and simultaneously, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph-the human capacity for change. A moving portrait in miniature of family life, it also has profoundly universal implications, giving language to the silent space that separates people and the space that they transgress to reach each other.
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Ship of Fools
by Katherine Anne Porter
A novel recounting the lives and actions of the passengers on a ship en route from Mexico to Germany in 1931.