My desert island books part 11
Discover 10 essential desert island books in Part 11 of our curated series, featuring Harlan Ellison, Ursula K. Le Guin, William S. Burroughs, and more. From The Dispossessed to Rabbit Angstrom, this list highlights must-read science fiction, literary classics, and unforgettable novels perfect for your ultimate reading list. Explore top sci-fi picks, cult fiction, and timeless favorites in this definitive books guide.
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The Essential Ellison
by Harlan Ellison
Harlan Ellison is probably best known as a script writer for sci-fi and fantasy movies and TV series such as the original Outer Limits, The Hunger, Logan's Run, and Babylon Five. But his range is much broader than that, encompassing stories, novels, essays, reviews, reminiscences, plays, even fake autobiographies. Essential Ellison includes contains 74 unabridged works, including such classics as A Boy and His Dog, Xenogenesis, and Mefisto in Onyx. Includes black-and-white photos.
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The Cornish Trilogy
by Robertson Davies
Woven around the pursuits of the energetic spirits and erudite scholars of the University of St. John and the Holy Ghost, this dazzling trilogy of novels lures the reader into a world of mysticism, historical allusion, and gothic fantasy that could only be the invention of Canada's grand man of letters.
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A Dance to the Music of Time
by Anthony Powell
"Movement 2. The rumble of distant events in Germany and Spain presages the storm of WWII. In England, even as the whirl of marriages and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures gathers speed, men and women find themselves on the brink of fateful choices.
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Rabbit Angstrom
by John Updike
The four novels in the acclaimed Rabbit series—including the Pulitzer Prize winners Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest—brought together in a single volume, from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century. When we first met him in Rabbit, Run (1960), the book that established John Updike as a major novelist, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom is playing basketball with some boys in an alley in Pennsylvania during the tail end of the Eisenhower era, reliving for a moment his past as a star high school athlete. Athleticism of a different sort is on display throughout these four magnificent novels—the athleticism of an imagination possessed of the ability to lay bare, with a seemingly effortless animal grace, the enchantments and disenchantments of life. Updike revisited his hero toward the end of each of the following decades in the second half of this American century; and in each of the subsequent novels, as Rabbit, his wife, Janice, his son, Nelson, and the people around them grow, these characters take on the lineaments of our common existence. In prose that is one of the glories of contemporary literature, Updike has chronicled the frustrations and ambiguous triumphs, the longuers, the loves and frenzies, the betrayals and reconciliations of our era. He has given us our representative American story. This Rabbit Angstrom volume is composed of the following novels: Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit is Rich; and Rabbit at Rest.
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Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
by Samuel R. Delany
The story of a truly galactic civilization with over 6,000 inhabited worlds.
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Nova Express
by William S. Burroughs
Nova Express takes William S. Burroughs's nightmarish future one step beyond The Soft Machine. The diabolical Nova criminals have gained control and plan on wreaking untold destruction. It's up to Inspector Lee of the Nova Police to attack and dismantle the word-and-imagery machine of these control addicts” before it's too late.
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The Ticket that Exploded
by William S. Burroughs
Inspector Lee and the Nova Police engage the Nova Mob in a decisive battle for the planet. Scientists and combat troops, ad men and con men whose deceitful language has spread like an incurable disease, create terror.
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The Dispossessed
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Centuries ago, the moon Anarres was settled by utopian anarchists who left the Earthlike planet Urras in search of a better world, a new beginning. Now a brilliant physicist, Shevek, determines to reunite the two civilizations that have been separated by hatred since long before he was born. The Dispossessed is a penetrating examination of society and humanity -- and one man's brave undertaking to question the unquestionable and ignite the fires of change.
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Them
by Joyce Carol Oates
Loretta Wendall and her two children experience violence and poverty in Detroit from the Depression in the 1930s to the riots of 1967.