My desert island list part 37
Discover the ultimate desert island books list, part 37, featuring must-read literary fiction. Explore curated picks like Kathy Acker's *Portrait of an Eye* and Samuel R. Delany's *Tales of Nevèrÿon*, essential reads for any book lover's survival library.
Book
Portrait of an Eye
by Kathy Acker
The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula; I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac; The Adult Life of Toulouse-Lautrec by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec
Book
Tales of Nevèrÿon
by Samuel R. Delany
This 1979 American Book Award nominee contains five interlocked stories that tell of the slave Gorgik in a long-ago land, and a masked swordswoman narrates an astonishing feminist creation myth.
Book
The Chosen Place, The Timeless People
by Paule Marshall
The chosen place is Bourneville, a remote, devastated part of a Caribbean island; the timeless people are its inhabitants—black, poor, inextricably linked to their past enslavement. When the advance team for an ambitious American research project arrives, the tense, ambivalent relationships that evolve, between natives and foreigners, black and whites, haves and have-nots, keenly dramatize the vicissitudes of power. “An important and moving book . . . Marshall is as wise as she is bold, for in compromising neither her politics nor her understanding of people, she makes better sense of both.”—Village Voice
