Salon.com Recommended Fiction - Part 4
Explore Salon.com's top fiction picks in Part 4 of their recommended reading list. Discover must-read novels and hidden gems curated by literary experts to elevate your bookshelf.
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Sarah Canary
by Karen Joy Fowler
When an enigmatic woman cloaked in black wanders into a Chinese labor camp in the Pacific Northwest of 1873, one man is chosen to lead her out into the woods. But soon, he becomes the enchanted follower. Thus begins a magical journey. . . .
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The French Lieutenant's Woman
by John Fowles
The scene is the village of Lyme Regis on Dorset's Lyme Bay ... "the largest bite from the underside of England's out-stretched southwestern leg." The major characters in the love-intrigue triangle are Charles Smithson, 32, a gentleman of independent means and vaguely scientific bent; his fiancée, Ernestina Freeman, a pretty heiress daughter of a wealthy and pompous dry goods merchant; and Sarah Woodruff, mysterious and fascinating ... deserted after a brief affair with a French naval officer a short time before the story begins. Obsessed with an irresistible fascination for the enigmatic Sarah, Charles is hurtled by a moment of consummated lust to the brink of the existential void. Duty dictates that his engagement to Tina must be broken as he goes forth once again to seek the woman who has captured his Victorian soul and gentleman's heart.
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J R
by William Gaddis
At the center of this hugely comic tale of "free enterprise" America stands JR--an eleven-year-old capitalist, eagerly following the example of the grasping world around him. Operating through pay phones and post-office money orders, JR inadvertently parlays a shipment of Navy surplus picnic forks, a defaulted bond issue, and a single share of common stock into a vast paper empire embracing timber, mineral and natural gas rights, publishing, and a brewery. At once a novel of epic comedy and a biting satire of the American dream, JR displays the style and extraordinary inventiveness that has made Gaddis one of the most acclaimed writers of our time.
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The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
by Ernest J. Gaines
“Grand, robust, a rich and big novel.”—Alice Walker, The New York Times Book Review “In [Jane Pittman], Ernest Gaines has created a legendary figure. . . . Gaines’s novel brings to mind other great works: The Odyssey, for the way his heroine’s travels manage to summarize the American history of her race, and Huckleberry Finn, for the clarity of [Pittman’s] voice, for her rare capacity to sort through the mess of years and things to find the one true story of it all.”—Newsweek Miss Jane Pittman. She is one of the most unforgettable heroines in American fiction, a woman whose life has come to symbolize the struggle for freedom, dignity, and justice. Ernest J. Gaines’s now-classic novel—written as an autobiography—spans one hundred years of Miss Jane’s remarkable life, from her childhood as a slave on a Louisiana plantation to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. It is a story of courage and survival, history, bigotry, and hope—as seen through the eyes of a woman who lived through it all. A historical tour de force, a triumph of fiction, Miss Jane’s eloquent narrative brings to life an important story of race in America—and stands as a landmark work for our time.
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Two Girls, Fat and Thin
by Mary Gaitskill
Justine, a beautiful, lonely, sexually addicted young woman, meets Dorothy, fat, maladjusted, and unhappy since childhood. They are superficially a study in contrasts yet share equally haunting sexual burdens carried since youth. With common secrets, they are drawn into a remarkable friendship.
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The Sunlight Dialogues
by John Gardner
A stolid, law-and-order policeman in western N.Y. state encounters a mad "hippie" who paints the word LOVE on the street, escapes from jail, helps another prisoner escape, and, in the process, murders a policeman. The hunt is on....
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Omensetter's Luck
by William H. Gass
"The most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation." -The New Republic Now celebrating the 50th anniversary of its publication, Omensetter's Luck is the masterful first novel by the author of The Tunnel, Middle C, On Being Blue, and Eyes: Novellas and Stories. Greeted as a masterpiece when it was first published in 1966, Omensetter's Luck is the quirky, impressionistic, and breathtakingly original story of an ordinary community galvanized by the presence of an extraordinary man. Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, it chronicles - through the voices of various participants and observers - the confrontation between Brackett Omensetter, a man of preternatural goodness, and the Reverend Jethro Furber, a preacher crazed with a propensity for violent thoughts. Omensetter's Luck meticulously brings to life a specific time and place as it illuminates timeless questions about life, love, good, and evil. This edition includes an afterword written by William Gass in 1997. 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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Preston Falls
by David Gates
"Beautifully written.... Gates [has a] pitch-perfect ear for contemporary speech...and...[a] keen, journalistic eye."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times In this comic, fiercely compassionate novel, David Gates, whose first novel Jernigan was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, sends his protagonist on a visceral journey to the dark side of suburban masculinity, explores the claims youth makes on middle age, and the tenacious --at times perverse--power of love to assert itself. When Doug Willis has a mid-life crisis, he doesn't join a gym or have an affair. Instead he gets himself arrested while camping with his wife and kids, takes a two month leave of absence from his PR job, and retreats to his farmhouse in rural Preston Falls--where he plugs in his guitar and tries to shut out his life. While his wife, Jean, struggles to pay the bills and raise their sullen, skeptical kids, Willis's plans for hiatus crumble into Dewars-and-cocaine fueled disarray. A shattered window, an unguarded gun, and a shady small town attorney force a crisis--and Willis can't go home again. With its biting humor and harsh realism, Preston Falls confirms David Gates as a talent in the tradition of Russell Banks and Richard Ford: a master of dark truths and private longings.
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Neuromancer
by William Gibson
Case, a nerve-damaged data thief, is recruited by a new employer for a last-chance run against a powerful artificial intelligence.
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The Family Markowitz
by Allegra Goodman
Told through weddings, deaths, holiday dinners, and dreams, the story of three generations of the Markowitzes is revealed.
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Burger's Daughter
by Nadine Gordimer
"A riveting history of South Africa and a penetrating portrait of a courageous woman." -- The New Yorker A must read fiction of South Africa from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature This is the moving story of the unforgettable Rosa Burger, a young woman from South Africa cast in the mold of a revolutionary tradition. Rosa tries to uphold her heritage handed on by martyred parents while still carving out a sense of self. Although it is wholly of today, Burger's Daughter can be compared to those 19th century Russian classics that make a certain time and place come alive, and yet stand as universal celebrations of the human spirit. Nadine Gordimer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born and lives in South Africa.
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The Company of Women
by Mary Gordon
"A superb, stunningly written novel." The Philadelphia Inquirer Raised by five intensely religious women and a charismatic, controversial priest, sheltered from the secular world, Felicitas Maria Taylor is intelligent, charming, and desperate for a taste of ordinary happiness. More freedom than she has ever imagined awaits her at Columbia University in the 1960s. There, Felicitas falls in love with the worst man for her -- with shattering results. Now she must turn again to the company of the women who love her as she struggles to embrace the future without betraying the past.
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Mister Sandman
by Barbara Gowdy
One of the most audacious and talked-about novels of the season, "Mister Sandman" is set in Toronto in the mid-1950s and concerns the Canary family: their immoderate passions and eccentricities and their secret lives.
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The Street Lawyer
by John Grisham
After a violent encounter with a homeless man, talented corporate lawyer Michael finds himself out in the streets, lucky to be alive, and holding a top-secret file belonging to his former employers.
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Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
by Allan Gurganus
Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All became an instant classic upon its publication. Critics and readers alike fell in love with the voice of ninety-nine-year-old Confederate widow Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heroines in American literature. Lucy married at the turn of the twentieth century, when she was fifteen and her husband was fifty. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence," Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Lucy’s story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrator's daily battles in the Home--complete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy striper. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is a marvel of narrative showmanship and proof that brilliant, emotional storytelling remains at the heart of great fiction.
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Airships
by Barry Hannah
Now considered a contemporary classic, Airships was honored by Esquire magazine with the Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award. The twenty stories in this collection are a fresh, exuberant celebration of the new American South -- a land of high school band contests, where good old boys from Vicksurg are reunited in Vietnam and petty nostalgia and the constant pain of disappointed love prevail. Airships is a striking demonstration of Barry Hannah's mature and original talent.
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Legends of the Fall
by Jim Harrison
Three novellas explore the theme of revenge and the actions to which people resort when they feel threatened
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The Lime Twig
by John Hawkes
But it would be unfair to the reader to reveal what happens when a gang of professional crooks gets wind of the scheme and moves to muscle in on this bettors' dream of a long-odds situation. Worked out with all the meticulous detail, terror, and suspense of a nightmare, the tale is, on one level, comparable to a Graham Greene thriller; on another, it explores a group of people, their relationships fears, and loves. For as Leslie A. Fiedler says in his introduction, "John Hawkes.. . makes terror rather than love the center of his work, knowing all the while, of course, that there can be no terror without the hope for love and love's defeat . . . ."
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Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
Catch-22 is like no other novel. It is one of the funniest books ever written, a keystone work in American literature, and even added a new term to the dictionary. At the heart of Catch-22 resides the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero endlessly inventive in his schemes to save his skin from the horrible chances of war. His efforts are perfectly understandable because as he furiously scrambles, thousands of people he hasn't even met are trying to kill him. His problem is Colonel Cathcart, who keeps raising the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions that he is committed to flying, he is trapped by the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade, the hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule from which the book takes its title: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes the necessary formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of making the request proves that he is sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved. Catch-22 is a microcosm of the twentieth-century world as it might look to some one dangerously sane -- a masterpiece of our time.
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Memoir from Antproof Cas
by Mark Helprin
From Mark Helprin, acclaimed author of A Soldier of the Great War and A Winter's Tale, comes a miraculous song of the twentieth century. In a mountain garden in Brazil, an old American is writing his memoirs, placing the pages carefully in his antproof case. As he reminisces we learn he was a World War II ace who was shot down twice, an investment banker who met with popes and presidents, a multimillionaire, a man who was never not in love. He spent his adolescence in an insane asylum in Switzerland; he was the thief of the century, a murderer, and a protector of the innocent. And all his life, he waged a valiant, losing, one-man battle against the world's most insidious enslaver: coffee.
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Strip Tease
by Carl Hiaasen
A single mom turned stripper finds herself locking horns with a high-powered Congressman when a bachelor party gets out of hand in this inventive tale yet of savage appetites and sweet justice. Only in America could an innocent, if drunken, guest of honor at a strip joint bachelor party become a mortal threat against Big Money and Big Government. Only in south Florida, land of roadside honky-tonks and sinister pleasure boats -- not to mention blackmail and murder -- would a virtuous topless dancer join forces with a cool but clueless cop. And only in the fiction of Carl Hiaasen do readers experience riveting suspense and razor-sharp characters along with the most wicked humor imaginable. Don't miss Strip Tease, Hiaasen's crazed romp through lust, murder, and government machinations.
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The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
by Oscar Hijuelos
It's 1949. It's the era of the mambo, and two young Cuban musicians make their way up from Havana to the grand stage of New York. The Castillo brothers, workers by day, become by night stars of the dance halls, where their orchestra plays the lush, sensuous, pulsing music that earns them the title of the Mambo Kings. This is their moment of youth--a golden time that thirty years later will be remembered with nostalgia and deep afection. In The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,Oscar Hijuelos has created a rich and enthralling novel about passion and loss, memory and desire.
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Riddley Walker, Expanded Edition
by Russell Hoban
This acclaimed story is set in an England that has suffered a nuclear holocaust. Society has regressed to an Iron Age, semi-literate state represented by the special language that the author created especially for this book.
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The Swimming-Pool Library
by Alan Hollinghurst
The dazzling first novel from the best-selling, Booker Prize-Winning author of The Line of Beauty and The Sparsholt Affair. An enthralling, darkly erotic novel of homosexuality before the scourge of AIDS; an elegy, possessed of chilling clarity, for ways of life that can no longer be lived with impunity. The Swimming-Pool Library focuses on the friendship of two men: William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and Lord Nantwich, an elderly man searching for someone to write his biography and inherit his traditions.