Salon.com Recommended Fiction - Part 6
Discover Salon.com Recommended Fiction (Part 6). Explore top titles and find your next read. Learn more today.
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Girl in Landscape
by Jonathan Lethem
Girl in Landscape is a daring exploration of the violent nature of sexual awakening, a meditation on language and perception, and an homage to the great American tradition of the Western. • "Jonathan Lethem's imagination [is]...marvelously fertile." --Newsday The heroine is young Pella Marsh, whose mother dies just before her family flees a post-apocalyptic Brooklyn for the frontier of a recently discovered planet. Hating her ineffectual father, and troubled by a powerful attraction to a virile but dangerous loner who holds sway over the little colony, Pella sets out on a course of discovery that will have tragic and irrevocable consequences for the humans in the community and the ancient inhabitants, known only as archbuilders. Girl in Landscape finds Jonathan Lethem twisting forms and literary conventions to create a dazzling, completely unconventional tale.
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Et Tu, Babe
by Mark Leyner
In this fiendishly original new novel, Mark Leyner is a leather-blazer-wearing, Piranha 793-driving, narcotic-guzzling monster who has potential rivals eliminated by his bionically enhanced bodyguards, has his internal organs tattooed, and eavesdrops on the erotic fantasies of Victoria's Secret models -- which naturally revolve around him. Leyner's jet-propelled roller derby through the cultures of celebrity, cyberpunk, and rabid egotism is exhilaratingly bizarre, exhaustingly funny -- and you'd better hope it's just fiction.
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Advertisements for Myself
by Norman Mailer
A collection of stories, polemic, meditations, and interviews.
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Mary Reilly
by Valerie Martin
From the acclaimed author of the bestselling Italian Fever and award-winning Property, comes a fresh twist on the classic Jekyll and Hyde story, a novel told from the perspective of Dr. Jekyll's dutiful and intelligent housemaid. "Part psychological novel, part social history, part eerie horror tale ... dark and moving and powerful." —The Washington Post Faithfully weaving in details from Robert Louis Stevenson's classic, Martin introduces an original and captivating character: Mary is a survivor—scarred but still strong—familiar with evil, yet brimming with devotion and love. As a bond grows between Mary and her tortured employer, she is sent on errands to unsavory districts of London and entrusted with secrets she would rather not know. Unable to confront her hideous suspicions about Dr. Jekyll, Mary ultimately proves the lengths to which she'll go to protect him. Through her astute reflections, we hear the rest of the classic Jekyll and Hyde story, and this familiar tale is made more terrifying than we remember it, more complex than we imagined possible.
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Bone by Bone
by Peter Matthiessen
"Watson's voice is an artistic triumph. . .[Bone by Bone] may well come to be regarded as a classic." --San Francisco Chronicle Book Review In Bone by Bone, Peter Matthiessen speaks in the extraordinary voice of the enigmatic and dangerous E. J. Watson, whom we first saw, obliquely, through the eyes of his early twentieth-century Everglades community in Killing Mister Watson. This astonishing new novel, calling to account the violence, virulent racism, and destruction of the land that fueled the so-called American Dream, points an accusing finger straight into the burning eyes of Uncle Sam. Here is the bloodied child of the Civil War and Reconstruction who dreams of recovering the family plantation. He becomes the gifted cane planter nearing success on a wilderness river when he gives in fatally to his accumulating demons. Powerfully imagined, prodigiously detailed, Bone by Bone is a literary tour de force as bold and ambitious as Watson himself. "Like a true tragic figure, [Watson] knows and understands; he does not wriggle to save his own skin," said The New York Times. "This is a work of genuine dignity."
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Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
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The Giant's House
by Elizabeth McCracken
Befriending an adolescent boy who is ostracized for his unusual height, bereft Cape Cod librarian Peggy Cort finds a soulmate in James and comes to love him as he grows into a man of eight feet.
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Charming Billy
by Alice McDermott
Praised in the highest terms by reviewers, the story of a charming, romantic Irish American explores the impact of his life and death on his family and his close-knit New York City neighborhood. Reprint.
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The Child in Time
by Ian McEwan
Soon to be on public television starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Stephen Lewis, a successful writer of children's books, is confronted with the unthinkable: his only child, three-year-old Kate, is snatched from him in a supermarket. In one horrifying moment that replays itself over the years that follow, Stephen realizes his daughter is gone. With extraordinary tenderness and insight, Booker Prize-winning author Ian McEwan takes us into the dark territory of a marriage devastated by the loss of a child. Kate's absence sets Stephen and his wife, Julie, on diverging paths as they each struggle with a grief that only seems to intensify with the passage of time. Eloquent and passionate, the novel concludes in a triumphant scene of love and hope that gives full rein to the author's remarkable gifts. The winner of the Whitbread Prize, The Child in Time is an astonishing novel by one of the finest writers of his generation.
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Spider
by Patrick McGrath
Spider is gaunt, threadbare, unnerved by everything from his landlady to the smell of gas. He tells us his story in a storm of beautiful language that slowly reveals itself as a fiendishly layered construction of truth and illusion. With echoes of Beckett, Poe, and Paul Bowles, Spider is a tale of horror and madness, storytelling and skepticism, a novel whose dizzying style lays bare the deepest layers of subconscious terror.
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Ninety-two in the Shade
by Thomas McGuane
Tiring of the company of junkies and burn-outs, Thomas Skelton goes home to Key West to take up a more wholesome life. But things fester in America's utter South. And Skelton's plans to become a skiff guide in the shining blue subtropical waters place him on a collision course with Nichol Dance, who has risen to the crest of the profession by dint of infallible instincts and a reputation for homicide. Out of their deadly rivalry, Thomas McGuane has constructed a novel with the impetus of a thriller and the heartbroken humor that is his distinct contribution to American prose.
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Story of My Life
by Jay McInerney
In his breathlessly paced new novel Jay McInerney revisits the nocturnal New York of Bright Lights, Big City. Alison Poole, twenty going on 40,000, is a budding actress already fatally well versed in hopping the clubs, shopping Chanel falling in and out of, lust, and abusing other people's credit cards. As Alison races toward emotional breakdown, McInerney gives us a hilarious yet oddly touching portrait of a postmodern Holly Golightly coming to terms with a world in which everything is permitted and nothing really matters.
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Waiting to Exhale
by Terry McMillan
Four African-American women are leaning on each other while "waiting to exhale", waiting for the one man who will take their breath away.
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All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers
by Larry McMurtry
Ranging from Texas to California on a young writer's journey in a car he calls El Chevy, All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers is one of Larry McMurtry's most vital and entertaining novels. Danny Deck is on the verge of success as an author when he flees Houston and hurtles unexpectedly into the hearts of three women: a girlfriend who makes him happy but who won't stay, a neighbor as generous as she is lusty, and his pal Emma Horton. It's a wild ride toward literary fame and an uncharted country...beyond everyone he deeply loves. All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers is a wonderful display of Larry McMurtry's unique gift: his ability to re-create the subtle textures of feelings, the claims of passing time and familiar place, and the rich interlocking swirl of people's lives.
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Edwin Mullhouse
by Steven Millhauser
A parody of a literary biography starring a 10-year-old novelist who is mysteriously dead at 11—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Martin Dressler. As a memorial, Edwin Mullhouse's best friend, Jeffrey Cartwright, decides that the life of this great American writer must be told. He follows Edwin's development from his preverbal first noises through his love for comic books to the fulfillment of his literary genius in the remarkable novel, Cartoons.
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The Ice Storm
by Rick Moody
The year is 1973. As a freak winter storm bears down on an exclusive, affluent suburb in Connecticut, cark skid out of control, men and women swap partners, and their children experiment with sex, drugs, and even suicide. Here two families, the Hoods and the Williamses, com face-to-face with the seething emotions behind the well-clipped lawns of their lives-in a novel widely hailed as a funny, acerbic, and moving hymn to a dazed and confused era of American life.
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Birds of America
by Lorrie Moore
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist A New York Times Editors' Choice A Pulishers Weekly Best Book of the Year Birds of America is a stunning collection of twelve stories by Lorrie Moore, one of our finest authors at work today. With her characteristic wit and piercing intelligence she unfolds a series of portraits of the lost and unsettled of America, and with a trademark humor that fuels each story with pathos and understanding.
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Sula
by Toni Morrison
In clear, dark, resonant language, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison brilliantly evokes not only a bond between two lives, but the harsh, loveless, ultimately mad world in which that bond is destroyed, the world of the Bottom and its people. Unabridged. 5 CDs.
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Black Betty
by Walter Mosley
Easy Rawlins is on the verge of losing everything—until he gets an offer from the FBI that he has no choice but to accept. For most Black Americans, the 1960s were times of hope. For former P.I. Easy Rawlins, Los Angeles's mean streets were never meaner—or more deadly. Racial tensions are high—Black folks avoid even stepping foot in white neighborhoods. Despite the ongoing civil rights movement, racism still rules the streets and police officers are no exception. So when a white man approaches Easy with a wad of cash to find a missing person, Easy would is tempted to simply throw the money back in his sleazy face. But he personally knows the woman the white man wants to find—the notorious Black Betty, an ebony siren whose talent for all things rich and male took her from Houston's Fifth Ward to Beverly Hills. Short on money and pulled by the strong desire to see Black Betty again, he accepts the job. But why exactly this white man wants to find her isn’t clear. Easy’s questions aren’t being answers and he realizes the case might be more complex than he thought. Easy won’t stop at anything to find Black Betty. Even as the obstacles grow higher and the bodies begin to pile up.
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Jasmine
by Bharati Mukherjee
After the assassination of her husband, seventeen-year-old Jasmine leaves India to live with a middle-aged banker in a small Iowa town, only to retain some of the traditions and memories of the past.
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Open Secrets
by Alice Munro
A collection of eight short stories about women--their lives, loves and secrets
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The Sea, the Sea
by Iris Murdoch
Winner of the Booker Prize—a tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a playwright as he composes his memoirs Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor, both professionally and personally, and amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years. None of his plans work out, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors-some real, some spectral-that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core. 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.