Salon.com Recommended Fiction - Part 9
Discover Salon.com's curated Recommended Fiction list, Part 9—featuring 15 must-read novels from literary icons like Alice Walker, Kurt Vonnegut, and Anne Tyler. From the domestic drama of *The Color Purple* to the satirical bite of *The Bonfire of the Vanities*, this essential reading guide spans classic and contemporary storytelling. Explore standout picks from Stephen Wright, John Updike, and more in this hand-picked selection of the best in fiction.
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Among the Dead
by Michael Tolkin
A black comedy set in modern-day L.A. traces the disastrous attempts of an unfaithful husband to make a new start with his family. By the author of The Player. Reprint.
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Sacred Country
by Rose Tremain
Certain that she is really a male trapped in a female body, Mary Ward pursues this elusive identity, much to the consternation of her mother, her brother, and a neighbor's son.
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The Collected Stories
by William Trevor
A collection of short stories from celebrated author William Trevor in which he shines a light on the day-to-day life of Ireland and its citizens. From his debut collection, “The Day We Got Drunk on Cake,” published in 1968, to “Family Sins” (1990), William Trevor has crafted the short story to perfection, giving us brilliant and subtle stories full of the reversals, surprises, and shadowy truths we discover in life itself. To read this volume is not just to encounter an extraordinary literary stylist, but to understand life as surely as though we were looking through the eyes of his protagonists and—deeper still—into their hearts. William Trevor: The Collected Stories includes the tales from his seven previous books, as well as four stories that have never appeared in book form in America. They depict the comforts and frustrations of life in rural Ireland, the complexities of family relationships, and the elusive grace of love. They portray the almost invisible strands that bind people to each other as well as the chains that imprison them in solitary yearning.
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Tallien
by Frederic Tuten
In Tallien, a novel that shuttles gracefully between past and present, a young man visits his dying father - formerly a Depression-era union organizer and activist - after a 30-year estrangement. At his bedside, the son relates the tale of Jean Lambert Tallien, a key figure in the French Revolution, who is torn between his egalitarian ideals and his love for an aristocratic woman. In skillful prose, acclaimed author Frederic Tuten uses the historical and contemporary narratives to explore the tensions between passions of the heart and of the mind.
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Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
by Anne Tyler
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning author, a “funny, heart-hammering, wise” (The New York Times) portrait of a family that will remind you why "to read a novel by Anne Tyler is to fall in love" (PEOPLE). Abandoned by her wanderlusting husband, stoic Pearl raised her three children on her own. Now grown, the siblings are inextricably linked by their memories—some painful—which hold them together despite their differences. Hardened by life’s disappointments, wealthy, charismatic Cody has turned cruel and envious. Thrice-married Jenny is errant and passionate. And Ezra, the flawed saint of the family, who stayed at home to look after his mother, runs a restaurant where he cooks what other people are homesick for, stubbornly yearning for the perfect family he never had. Now gathered during a time of loss, they will reluctantly unlock the shared secrets of their past and discover if what binds them together is stronger than what tears them apart. “[In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Tyler] has arrived at a new level of power.” —John Updike, The New Yorker “Marvelous, astringent, hilarious, [and] strewn with the banana peels of love.” —Cosmopolitan
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Rabbit Is Rich
by John Updike
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • The middle-aged hero of Rabbit, Run, returns—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century. The hero of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, ten years after the hectic events described in Rabbit Redux, has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab is falling, gas lines are lengthening, the President collapses while running in a marathon, and double-digit inflation coincides with a deflation of national confidence. Nevertheless, Harry Angstrom feels in good shape, ready to enjoy life at last—until his son, Nelson, returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit to his lot. New characters and old populate these scenes from Rabbit’s middle age, as he continues to pursue, in his erratic fashion, the rainbow of happiness.
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Julian
by Gore Vidal
The remarkable bestseller about the fourth-century Roman emperor who famously tried to halt the spread of Christianity, Julian is widely regarded as one of Gore Vidal’s finest historical novels. Julian the Apostate, nephew of Constantine the Great, was one of the brightest yet briefest lights in the history of the Roman Empire. A military genius on the level of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, a graceful and persuasive essayist, and a philosopher devoted to worshipping the gods of Hellenism, he became embroiled in a fierce intellectual war with Christianity that provoked his murder at the age of thirty-two, only four years into his brilliantly humane and compassionate reign. A marvelously imaginative and insightful novel of classical antiquity, Julian captures the religious and political ferment of a desperate age and restores with blazing wit and vigor the legacy of an impassioned ruler.
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The Atlas
by William T. Vollmann
Arranged as a huge thematic palindrome, The Atlas showcases Vollmann's ability to build strange structures, sonnets composed of stories instead of words.
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Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five is “a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century” (Time). Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.” An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it. Authors as wide-ranging as Norman Mailer, John Irving, Michael Crichton, Tim O’Brien, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, David Sedaris, Jennifer Egan, and J. K. Rowling have all found inspiration in Vonnegut’s words. Jonathan Safran Foer has described Vonnegut as “the kind of writer who made people—young people especially—want to write.” George Saunders has declared Vonnegut to be “the great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us . . . a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.” More than fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut’s portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.
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I'm Losing You
by Bruce Wagner
Chosen as a "New York Times" Notable Book of the Year, "I'm Losing You" is set in cordless and unplugged Hollywood a land of H.I.V.I.P.s, porn stars, scheming dermatologists, and cell-phone conversations that never connect. Bruce Wagner charts the morbidity and mortality of our culture's, depicting the national obsession with fame and fortune truth and consequence as never before.
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The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
Set in the period between the world wars, this novel tells of two sisters, their trials, and their survival.
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Life and Loves of a She Devil
by Fay Weldon
This is not a book for everyone, but its admirers are vigorously enthusiastic. For example: Rhoda Koenig in New York Magazine, who calls it ". . . a novel of blazingly hot revenge, one that amply illustrates the saying about heaven having no rage like love turned to hate, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned." Or Rosalyn Drexler, who said on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, "It affords a scintillating, mindboggling, vicarious thrill for any reader who has ever fantasized dishing out retribution for one wrong or another." Or Carol E. Rinzler, who wrote on The Washington Post Book World's front page, ". . . what makes this a powerfully funny and oddly powerful book is the energy of the language and of the intellect that conceived it, an energy that vibrates off the pages and that makes SHE-DEVIL as exceptional a book in the remembering as in the reading . . . . a small, mad masterpiece."
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A Curtain of Green, and Other Stories
by Eudora Welty
Collects short stories by a scrutinizer of Southern life, Eudora Welty, exposing the grotesque and violent nature of the human animal.
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The Optimist's Daughter
by Eudora Welty
This Pulitzer Prize–winning novel tells the story of Laurel McKelva Hand, a young woman who has left the South and returns, years later, to New Orleans, where her father is dying. After his death, she and her silly young stepmother go back still farther, to the small Mississippi town where she grew up. Along in the old house, Laurel finally comes to an understanding of the past, herself, and her parents.
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A Boy's Own Story
by Edmund White
At home, in school, and on the streets, a homosexual teenager growing up in the 1950s moves through comic sexual experiments, isolation, fear, and exciting expectations toward an escape from childhood and a firm sense of self, in this classic coming-of-age novel. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.
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Philadelphia Fire
by John Edgar Wideman
Philadelphia Fire is the most ambitious, most highly praised, and best-selling work of fiction by "one of America's premier writers of fiction" (The York Times). Based on the 1985 bombing police of a West Philadelphia row house owned the Afrocentric cult Move, it tells of Cudjoe, a writer who returns to his old neighborhood after a decade of self-imposed exile, obsessed with finding the lone boy who was seen running from the flames.
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The Bonfire of the Vanities
by Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe’s modern American satire tells the story of Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street “Master of the Universe” who has it all — a Park Avenue apartment, a job that brings wealth, power and prestige, a beautiful wife, an even more beautiful mistress. Suddenly, one wrong turn makes it all go wrong, and Sherman spirals downward in a sudden fall from grace that sucks him into the ravenous heart of a New York City gone mad during the go-go, racially turbulent, socially hilarious 1980s. From the Trade Paperback edition.
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In The Garden Of The North American Martyrs
by Tobias Wolff
Among the characters you'll find in this collection of twelve stories by Tobias Wolff are a teenage boy who tells morbid lies about his home life, a timid professor who, in the first genuine outburst of her life, pours out her opinions in spite of a protesting audience, a prudish loner who gives an obnoxious hitchhiker a ride, and an elderly couple on a golden anniversary cruise who endure the offensive conviviality of the ship's social director. Fondly yet sharply drawn, Wolff's characters stumble over each other in their baffled yet resolute search for the "right path."
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M31
by Stephen Wright
Dash and Dot—husband and wife; self-professed descendants of aliens from the M31 galaxy—are the world’s most in-demand lecturers on the UFO circuit. They live in a decommissioned church in the middle of America, with a radar dish on its steeple and a spaceship in the sanctuary. Their children have the run of the house when Dash and Dot are away. When a couple of UFO groupies show up looking for the extraterrestrial duo, they find instead a nuclear family—or rather, a family gone nuclear—whose comically discomforting world resembles our own as much as it does another world altogether.