Skibinskayas Literary Essentials
Explore Skibinskayas Literary Essentials—a curated list of must-read books for literature lovers. Discover timeless classics and essential reads handpicked for your next literary adventure.
Book
The Labyrinth
by Catherynne M. Valente
Here Monsters are hidden ... A lyrical anti-quest through aconscious maze without center, borders, or escape--a dark pilgrim's progressthrough a landscape of vicious Angels, plague houses, crocodile-prophets, tragicchess-sets, and the mind of an unraveling woman, driven on by the mocking guidewho seeks to destroy as much as save. Enter the world of the Labyrinth,where Doors do not wait to be opened, but hunt you in the night. This isZarathustra in Wonderland, a puzzle which defies solution, a twisted paththrough language and madness... But where will you hide?
Book
The Pillow Book of Sei Sh?nagon
by Sei Shōnagon
One of the great classics of Japanese literature, "The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon" is by far our most detailed source of factual material on life in eleventh-century Japan at the height of Heian culture.
Book
Wittgenstein's Mistress
by David Markson
Wittgenstein's Mistress is a novel unlike anything David Markson or anyone else has ever written before. It is the story of a woman who is convinced and, astonishingly, will ultimately convince the reader as well that she is the only person left on earth. Presumably she is mad. And yet so appealing is her character, and so witty and seductive her narrative voice, that we will follow her hypnotically as she unloads the intellectual baggage of a lifetime in a series of irreverent meditations on everything and everybody from Brahms to sex to Heidegger to Helen of Troy. And as she contemplates aspects of the troubled past which have brought her to her present state--obviously a metaphor for ultimate loneliness--so too will her drama become one of the few certifiably original fictions of our time. "The novel I liked best this year," said the Washington Times upon the book's publication; "one dizzying, delightful, funny passage after another . . . Wittgenstein's Mistress gives proof positive that the experimental novel can produce high, pure works of imagination."
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Book
The Secret History
by Donna Tartt
"Powerful...Enthrallling...A ferociously well-paced entertainment." THE NEW YORK TIMES Richard Papen arrived at Hampden College in New England and was quickly seduced by an elite group of five students, all Greek scholars, all worldly, self-assured, and, at first glance, all highly unapproachable. As Richard is drawn into their inner circle, he learns a terrifying secret that binds them to one another...a secret about an incident in the woods in the dead of night where an ancient rite was brought to brutal life...and led to a gruesome death. And that was just the beginning.... "A smart, craftsman-like, viscerally compelling novel." TIME Selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK