The Best Writing Ive Read
Discover 'The Best Writing Ive Read'—a curated list of must-read books with exceptional prose. Explore top literary picks for inspiring and masterful writing.
Book
Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust
by Nathanael West
Two classic short stories, one about a male reporter who writes an advice column, and the other, about people who have migrated to California in expectation of health and ease.
Book
Rabbit, Run
by John Updike
“A lacerating story of loss and of seeking, written in prose that is charged with emotion but is always held under impeccable control.”—Kansas City Star Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty—even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine Grace. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path, an invisible line toward his own salvation as straight as a ruler’s edge.
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ID: 0060830328
(Type: books)
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Nine Stories
by J.D. Salinger
The "original, first-rate, serious, and beautiful" short fiction (New York Times Book Review) that introduced J. D. Salinger to American readers in the years after World War II, including "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and the first appearance of Salinger's fictional Glass family. Nine exceptional stories from one of the great literary voices of the twentieth century. Witty, urbane, and frequently affecting, Nine Stories sits alongside Salinger's very best work--a treasure that will passed down for many generations to come. The stories: A Perfect Day for Bananafish Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut Just Before the War with the Eskimos The Laughing Man Down at the Dinghy For Esm --with Love and Squalor Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period Teddy
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Cathedral
by Raymond Carver
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • Twelve short stories that mark a turning point in the work of “one of the true American masters" (The New York Review of Books). “A writer of astonishing compassion and honesty … His eye is so clear, it almost breaks your heart.” —The Washington Post Book World A remarkable collection that includes the canonical titular story about blindness and learning to enter the very different world of another. These twelve stories “overflow with the danger, excitement, mystery and possibility of life.” —The Washington Post Book World
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Pigeon Feathers, and Other Stories
by John Updike
When this classic collection of stories first appeared--in 1962, on the author's thirtieth birthday--Arthur Mizener wrote in The New York Times Book Review: "Updike is a romantic [and] like all American romantics, that is, he has an irresistible impulse to go in memory home again in order to find himself. . . . The precise recollection of his own family-love, parental and marital, is vital to him; it is the matter in which the saving truth is incarnate. . . . Pigeon Feathers is not just a book of very brilliant short stories; it is a demonstration of how the most gifted writer of his generation is coming to maturity; it shows us that Mr. Updike's fine verbal talent is no longer pirouetting, however gracefully, out of a simple delight in motion, but is beginning to serve his deepest insight."
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ID: 0822212951
(Type: books)
Book
The Plague
by Albert Camus
“Its relevance lashes you across the face.” —Stephen Metcalf, The Los Angeles Times • “A redemptive book, one that wills the reader to believe, even in a time of despair.” —Roger Lowenstein, The Washington Post A haunting tale of human resilience and hope in the face of unrelieved horror, Albert Camus' iconic novel about an epidemic ravaging the people of a North African coastal town is a classic of twentieth-century literature. The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a deadly plague, which condemns its victims to a swift and horrifying death. Fear, isolation and claustrophobia follow as they are forced into quarantine. Each person responds in their own way to the lethal disease: some resign themselves to fate, some seek blame, and a few, like Dr. Rieux, resist the terror. An immediate triumph when it was published in 1947, The Plague is in part an allegory of France's suffering under the Nazi occupation, and a timeless story of bravery and determination against the precariousness of human existence.