Best of
Novels

1929

Pather Panchali: Song of the Road


Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay - 1929
    It was followed in 1932 by a sequel Aparajito, which was later also adapted into a film of the same name by Satyajit Ray.

All Quiet on the Western Front


Erich Maria Remarque - 1929
    With the fire and patriotism of youth they sign up. What follows is the moving story of a young ‘unknown soldier’ experiencing the horror and disillusionment of life in the trenches.

The Best of O. Henry


O. Henry - 1929
    Henry's talents, including such classics asThe Gift of the Magi and The Furnished Room.

The Good Companions


J.B. Priestley - 1929
    It was his third novel and it is certainly well-written and very readable. It is, too, an enjoyable romp, all about a stranded theatrical group the Dinky Doos rescued by Miss Trant and coverted into the Good Companions, and involving their adventures with such characters as Jess Oakroyd, the middle-aged joiner from Bruddersford, who breaks free from his miserable domestic existence, Susie Dean and Inigo Jollifant. It is the sort of long, colourful novel which was one of Priestley's hallmarks, and it is clear that Priestley enjoyed himself writing it. He regarded the job as not so much a task, more a kind of holiday.One of the ironies of the success of The Good Companions is that when he discussed his idea for the book with his publishers they told him that such a book would not appeal to the current reading public. However, the germ of the story was embedded deep into his mind and heart, and writing the novel became something of an obsession. He had made up his mind to write a novel that he himself could enjoy even if nobody else did...and, in the event, a great many others also loved it! (The novel arrived at a time when the country was in depression, and someone commented that The Good Companions "soared out of the gloom like a fairy tale to lift thousands of minds into a world of literary enchantment."David Hughes in "J.B. Priestley:An Informal Study of His Work", wrote: "The Good Companions is a simple book, plainly constructed and straightforwardly told. Like so much of Priestley's work, its action begins on a note of rebellion, while its impulse is the search for romance without losing sight of reality; indeed, staring into the very heart of reality for the magic. Jess Oakroyd is pitched into loneliness by the drab quarrrelling of his family. Miss Trant, suddenly relieved in early middle age of a burden that might have lasted her lifetime, turns against the trivial monotony of her genteel days in a Cotswold village. Inigo Jollifant, surrounded in the prep school where he teaches by petty rulings, is refused permission to play the piano by the headmaster's wife, gets drunk and escapes into the night. Three separate rebellions against the frustrations of life put three characters on the road for what is probably the longest picaresque novel in English since Pickwick."Priestley started to write The Good Companions in January 1928, and he delivered the manuscript to Heinemann in March 1929.At least two films have been made of The Good Companions, and it has been turned into a play on several occasions.

Red Harvest


Dashiell Hammett - 1929
    "Red Harvest" is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain.The Op was in Personville, derogatory nickname aside, as the result of a letter to the Continental Detective Agency in San Francisco from Donald Willsson, publisher of the local paper, asking for an agent to visit. No other information. As soon as the OP arrives, the body count begins. It starts with his client!

The Luzhin Defense


Vladimir Nabokov - 1929
    Luzhin, a distracted, withdrawn boy, takes up chess as a refuge from everyday life. As he rises to the heights of grandmaster, the game of chess gradually supplants the world of reality as he moves inexorably towards madness.

Wolf Solent


John Cowper Powys - 1929
    Lawrence. Since then it has won the admiration of writers from Henry Miller to Iris Murdoch. Wolf Solent remains wholly unrivaled in its deft and risky balance of mysticism and social comedy, ecstatic contemplation of nature and unblinking observation of human folly and desire.Forsaking London for Ramsgard, a village in Dorsetshire, Wolf Solent discovers a world of pagan splendor and medieval insularity, riddled by ancient scandals and resentments. And there this poetic young man meets two women—the sensuous beauty Gerda and the ethereal gamine Christie—who will become the sharers of his body and soul. Audacious, extravagant, and gloriously strange, Wolf Solent is a twentieth-century masterpiece.

Dodsworth


Sinclair Lewis - 1929
    When the woman becomes involved with another man, her husband must choose between forgiving his wife or abandoning the relationship, & Europe, forever.

Daughter of Earth


Agnes Smedley - 1929
    Revered writer and activist Agnes Smedley worked to advance the cause of human justice on three continents as a writer and political activist. Here, she relives in fictionalized form her first thirty-three years—growing up on the wrong side of the tracks; discovering double standards of class, race, and sex among East Coast intellectuals; facing false espionage charges; and maintaining her independence through two tormented marriages.

Passing


Nella Larsen - 1929
    When she reconnects with her childhood friend Clare Kendry, who is similarly light-skinned, Irene discovers that Clare has been passing for a white woman after severing ties to her past--even hiding the truth from her racist husband.Clare finds herself drawn to Irene's sense of ease and security with her Black identity and longs for the community (and, increasingly, the woman) she lost. Irene is both riveted and repulsed by Clare and her dangerous secret, as Clare begins to insert herself--and her deception--into every part of Irene's stable existence. First published in 1929, Larsen's brilliant examination of the various ways in which we all seek to "pass," is as timely as ever.

I Burn Paris


Bruno Jasieński - 1929
    It tells the story of a disgruntled factory worker who, finding himself on the streets, takes the opportunity to poison Paris's water supply with a deadly virus. With the deaths piling up, we encounter Chinese communists, rabbis, disillusioned scientists, American millionaires and a host of others as the city sections off into ethnic enclaves and everyone plots their route of escape. At the heart of the cosmopolitan city is a deep-rooted xenophobia and hatred — the one thread that binds all these groups together. As Paris lies in ruin, Jasienski issues a rallying cry to the downtrodden of the world while mixing "The Internationale" with a broadcast of popular music.With its montage strategies reminiscent of early avant-garde cinema and fist-to-the-gut metaphors, I Burn Paris has lost none of its vitality and vigor. Ruthlessly dissecting various utopian fantasies, Jasienski is out to disorient, and he has a seemingly limitless ability to transform the Parisian landscape into the product of disease-addled minds. An exquisite example of literary Futurism and Catastrophism, the novel presents a filthy, degenerated world where factories and machines have replaced the human, but rather than cliché and simplistic propaganda, these features are given an immediacy that depicts the modern metropolis as only superficially cosmopolitan, as hostile and animalistic to its core.

The Poet and the Lunatics


G.K. Chesterton - 1929
    His madness is the madness of insight and he uses this gift to solve or prevent crimes committed by madmen. Chesterton ably illustrates his own premise that lunacy and sanity may just be a point of view!

Look Homeward, Angel


Thomas Wolfe - 1929
    It is Wolfe's first novel, and is considered a highly autobiographical American Bildungsroman. The character of Eugene Gant is generally believed to be a depiction of Wolfe himself. The novel covers the span of time from Gant's birth to the age of 19. The setting is the fictional town and state of Altamont, Catawba, a fictionalization of his home town, Asheville, North Carolina. Playwright Ketti Frings wrote a theatrical adaptation of Wolfe's work in a 1957 play of the same title.

Her Privates We


Frederic Manning - 1929
    Called the "book of books" by Lawrence of Arabia, 'Her Privates We' is an expressionist classic that magnificently captures the horror of war.

The Bridge in the Jungle


B. Traven - 1929
    Just as a party that has attracted many Indians from neighboring settlements is about to begin, death marches silently in. A small boy has disappeared. As the intimation of tragedy spreads among the people gathered in the jungle clearing, they unite, first to find the lost boy and then to console the grieving mother. The Bridge in the Jungle, regarded by many as B. Traven's finest novel, is a tale of how a simple, desperately poor people come together in the face of death. Traven never allows an iota of sentimentality to enter his story, but the reader finishes the book with renewed faith in the courage and dignity of human beings. "B. Traven is coming to be recognized as one of the narrative masters of the twentieth century."--New York Times Book Review. "Great storytellers often arise like Judaic just men to exemplify and rehearse the truth for their generation. The elusive B. Traven was such a man."--Book World.

Death of a Hero


Richard Aldington - 1929
    The hero is George Winterbourne. Leaving the Edwardian gloom of his embattled parents behind him, George escapes to Soho, which buzzes, on the eve of war, with talk of politics, pacifism and free love. He paints, he marries, he takes a mistress: the perfect hero of his time, whose destiny -- like all those of that lost generation -- is the bloody nightmare of the trenches.

Conan Doyle Stories


Arthur Conan Doyle - 1929
    Includes:The Ring and the CampPirates and Blue WaterTerror and MysteryTwilight and the UnseenAdventure and Medical LifeTales of Long Ago

Hebdomeros, with Monsieur Dudron's Adventure and Other Metaphysical Writings


Giorgio de Chirico - 1929
    In his introduction John Ashbery calls the book "the finest work of Surrealist fiction," noting that de Chirico "invented for the occasion a new style and a new kind of novel . . . his long run-on sentences, stitched together with semi-colons, allow a cinematic freedom o f narration . . . his language, like his painting, is invisible: a transparent but dense medium containing objects that are more real than reality." Hebdomeros is accompanied by an appendix of previously untranslated or uncollected writings, including M. Dudron's Adventure, a second, fragmentary novel translated by John Ashbery.

The Midnight Bell


Patrick Hamilton - 1929
    Ella, the barmaid at the pub, is secretly in love with Bob.

Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral


Jessie Redmon Fauset - 1929
    After the death of her parents, Angela moves to New York to escape the racism she believes is her only obstacle to opportunity. What she soon discovers is that being a woman has its own burdens that don't fade with the color of one's skin, and that love and marriage might not offer her salvation.

La rosa blanca


B. Traven - 1929
    A clash of two cultures, total exploitation for maximum profit vs. reverence for the land and what flows from it. As in this novel: We all are poor people, delight in the machine, in the airplane, the radio precisely because we have lost our attachment to the soil. This loss leaves us apathetic and distracted. That's why we need gasoline - to anesthetize us, to make us insensible of our loss, of our pain, gasoline that deludes us with speed so that we can flee all the quicker from ourselves and the needs of the heart. A Collector's Edition

Flags in the Dust


William Faulkner - 1929
    The complete text of Faulkner's third novel, published for the first time in 1973, appeared with his reluctant consent in a much cut version in 1929 as SARTORIS.

Evelyn Finds Herself


Josephine Elder - 1929
    However, when Madeleine arrives, she comes between them in a way that permanently threatens their friendship.

Swift Water


Emilie Loring - 1929
    The high-spirited, impetuous young woman who at first refuses to fall in love with Christopher Wynn, the handsome young minister, because she missed the bright glamor of her life in the city. The powers of envy and bigotry, the misgivings of her family and friends, and above all her own doubts nearly defeated Jean, yet she stayed because she had fallen hopelessly in love with the young clergyman. Until a violent storm draws the two together--and the flood which brings havoc to their town, unlocked the secret of a truly good man's heart.

A Room of One's Own & The Voyage Out


Virginia Woolf - 1929
    But if only she had found the means to create, urges Woolf, she would have reached the same heights as her immortal sibling. In this classic essay, Virginia Woolf takes on the establishment, using her gift of language to dissect the world around her and give a voice to those who have none. Her message is simple: A woman must have a fixed income and a room of her own in order to have the freedom to create. Annotated and with an introduction by Susan Gubar

Sentimental Tales


Mikhail Zoshchenko - 1929
    The tales are narrated by one Kolenkorov, a writer not very good at his job, who takes credit for editing the tales in a series of comic prefaces.Yet beneath Kolenkorov's intrusive narration and sublime blathering, the stories are genuinely moving. They tell tales of unrequited love and amorous misadventures among down-on-their-luck musicians, provincial damsels, aspiring poets, and liberal aristocrats hopelessly out of place in the new Russia, against a backdrop of overcrowded apartments, scheming, and daydreaming. Zoshchenko's deadpan style and sly ventriloquy mask a biting critique of Soviet life--and perhaps life in general. An original perspective on Soviet society in the 1920s and simply uproariously funny, Sentimental Tales at last shows Anglophone readers why Zoshchenko is considered among the greatest humorists of the Soviet era. "A book that would make Gogol guffaw."--Kirkus Reviews"If you find Chekhov a bit tame and want a more bite to your fiction, then you need a dose of Zoshchenko, the premier Russian satirist of the twentieth century . . . Snap up this thin volume and enjoy."--Russian Life"Mikhail Zoshchenko masterfully exhibits a playful seriousness. . . . Juxtaposing joyful wit with the bleakness of Soviet Russia, Sentimental Tales is a potent antidote for Russian literature's dour reputation."--Foreword Reviews"Superb."--Los Angeles Review of Books

The Lacquer Lady


F. Tennyson Jesse - 1929
    It is the 1880's, the last years of the opulent Kingdom of Burma, ripe for annexation by the empires of Europe. Fanny becomes the favorite of the Burmese Queen, and is swept into the magnificent court life of the Royal Palace. Now a lacquer lady in a scented world, Fanny falls in love and the destiny of the Kingdom is altered forever...