How We Are Hungry


Dave Eggers - 2005
    "Another""What It Means When a Crowd in a Faraway Nation Takes a Soldier Representing Your Own Nation, Shoots Him, Drags Him from His Vehicle and Then Mutilates Him in the Dust""The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water""On Wanting to Have Three Walls Up Before She Gets Home""Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance""She Waits, Seething, Blooming""Quiet""Your Mother and I""Naveed""Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will Not Die Alone""About the Man Who Began Flying After Meeting Her""Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly""After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned"From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Love of the Last Tycoon


F. Scott Fitzgerald - 1941
    It is the story of the young Hollywood mogul Monroe Stahr, a character inspired by the life of boy-genius Irving Thalberg, and is an exposé of the studio system in its heyday.

Here I Am


Jonathan Safran Foer - 2016
    Unfolding over four tumultuous weeks in present-day Washington, D.C., Here I Am is the story of a fracturing family in a moment of crisis. As Jacob and Julia Bloch and their three sons are forced to confront the distances between the lives they think they want and the lives they are living, a catastrophic earthquake sets in motion a quickly escalating conflict in the Middle East. At stake is the meaning of home - and the fundamental question of how much aliveness one can bear. Showcasing the same high-energy inventiveness, hilarious irreverence, and emotional urgency that readers loved in his earlier work, Here I Am is Foer's most searching, hard-hitting, and grandly entertaining novel yet. It not only confirms Foer's stature as a dazzling literary talent but reveals a novelist who has fully come into his own as one of our most important writers.

Freaky Deaky


Elmore Leonard - 1988
    The St. Louis Post-Dispatch calls Leonard, “the world’s greatest cops ‘n’ robbers novelist.” The Seattle Times says, “Leonard is more than just one of the all-time greats of crime fiction. He’s fast becoming an authentic American icon.” No matter where you wish to place the man who created the character of U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, lately of TV’s hit series Justified, in the pantheon of mystery and noir detective fiction demigods—John D. MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and the like—there is no denying that nobody does it better than the Grand Master Elmore Leonard!

The Wapshot Chronicle


John Cheever - 1957
    There is Captain Leander Wapshot, venerable sea-dog and would-be suicide; his licentious older son, Moses; and Moses's adoring and errant younger brother, Coverly. Tragic and funny, ribald and splendidly picaresque, and partly based on Cheever's adolescence in New England, The Wapshot Chronicle is a stirring family narrative in the finest traditions of Trollope, Dickens, and Henry James

All That Is


James Salter - 2013
    It was a time when publishing was still a private affair - a scattered family of small houses here and in Europe - a time of gatherings in fabled apartments, parties into the night. It is a world in which to immerse himself, a world of intimate connections and surprising triumphs. But the deal that Philip cannot seem to close is love: one marriage goes bad; another fails to happen; and, finally, he meets a woman who enthralls, then betrays him, setting him on a course he could never have imagined for himself. Written with Salter's signature economy of prose, All That Is fiercely, fluidly explores a life unfolding in a world on the brink of change: a dazzling, sometimes devastating labyrinth of love and ambition, of the small shocks and grand pleasures of being alive.

Burning Chrome


William Gibson - 1986
    Johnny Mnemonic (1981)The Gernsback Continuum (1981)Fragments of a Hologram Rose (1977)The Belonging Kind (1981) with John ShirleyHinterlands (1981)Red Star, Winter Orbit (1983) with Bruce SterlingNew Rose Hotel (1984)The Winter Market (1985)Dogfight (1985) with Michael SwanwickBurning Chrome (1982)

The Plantation


Chris Kuzneski - 2000
    But these aren’t random kidnappings. They’re crimes of passion,planned and researched several months in advance, then executed with a singular objective in mind. Revenge.Ariane Walker is one of the victims, dragged from her apartment with few clues to follow. The police said there’s little they can do for her, but that isn’t good enough for her boyfriend, Jonathon Payne.With the help of his best friend (David Jones), Payne gives chase, hoping that a lead in New Orleans somehow pays off. Together, they uncover the mystery of Ariane’s abduction and the truth behind the South’s most violent secret.

People Who Knock on the Door


Patricia Highsmith - 1983
    He and his youngest son, Robbie, embrace their newfound faith, while his elder son Arthur rejects it. Caught in the middle of the ensuing web of lies, his wife, Lois tries to keep the family together, but when the church elders start to interfere in Arthur's love life, events spiral toward violence. In this masterful late work, Highsmith weaves a powerful tale about blind faith and the peculiar ideas of justice that lie underneath the veneer of respectability.

Butcher's Crossing


John Williams - 1960
    With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America.It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher’s Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.

No Beast So Fierce


Edward Bunker - 1972
    Reissue.

The Deerslayer


James Fenimore Cooper - 1841
    But he has yet to meet the test of human conflict. In a tale of violent action and superbly sustained suspense, the harsh realities of tribal warfare force him to kill his first foe, then face torture at the stake. Still yet another kind of initiation awaits him when he discovers not only the ruthlessness of "civilized" men, but also the special danger of a woman's will. His reckless spirit transformed into mature courage and moral certainty, the Deerslayer emerges to face life with nobility as pure and proud as the wilderness whose fierce beauty and freedom have claimed his heart.

Tough Guys Don't Dance


Norman Mailer - 1984
    On the twenty-fourth morning after the decampment of his wife, Patty Lareine, he awakens with a hangover, considerable sexual excitement, and, on his upper arm, a red tattoo bearing a name from the past. Of the night before, he remembers practically nothing. What he soon learns is that the front passenger seat of his Porsche is soaked with blood and that in a secluded corner of his marijuana stash in a nearby woods rests a blonde head, severed at the throat.Is Madden therefore a murderer? He has no way of knowing. As in many novels of crime, the narrative centers on violence--physical, sexual, and emotional--but these elements move in their orbits through a rich constellation of character as Madden tries to reconstruct the missing hours of a terrible evening. In the course of this in-quiry a bizarre and vividly etched gallery of characters reappears to him as in a dream--ex-prizefighters, sexual junkies, mediums, former cons, a police chief, a world-weary former girl friend, and Mad-den's father, old now but still a Herculean figure, a practitioner of the sternest backroom ethics."Tough Guys Don't Dance" represents Mailer at the peak of his powers with a stunningly conceived novel that soon transcends its origins as a mystery to become a relentless search into the recesses and buried virtues of the modern American male. Rarely, as many readers will discern, have the paradoxes ofmachismo and homosexuality been so well explored.

Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth


Thomas Wolfe - 1935
    The book chronicles the maturing of Wolfe's autobiographical character, Eugene Gant, in his desperate search for fulfillment, making his way from small-town North Carolina to the wider world of Harvard University, New York City, and Europe. In a massive, ambitious, and boldly passionate novel, Wolfe examines the passing of time and the nature of the creative process, as Gant slowly but ecstatically embraces the urban life, recognizing it as a necessary ordeal for the birth of his creative genius as a writer. The work of an exceptionally expressive writer of fertile imagination and startling emotional intensity, Of Time and the River illuminates universal truths about art and life, city and country, past and present. It is a novel that is majestic and enduring. As P. M. Jack observed in The New York Times, "It is a triumphant demonstration that Thomas Wolfe has the stamina to produce a magnificent epic of American life." This edition, published in celebration of Wolfe's centennial anniversary, contains a new introduction by Pat Conroy.

Agapē Agape


William Gaddis - 2002
    Now comes his final work of fiction, a subtle, concentrated culmination of his art and ideas. For more than fifty years Gaddis collected notes for a book about the mechanization of the arts, told by way of a social history of the player piano in America. In the years before his death in 1998, he distilled the whole mass into a fiction, a dramatic monologue by an elderly man with a terminal illness. Continuing Gaddis's career-long reflection on those aspects of corporate technological culture that are uniquely destructive of the arts, Agape Agape is a stunning achievement from one of the indisputable masters of postwar American fiction.