The book Jonathan Franzen dubbed the "ur-text of postwar fiction" and the "first great cultural critique, which, even if Heller and Pynchon hadn't read it while composing Catch-22 and V., managed to a…
Published in 1936, Absalom, Absalom! is considered by many to be William Faulkner's masterpiece. Although the novel's complex and fragmented structure poses considerable difficulty to readers, the boo…
J R is the long-awaited novel from William Gaddis, author of The Recognitions, that tremendous book which, in the twenty years since its publication, has come to be acknowledged as an American masterp…
Ulysses is a modernist novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It was first serialized in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920 and then published in its entirety…
Although most of the action of The Mezzanine occurs on the escalator of an office building, where its narrator is returning to work after buying shoelaces, this startlingly inventive and witty novel t…
One of Faulkner's comic masterpieces, The Reivers is a picaresque that tells of three unlikely car thieves from rural Mississippi. Eleven-year-old Lucius Priest is persuaded by Boon Hogganbeck, one of…
A child prodigy with a talent for languages and an insatiable thirst for knowledge, Ludo shares with his single mother, Sibylla, an obsession with Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, absorbing its lessons in Sa…
Instead of the book he's meant to write, Rudolph, a Viennese musicologist, produces this tale of procrastination, failure, and despair, a dark and grotesquely funny story of small woes writ large and …
This controversial portrayal of Viennese artistic circles begins as the writer-narrator arrives at an 'artistic dinner' given by a composer and his society wife—a couple that the writer once admired b…
Light in August, a novel that contrasts stark tragedy with hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, which features some of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, …
