The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life

When Stoner was published in 1965, the novel sold only a couple of thousand copies before disappearing with hardly a trace. Yet John Williams's quietly powerful tale of a Midwestern college professor,…

If you like book The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life here is the list of books you may also like

Buy this book on Amazon

The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life similar books

Augustus

A brilliant and beautifully written novel in the tradition of Robert Graves, Augustus is a sweeping narrative that brings vividly to life a compelling cast of historical figures through their letters,…
Buy this book on Amazon
Butcher's Crossing

In his National Book Award–winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismant…
Buy this book on Amazon
Sanctuary

Psychologically astute and wonderfully poetic, Sanctuary is a powerful novel examining the nature of true evil, through the prisms of mythology, local lore, and hard-boiled detective fiction. This is …
Buy this book on Amazon
Stoner

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature a…
Buy this book on Amazon
Nothing But the Night

Buy this book on Amazon
Collected Novels: Butcher’s Crossing / Stoner / Augustus

Buy this book on Amazon
In the Shadow of the Banyan

For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins with the footsteps of her father returning home in the early dawn hours bringing details of the civil war that has overwhelmed the stre…
Buy this book on Amazon
To a God Unknown

Buy this book on Amazon
Native Son

Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man…
Buy this book on Amazon
Fair Play

Winner of the 2009 Bernard Shaw Prize for Translation

Fair Play is the type of love story that is rarely told, a revelatory depiction of contentment, hard-won and exhilarating.

Mari is a writer and Jo…
Buy this book on Amazon
Riceyman Steps: A Novel

Buy this book on Amazon
Humboldt's Gift

The novel, for which Bellow won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1976, is a self-described "comic book about death," whose title character is modeled on the self-destructive lyric poet Delmore Schwar…
Buy this book on Amazon
Ancillary Mercy (Imperial Radch, #3)

Ancillary Mercy is the third book in the trilogy that began with Ancillary Justice.

For a moment, things seemed to be under control for Breq, the soldier who used to be a warship. Then a search of Atho…
Buy this book on Amazon
Someone at a Distance

'A very good novel indeed about the fragility and also the tenacity of love' commented the Spectator recently about this 1953 novel by Dorothy Whipple, which was ignored fifty years ago because 'edito…
Buy this book on Amazon
Leaving the Atocha Station

Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. What is actual when …
Buy this book on Amazon
The Portrait of a Lady

When Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American, is brought to Europe by her wealthy Aunt Touchett, it is expected that she will soon marry. But Isabel, resolved to determine her own fate, does not…
Buy this book on Amazon
Laughing Boy: A Navajo Love Story

Buy this book on Amazon
What Are People For?

Buy this book on Amazon
Winesburg, Ohio

Winesburg, Ohio depicts the strange, secret lives of the inhabitants of a small town. In "Hands," Wing Biddlebaum tries to hide the tale of his banishment from a Pennsylvania town, a tale represented …
Buy this book on Amazon
Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman

The eldest son of a master woodworker, Callum Robinson spent his childhood surrounded by wood and trees, absorbing lessons in his father’s workshop. In time he became his father’s apprentice, helping …
Buy this book on Amazon
Bastard Out of Carolina

Greenville County, South Carolina, is a wild, lush place that is home to the Boatwright family—a tight-knit clan of rough-hewn, hard-drinking men who shoot up each other's trucks, and indomitable wome…
Buy this book on Amazon
The Sound and the Fury

The tragedy of the Compson family features some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and…
Buy this book on Amazon
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Joe Kavalier, a young Jewish artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdini-esque escape, has just smuggled himself out of Nazi-invaded Prague and landed in New York City. His Brooklyn cousin …
Buy this book on Amazon
The Reef

Buy this book on Amazon
The Signalman

Presents the tale of a young man who, after listening to an eccentric railroad signalman's predictions of disaster, must question whether the power to see into the future is worth the terrible price
Buy this book on Amazon
Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I)

This book is the first volume in a cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time,…
Buy this book on Amazon
Invisible Man

First published in 1952 and immediately hailed as a masterpiece, Invisible Man is one of those rare novels that have changed the shape of American literature. For not only does Ralph Ellison's nightma…
Buy this book on Amazon
The Comfort of Strangers

As their holiday unfolds, Colin and Maria are locked into their own intimacy. They groom themselves meticulously, as though there waits someone who cares deeply about how they appear. Then they meet a…
Buy this book on Amazon
Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990

In 1990, a country disappeared. When the Iron Curtain fell, East Germany simply ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the GDR prese…
Buy this book on Amazon
Miss Lonelyhearts / The Day of the Locust

Miss Lonelyhearts

Miss Lonelyhearts was a newspaper reporter, so named because he had been assigned to write the agony column, to answer the letters from Desperate, Sick-of-It-All, Disillusioned. A jok…
Buy this book on Amazon