Jia Tolentino
[isbn]
Jia Tolentino seems to have absorbed the cultural battles of this century in such a way that her interpretations — all complexities intact — actually feel definitive. I don't know exactly how she does this but it makes me happy to know that there is an American writer under 40 who, while fully participating in the zeitgeist of her time, has a perspective on it that clearly demonstrates that she can call on our entire intellectual and moral... (read more)
Recommended by Jason C.
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Benjamin Carter Hett
[isbn]
Anyone who thinks that when push comes to shove U.S. elites will choose to allow Bernie Sanders-style Euro-socialism to prevail over Trumpism must be operating either under the illusion that today's American elite are less craven and venal than the German elites of 1932-1933 or that American democracy is less compromised than Germany's was. This book, as well as every day’s headlines in this low, dishonest decade, demonstrate otherwise.
Recommended by Jason C.
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Sarah Schmidt
[isbn]
This is the Lizzie Borden novel you've been waiting for. Imagine Gone Girl recast in the Borden house circa 1892...
Recommended by Jason C.
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Yuri Herrera
[isbn]
The rarest of novels, one in which technical brilliance is matched by the most socially relevant subject imaginable: a young Mexican woman crossing the border into America.
Recommended by Jason C.
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Eve Babitz, Holly Brubach
[isbn]
The It Girl of 1960s Los Angeles takes you deep inside the world of haute bohemians — beautiful ingenues and beautiful rock stars.
Recommended by Jason C.
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Hiromi Kawakami and Allison Markin Powell
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It's like Haruki Murakami had a daughter and she started rewriting his old books from a female point of view. In a good way.
Recommended by Jason C.
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Louis Ferdinand Celine
[isbn]
Almost certainly the most gleefully misanthropic novel ever written. Pessimistic, cynical, nihilistic, hilarious!
Recommended by Jason C.
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Arkady Strugatsky
[isbn]
Basically the Soviet Harry Potter, both in terms of its huge popularity and its story of a witchcraft institute. As a Russian novel written for adults, it is much more darkly humorous than the wizard school we are used to. Kudos to the University of Chicago for publishing a new translation of this Russian classic and for retaining the original witty illustrations!
Recommended by Jason C.
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Julian Barnes
[isbn]
The Noise of Time dramatizes the moral dilemma of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Soviet Union's greatest composer (sorry, Prokofiev), as he is confronted by Stalin.
Recommended by Jason C.
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B. S. Johnson
[isbn]
The great, experimental, Beatles-era British writer B. S. Johnson's recently reissued House Mother Normal is a hilarious send-up of nursing home life. Sounds boring? It ain't.
Recommended by Jason C.
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Linda Spalding
[isbn]
Slave-owning Quakers are on the run in this 2012 winner of the prestigious Governor General's Award for Fiction.
Recommended by Jason C.
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Michel Houellebecq, Lorin Stein
[isbn]
Imagine your country (hypothetically, of course) elected a leader whose values were antithetical to your own. How long would it take you to submit?
Recommended by Jason C.
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Giorgio Bassani
[isbn]
A heartbreaking evocation of an Eden before the fall — in this case, love among wealthy secular Jews on the eve of WWII. The full flower of youth, and then the smoke and ash.
Recommended by Jason C.
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Abdelrahman Munif
[isbn]
Cities of Salt might just be the most important Arabic-language novel published in the entire 20th century, as it brilliantly dramatizes what happens when oil is discovered in an unnamed Persian Gulf kingdom in the 1930s. Unsurprisingly banned in Saudi Arabia, this first volume of a quintet exploring the collision between Western industrialism and traditional ways of life — and the human and societal costs of this collision — looms... (read more)
Recommended by Jason C.
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Georges Perec, David Bellos
[isbn]
Life: A User's Manual is the magnum opus of one of the most startlingly inventive and original novelists who ever lived. The French polymath Georges Perec, an associate of the Oulipo collective, once wrote a full-length novel without ever using the letter "e", then he wrote one in which "e" is the only vowel employed at all. In Life: A User's Manual, he deconstructs the lives in a fictional apartment block in Paris at one single... (read more)
Recommended by Jason C.
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Ryunosuke Akutagawa and Yoshihiro Tatsumi and Jay Rubin
[isbn]
Known primarily in the West for providing the source story to Kurosawa's wonderful film Rashomon, in Japan Akutagawa is regarded as the father of the modern short story and as a cult figure, revered for his short, tragic life and the sinister shades contained in many of his stories. This collection includes the disturbing and perfectly rendered "Hell Screen."
Recommended by Jason C.
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