Erskine Caldwell’s stories of rural poverty (Tobacco Road) and
The Killer Inside Me is a chilling first-person story of an evil lawman, while Pop. 1280 is a strangely funny version of the same plot. Of all the noir writers, Thompson is the most popular today, in...
James Buchan’s The Persian Bride combines a moving love story, a political thriller, and a history of modern Iran in a beautiful novel about the relationship of two people caught up in the Iranian rev...
Wild Life by Molly Gloss Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide by Robert Michael Pyle
Memoir A Ride in the Neon Sun. Here’s what she says about traveling: Some people travel with firm ideas for a journey, following in the footsteps of an intrepid ancestor whose exotic exploits were hap...
Richard Rhodes’s exceptionally readable The Making of the Atomic Bomb is the place to start. This sweeping chronicle of the difficult and sobering history of the endeavor called the Manhattan Project...
Daddy Was a Numbers Runner by Louise Meriwether is the story of Francie Coffin, who is growing up in the spirit-deadening ghettos of Harlem in the 1930s, in a family struggling to survive intact.
A. B. Guthrie’s 1947 novel The Big Sky (even better than its sequel, The Way West, which won the Pulitzer Prize), The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark (1940), and Jack Schaefer’s Shane (194...
John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in many ways defines the spy genre; it introduces the grand theme of ferreting out the Russian agent high up in British intelligence.
In Breaking Clean, Judy Blunt looks back on her childhood and early married life in the 1950s and ’60s on cattle ranches in northeastern Montana, and explores what it meant to be female in that place...
If you read no other work of what’s known as cyberpunk (which looks at the ever-thinner line between humans and machines), at least read the novel that began it all: William Gibson’s Neuromancer, whic...
Food played a major role in the lives of both Ruth Reichl (longtime New York Times restaurant critic and editor-in-chief of Gourmet, who wrote about her lifelong interest in food in two memoirs, the b...
Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa reveals the upheaval of partition through the eyes of a child, Lame Lenny, a young Parsi girl crippled from polio. Lenny’s world is her beloved and beautiful Hindu ayah...
Amy Wilentz’s Martyrs’ Crossing is set against the ongoing tension of Israeli-Palestinian relations. When a Palestinian woman is turned back at the checkpoint at Ramallah as she attempts to take her s...
The three grand old men of Cuban literature are Alejo Carpentier (his masterpiece is The Lost Steps); José Lezama Lima (whose autobiographical novel Paradiso infuriated Castro); and Guillermo Cabrera...
The best place to begin is with the Library of America’s two-volume collection, Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s & 40s and Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s. Together they include all t...
Other good reading from Japan includes Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen, with its heroine who finds whatever comfort she can in food; Miyuki
One of the most intricate Cold War spy novels I’ve ever read is David Quammen’s The Soul of Viktor Tronko, based on the real-life case of a Cold War–era Russian defector who tells his debriefers that...
One of my top ten favorite novels in any category is Stephanie Plowman’s The Road to Sardis, a heartbreaking retelling of the events of the Peloponnesian War, which broke out in 431 B.C. between longt...
Chaim Potok wrote two novels that I think are indispensable to understanding the Hasidic and Orthodox American Jewish communities following the Holocaust: The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev.