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...
Montserrat Fontes’s disturbing novel of a family trying to survive the brutal Porfirio Díaz regime at the turn of the twentieth century, Dreams of the Centaur, is followed by First Confession.
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.
Other good reading from Japan includes Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen, with its heroine who finds whatever comfort she can in food; Miyuki
In its descriptions of a family trying to find suitable mates for three sisters, The Makioka Sisters by Junichir ō Tanizaki brings to mind the novels of Jane Austen and Anton Chekhov.
Undoubtedly, the place to start with Chinese fiction is with Cao Xueqin’s eighteenth-century classic, A Dream of Red Mansions, a sweeping epic about family life and Confucian practices in feudal China...
In Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata, the first of Japan’s two Nobel laureates, describes the sad and sorry love affair of a geisha from the country and an intellectual from the city. It’s
Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina is a coming-of-age novel about Ruth Ann (Bone) Boatwright and a difficult childhood made even harder by her violent and predatory stepfather.
Before David McCullough went on to fame, fortune, and literary awards with books like John Adams and Mornings on Horseback, he wrote a tragic and riveting account of the great 1889 flood in Pennsylvan...
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...
Paul Cain is an early, influential figure in this genre, who is now quite hard to find even in used bookstores and libraries. His 1932 Fast One was a noir landmark; it
Pueblo, Colorado, a corrupt and decaying mining town high in the Rockies, is the setting for Heidi Julavits’s The Mineral Palace, a story of motherhood, a troubled marriage, and the unveiling of long-...
In his dark story collection Poachers, Tom Franklin, who once worked in a grit factory, offers the sad and sorry lives of people stuck in the back-waters of the Alabama River, who tend to subsist on a...
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...
Both Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae and Tides of War: A Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War are well-told accounts of crucial events in Greek h...
There are also some moving sections about World War II in Anthony Burgess’s Any Old Iron, Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman, Kit Reed’s At War As Children, Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life, Empire of the...
Three books set in Iran—first a novel about two lovers caught up in the Iranian Revolution, then two books about Iran since the Revolution: The Persian Bride by James Buchan The Last Great Revolution:...
Amitav Ghosh’s multigenerational saga The Glass Palace, set in colonial Burma, India, and Malaya, tells the story of Rajkumar, once a poor Indian boy, who becomes a wealthy teak trader in Burma, and l...
In The Jew of New York, Ben Katchor draws on a historical event—the early-nineteenth-century plan to set up a Jewish homeland in upstate New York—to create a weirdly real world of make-believe. Or
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