Winesburg, Ohio

Sherwood Anderson's tales of hopes, desires, and agonies in Middle America retain their power nearly a century after they marked out a new territory in the national literature. If, as Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, writers obtain true originality through extraordinary sincerity, "by daring to give everything of themselves," then Anderson qualifies as an original.

Zona

Zona is Geoff Dyer's appreciation of the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker. As in his other nonfiction books, Dyer illuminates the subject by making connections between it and passingly related works or experiences. An account of the World Trade Center after the terrorist attacks, for example, also describes a leaky, ominous tunnel in the 1979 film: "The darkness grew loud with the sound of falling water, which turned out to be bands of mysterious subterranean rain ... falling from the confusion of ruin overhead." To hear Dyer tell it, cinema was invented to allow this film to be made. But if his claims stretch too far, or he takes a personal detour that seems odd, most readers will not mind. Such is the latitude given a great stylist.

The 42nd Parallel

In an introductory note to the 1937 Modern Library edition of this novel, John Dos Passos explains that the content of a novel determines its form. The content of U.S.A., of which The 42nd Parallel is the first book, is the whole of America in the first third of the 20th century; the form is intersecting personal narratives threaded with news clippings, bits of songs, mini-biographies of important figures, and stream-of-consciousness Camera Eye sections following the author's own experiences. The techniques have lost none of their power in depicting small people struggling against large powers. The much-bruited Great American Novel was written between 1930 and 1936 in three volumes: It is called U.S.A.

Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English?

Edward Behr sets up his enormously entertaining and perceptive account of his years as a foreign correspondent with two foundational statements: laughter is never gratuitous, and the best reporters' stories are told in barrooms, not in print. From dinner with Mao to pissing next to Churchill, Behr was seemingly everywhere during a career that began shortly after World War II. The Algerian war, Vietnam, the partition of India and much more besides are covered with a rich store of anecdotes. (The book's title, which was changed for an American edition against the author's wishes, refers to a particularly crass British reporter's question shouted at refugees leaving a plane in Congo.)