The Accident

In this final book of Elie Wiesel's trilogy, a damaged character (in all senses) comes to accept life and banish the ghosts of the dead. If that takes lies and a manufactured love, so be it.

Based on a True Story

A few years ago, Norm Macdonald's book club on Twitter lifted the veil and revealed his penetrating interpretations of world literature. His memoir, sly and clever and funny as it is, rings down that veil, which is doubtless the better commercial decision but still a bit disappointing.

Dawn

The second book in Elie Wiesel's trilogy, Dawn, explores how brutality breeds brutality. 

Lancelot

In this engaging, funny, and occasionally horrifying novel, Walker Percy offers both a critique of the modern world and a prescription for a new one. So skilled and persuasive is the prose that the reader barely notices the audacity of the enterprise.

Sanctuary

Faulkner called this novel a "cheap idea," and a reader today is still capable of being shocked by the scenes of voyeurism and the presence of the infamous corncob. But in accessing the deepest, darkest parts of the human soul, the writer has produced a worthy and lasting novel.

Home to Harlem

Claude McKay's novel of post-World War I Harlem is striking to a later reader because of its use of dialect and its characters' emphasis on the importance of skin tones. The book might be called a Manhattan Transfer of black people, as it creates a vivid portrait of a community with all its hopes and flaws.

Across the River and Into the Trees

Hemingway's last big novel, published in 1950, tells of a middle-aged American colonel's love for a young Venetian countess. The food and wine and hunting are there, as well as the mannered dialogue. A cold book about a doomed love.

The Torrents of Spring

I came across a 1930 issue of The American Mercury in which Sherwood Anderson wrote an affectionate piece about Hemingway and Faulkner, which shows his big-hearted nature given that both of those authors had mercilessly satirized him in print. Torrents, Hemingway's effort, is very funny for anyone who has read Anderson and a curiosity for those who haven't. I like the idea of an online reviewer who wrote that this book is not just pure cruelty; it is Hemingway's farewell to a way of writing as he struck out for new territories.

The Sun Also Rises

Hemingway grants one quick peek beneath the surface near the end of this novel when he has Lady Brett Ashley say, "You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch. ... It's sort of what we have instead of God." Otherwise it's bars, restaurants, taxis, hotels, bulls, and some snappy and occasionally very funny dialogue.

The Garrick Year

Margaret Drabble's second novel displays her subtle and perceptive understanding of human behavior, in this case that of a couple with two young children who spend a summer in the countryside where the husband is a stage actor.