Even More Contemporary Novelists
Discover the latest must-read books from today's top contemporary novelists. Explore fresh literary voices and acclaimed works in modern fiction.
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The Tin Drum
by GĆ¼nter Grass
A dwarf drummer found guilty of a crime he did not commit writes his memoirs from a mental hospital in postwar Germany
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ID: 0671646575
(Type: books)
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The Long March and In the Clap Shack
by William Styron
Two extraordinary works about soldiers in a time of dubious peace by a writer of vast eloquence and moral authority. With stylistic panache and vitriolic wit, William Styron depicts conflicts between men of somewhat more than average intelligence and the military machine. In The Long March, a novella, two Marine reservists fight to retain their dignity while on a grueling exercise staged by a posturing colonel. The uproariously funny play In the Clap Shack charts the terrified passage of a young recruit through the prurient inferno of a Navy hospital VD ward. In both works, Styron wages a gallant defense of the free individual--and serves up a withering indictment of a system that has no room for individuality or freedom.
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ID: 0679740732
(Type: books)
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Lincoln
by Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal's Narratives of Empire series spans the history of the United States from the Revolution to the post-World War II years. With their broad canvas and large cast of fictional and historical characters, the novels in this series present a panorama of the American political and imperial experience as interpreted by one of its most worldly, knowing, and ironic observers. To most Americans, Abraham Lincoln is a monolithic figure, the Great Emancipator and Savior of the Union, beloved by all. In Gore Vidal's Lincoln we meet Lincoln the man and Lincoln the political animal, the president who entered a besieged capital where most of the population supported the South and where even those favoring the Union had serious doubts that the man from Illinois could save it. Far from steadfast in his abhorrence of slavery, Lincoln agonizes over the best course of action and comes to his great decision only when all else seems to fail. As the Civil War ravages his nation, Lincoln must face deep personal turmoil, the loss of his dearest son, and the harangues of a wife seen as a traitor for her Southern connections. Brilliantly conceived, masterfully executed, Gore Vidal's Lincoln allows the man to breathe again.
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Riddley Walker, Expanded Edition
by Russell Hoban
This acclaimed story is set in an England that has suffered a nuclear holocaust. Society has regressed to an Iron Age, semi-literate state represented by the special language that the author created especially for this book.
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Omensetter's Luck
by William H. Gass
"The most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation." -The New Republic Now celebrating the 50th anniversary of its publication, Omensetter's Luck is the masterful first novel by the author of The Tunnel, Middle C, On Being Blue, and Eyes: Novellas and Stories. Greeted as a masterpiece when it was first published in 1966, Omensetter's Luck is the quirky, impressionistic, and breathtakingly original story of an ordinary community galvanized by the presence of an extraordinary man. Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, it chronicles - through the voices of various participants and observers - the confrontation between Brackett Omensetter, a man of preternatural goodness, and the Reverend Jethro Furber, a preacher crazed with a propensity for violent thoughts. Omensetter's Luck meticulously brings to life a specific time and place as it illuminates timeless questions about life, love, good, and evil. This edition includes an afterword written by William Gass in 1997. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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ID: 080185590X
(Type: books)
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The Executioner's Song
by Norman Mailer
Re-creates the crime, trial and events leading to the execution of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, who requested the death sentence.
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Seeing
by JosƩ Saramago
Four years after a bizarre blindness plague hits the capital, the political arena is thrown into turmoil when election day is marked by an unprecedented turnout of blank ballots and rebellious acts that prompt a state of emergency declaration.
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ID: 0140075577
(Type: books)
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Two Novels
by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Jealousy: "In a tropical jungle overlooking a banana plantation, a jealous husband is obsessed by his suspicion of adultery between his wife and his neighbor. Robbe-Grillet's handling of the devastating effect on the tormented husband and his subsequent violence gives us one of the most disturbing treatment of jealousy in contemporary fiction."--Publisher description
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Cat's Cradle
by Kurt Vonnegut
āA free-wheeling vehicle . . . an unforgettable ride!āāThe New York Times Catās Cradle is Kurt Vonnegutās satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planetās ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Catās Cradle is one of the twentieth centuryās most important worksāand Vonnegut at his very best. ā[Vonnegut is] an unimitative and inimitable social satirist.āāHarperās Magazine āOur finest black-humorist . . . We laugh in self-defense.āāAtlantic Monthly
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Solaris
by StanisÅaw Lem
Kris Kelvin lands on the space station Solaris only to face a cruel miracle.
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ID: 0571134513
(Type: books)
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The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
The "brilliant, funny, meaningful novel" (The New Yorker) that established J. D. Salinger as a leading voice in American literature--and that has instilled in millions of readers around the world a lifelong love of books. "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth." The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caufield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days.
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The Golden Notebook
by Doris Lessing
Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier year. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine reviles part of her own experience. And in the blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.
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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
by ŠŠ»ŠµŠŗŃŠ°Š½Š“Ń ŠŃŠ°ŠµŠ²ŠøŃ Š”Š¾Š»Š¶ŠµŠ½ŠøŃŃŠ½
Recounts the experiences of Shukhov, a prisoner at a Soviet work camp in Siberia, as he struggles for survival.
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Midaq Alley
by Naguib Mahfouz
Widely acclaimed as Naguib Mahfouz's best novel, Midaq Alley brings to life one of the hustling, teeming back alleys of Cairo in the 1940s. From Zaita the cripple-maker to Kirsha the hedonistic cafe owner, from Abbas the barber who mistakes greed for love to Hamida who sells her soul to escape the alley, from waiters and widows to politicians, pimps, and poets, the inhabitants of Midaq Alley vividly evoke Egypt's largest city as it teeters on the brink of change. Never has Nobel Prize-winner Mahfouz's talent for rich and luxurious storytelling been more evident than here, in his portrait of one small street as a microcosm of the world on the threshold of modernity.
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Herzog
by Saul Bellow
In one of his finest achievements, Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow presents a multifaceted portrait of a modern-day hero, a man struggling with the complexity of existence and longing for redemption. A Penguin Classic This is the story of Moses Herzog, a great sufferer, joker, mourner, and charmer. Although his life steadily disintegrates around himāhe has failed as a writer and teacher, as a father, and has lost the affection of his wife to his best friendsāHerzog sees himself as a survivor, both of his private disasters and those of the age. He writes unsent letters to friends and enemies, colleagues and famous people, revealing his wry perception of the world and the innermost secrets of his heart. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Philip Roth.
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ID: 0810117231
(Type: books)
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ID: 0345365607
(Type: books)
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Adam Resurrected
by Yoram Kaniuk
A former circus clown who was spared the gas chamber so that he might entertain thousands of Jews as they marched to their deaths, Adam Stein is now the ringleader at an asylum in the Negev desert populated solely by Holocaust survivors. "A tour de force."--"Commentary."
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ID: 1564782689
(Type: books)