pretentious masterpieces
Explore a curated list of pretentious masterpieces—iconic books hailed as literary gems. Discover overrated classics and divisive must-reads that spark debate among critics and readers alike.
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Gravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
In the mid-1960s, the publication of Pynchon's V and The Crying of Lot 49 introduced a brilliant new voice to American literature. Gravity's Rainbow, his convoluted, allusive novel about a metaphysical quest, published in 1973, further confirmed Pynchon's reputation as one of the greatest writers of the century.
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Underworld
by Don DeLillo
A finalist for the National Book Award, Don DeLillo's most powerful and riveting novel--"a great American novel, a masterpiece, a thrilling page-turner" (San Francisco Chronicle)--Underworld is about the second half of the twentieth century in America and about two people, an artist and an executive, whose lives intertwine in New York in the fifties and again in the nineties. With cameo appearances by Lenny Bruce, J. Edgar Hoover, Bobby Thompson, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Toots Shor, "this is DeLillo's most affecting novel...a dazzling, phosphorescent work of art" (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).
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Moby Dick, Or, The Whale
by Herman Melville
A young seaman joins the crew of the fanatical Captain Ahab in pursuit of the white whale Moby Dick.
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Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
A darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue from one of the leading writers of the twentieth century, the acclaimed author of Lolita. "Half-poem, half-prose...a creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth. One of the great works of art of this century." —Mary McCarthy, New York Times bestselling author of The Group An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreword and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit of a deposed king. Brilliantly constructed and wildly inventive, Vladimir Nabokov's witty novel achieves that rarest of things in literature—perfect tragicomic balance.
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Absalom, Absalom!
by William Faulkner
From the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by William Faulkner—also available are Snopes, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Selected Short Stories First published in 1936, Absalom, Absalom! is William Faulkner’s ninth novel and one of his most admired. It tells the story of Thomas Sutpen and his ruthless, single-minded attempt to forge a dynasty in Jefferson, Mississippi, in 1830. Although his grand design is ultimately destroyed by his own sons, a century later the figure of Sutpen continues to haunt young Quentin Compson, who is obsessed with his family legacy and that of the Old South. “Faulkner’s novels have the quality of being lived, absorbed, remembered rather than merely observed,” noted Malcolm Cowley. “Absalom, Absalom! is structurally the soundest of all the novels in the Yoknapatawpha series—and it gains power in retrospect.” This edition follows the text of Absalom, Absalom! as corrected in 1986 under the direction of Faulkner expert Noel Polk and features a new Foreword by John Jeremiah Sullivan.
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Ulysses
by James Joyce
This revised volume of the acclaimed novel follows the complete unabridged text as corrected in 1961. Set entirely on one day, 16 June 1904, Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus as they go about their daily business in Dublin. From this starting point, James Joyce constructs a novel of extraordinary imaginative richness and depth. Unique in the history of literature, Ulysses is one of the most important and enjoyable works of the twentieth century. This edition contains the original foreword by the author and the historic court ruling to remove the federal ban. It also contains page references to the first American edition of 1934.
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Women and Men
by Joseph McElroy
Beginning in childbirth and entered like a multiple dwelling in motion, Women and Men embraces and anatomizes the 1970s in New York--from experiments in the chaotic relations between the sexes to the flux of the city itself. Yet through an intricate overlay of scenes, voices, fact, and myth, this expanding fiction finds its way also across continents and into earlier and future times and indeed the Earth, to reveal connections between the most disparate lives and systems of feeling and power. At its breathing heart, it plots the fuguelike and fieldlike densities of late-twentieth-century life. McElroy rests a global vision on two people, apartment-house neighbors who never quite meet. Except, that is, in the population of others whose histories cross theirs--believers and skeptics; lovers, friends, and hermits; children, parents, grandparents, avatars, and, apparently, angels. For Women and Men shows how the families through which we pass let one person's experience belong to that of many, so that we throw light on each other as if these kinships were refracted lives so real as to be reincarnate. A mirror of manners, the book is also a meditation on the languages--rich, ludicrous, exact, and also American--in which we try to grasp the world we're in. Along the kindred axes of separation and intimacy Women and Men extends the great line of twentieth-century innovative fiction.
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The Tin Drum
by Günter 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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The Man Without Qualities, Vol. 1
by Robert Musil
Set in Vienna on the eve of World War I, this great novel of ideas tells the story of Ulrich, ex-soldier and scientist, seducer and skeptic, who finds himself drafted into the grandiose plans for the 70th jubilee of the Emperor Franz Josef. This new translation--published in two elegant volumes--is the first to present Musil's complete text, including material that remained unpublished during his lifetime.
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London Fields
by Martin Amis
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A blackly comic late 20th-century murder mystery set against the looming end of the millennium, in which a woman tries to orchestrate her own extinction—from "one of the most gifted novelists of his generation" (TIME). “Lyrical and obscene, colloquial and rhapsodic." —The New York Times First published in 1989, London Fields is set ten years into a dark future, against a backdrop of environmental and social decay and the looming threat of global cataclysm. As the dreaded Y2K approaches, Nicola Six, a “black hole” of sex and self-loathing, has chosen her thirty-fifth birthday, November 5, 1999, as the date of her own murder. Whom to manipulate into killing her is the question; her choice wavers between violent lowlife Keith Talent, who is obsessed with winning a darts tournament, and a dimly romantic banker named Guy Clinch. When Samson Young—a writer suffering from a long bout of writer’s block—stumbles upon these three, he believes he has found a story that will write itself. A highly unusual mystery with an unexpected twist at the end, London Fields is also a corrosively funny narrative of pyrotechnic complexity and scalding moral vision.
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