For whatever reason, I have always been interested in sad men. Successful men can be boring. It is failure, and how men manage it when success is the primary marker of masculinity, that I find interesting as a subject for fiction. Even when I was in my 20s, I liked reading novels about men suffering mid-life crisis. And now that I am squarely in middle age, novels that were about the future are now novels about the present.
Raj is often unsure of where he belongs. Having moved to America from Bombay as a child, he knew few Indian kids. Now middle-aged, he lives mostly happily in California, with a job at a university. His white wife seems to fit in better than he does, especially at their tennis club. But in one week, his life unravels.
It begins at a meeting for potential new members: Raj thrills to find an African American couple on the list. But in an effort to connect, he makes a racist joke. The committee turns on him, no matter the years of prejudice he’s put up with. He soon finds his job is in jeopardy after a group of students report him as a reverse racist, thanks to his alleged “anti-Western bias.”
Naipaul’s elegiac novel about his father begins with one of my favorite first lines: “Ten weeks before he died, Mr. Mohun Biswas, a journalist of Sikkim Street, St. James, Port of Spain, was sacked.” In an epic fashion, Naipaul renders the long, difficult life of the title character, giving him grace, even as he is unable to figure out just how to get the one thing he has always wanted: a house of his own.
Heart-rending and darkly comic, V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas has been hailed as one of the twentieth century's finest novels, a classic that evokes a man's quest for autonomy against the backdrop of post-colonial Trinidad.
Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library, a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold-foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition features an introduction by writer Teju Cole.
Mr Biswas has been told since the day of his birth that…
One of my favorite novels of the past decade, Nunez is funny and incisive and uses a very fine, sharp knife to carve up the idea of the great American male novelist. And there is a huge Great Dane at the center of the novel. Nunez became well known after this novel won the National Book Award. I wish she was even more well-known.
There is a whole different list for me to make with my favorite campus novels and this would certainly be on top of that list. Russo is very good at the absurdity of campus politics, but I think he is a wonder at using humor and self-deprecation to explore sadness. Sadness feels so much sadder with a heavy dose of funny. And this book is very funny.
Hilarious and true-to-life, witty, compassionate, and impossible to put down, Straight Man follows Hank Devereaux through one very bad week in this novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls. Soon to Be an Original Series on AMC Starring Bob Odenkirk.
William Henry Devereaux, Jr., is the reluctant chairman of the English department of a badly underfunded college in the Pennsylvania rust belt. Devereaux's reluctance is partly rooted in his character—he is a born anarchist—and partly in the fact that his department is more savagely divided than the Balkans.
In the course of a single week, Devereaux will have…
I have returned to many of these stories over and over again through the years—for Cheever’s prose, for his sense of what makes men tick. On one level, I can’t quite relate to white suburban husbands in upstate New York in the 1950s and 60s. And yet, somehow, they seem profoundly familiar.
John Cheever's Collected Stories explores the delicate psychological frameworks of 20th century suburbia.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HANIF KUREISHI
This outstanding collection by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Cheever shows the power and range of one of the finest short story writers of the last century. Stories of love and of squalor, they include masterpieces such as 'The Swimmer' and 'Goodbye, My Brother' and date from the time of his honourable discharge from the Army at the end of the Second World War.
It is wrong to say that the title character of Ellison’s novel can’t get his stuff together. More accurately, the world of mid-20th century America can’t figure out how to give an African American man his visibility and his humanity. Ellison has always shown me that the crisis of men is the crisis of race, of gender, of class.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this deeply compelling novel and epic milestone of American literature, a nameless narrator tells his story from the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.
He describes growing up in a Black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood," before retreating amid violence and confusion.
Originally published in 1952 as the first novel by a then unknown author, it remained on the bestseller list for…
Gabrielle found her grandfather’s diaries after her mother’s death, only to discover that he had been a Nazi. Born in Berlin in 1942, she and her mother fled the city in 1945, but Api, the one surviving male member of her family, stayed behind to work as a doctor in a city 90% destroyed.
Gabrielle retraces Api’s steps in the Berlin of the 21st century, torn between her love for the man who gave her the happiest years of her childhood and trying to come to terms with his Nazi membership, German guilt, and political responsibility.
Api's Berlin Diaries: My Quest to Understand My Grandfather's Nazi Past
"This is not a book I will forget any time soon."
Story Circle Book Reviews
Moving and provocative, Api's Berlin Diaries offers a personal perspective on the fall of Berlin 1945 and the far-reaching aftershocks of the Third Reich.
After her mother's death, Robinson was thrilled to find her beloved grandfather's war diaries-only to discover that he had been a Nazi.
The award-winning memoir shows Api, a doctor in Berlin, desperately trying to help the wounded in cellars without water or light. He himself was reduced to anxiety and despair, the daily diary his main refuge. As Robinson retraces Api's…
