As an artist whose grandparents were refugees, minorities escaping genocide, I feel driven to investigate the mechanisms of status and their relation to personal history. My work is a portrait of what I believe is the essence of the American condition—a painful cultural hangover from presumptions of privilege undermined by the collapse of exceptionalist fantasies based on race, gender, religion—and the rearguard defenses such loss triggers. I write in order to open a space where we can ask ourselves what our own roles in these mechanisms are, and to express the hope we might escape them.
Invisible Man is a tour-de-force exploration of what it is to be Black in America, but it is also much more. While I love it for the lush, jazz-inspired originality of its prose and the endless inventiveness of the plot,Invisible Man, despite its specificity and the terrifying view it offers into the cruelty (sometimes thoughtless, most often intentional) begat by America’s obsession with race, is also a book that helps us understand what it means to be the “other” in any place, at any time, in any culture. Ellison’s only novel is a monument to his compassion, a triumph of both art and human solidarity.
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…
In a twist of dramatic irony that is perhaps all too common, Edith Wharton’s elegantly structured novel successfully sets out to call attention to injustices—the barriers that society erects to limit the power of women and ensure the malleability of the poor—while being itself an example of another. However heart-felt a call for equality, The House of Mirth nevertheless portrays its one Jewish character with much of the thoughtless anti-Semitism that was de rigueur at the time and for many Americans today remains practically an addiction. A book that I read on its own terms but also which I feel encouraged to judge through the very lens Wharton herself would hold up to society.
A bestseller when it was published nearly a century ago, this literary classic established Edith Wharton as one of the most important American writers in the twentieth century-now with a new introduction from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan.
Wharton's first literary success-a devastatingly accurate portrait of New York's aristocracy at the turn of the century-is considered by many to be her most important novel, and Lily Bart, her most unforgettable character. Impoverished but well-born, the beautiful and beguiling Lily realizes a secure future depends on her acquiring a wealthy husband. But with her romantic indiscretion, gambling debts, and a maelstrom…
Like most readers, I have never been able to forget the moment I understood that Sethe has killed her daughter, Beloved, to protect her from slavery, that death was clearly preferable to the life she had known as a slave, a system one group of Americans knowingly and purposefully inflicted on another for profit, among other unpalatable reasons. Beloved haunts her mother for the rest of her life, just as Beloved haunts every reader and the facts behind the story it tells haunt our country’s claims to defend and promote freedom, democracy, and equality. Here is a novel of terrifying beauty and pity that should inspire endless anger and unwithering sorrow.
'Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours... Beloved is a heart-breaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all' Margaret Atwood, New York Times
Discover this beautiful gift edition of Toni Morrison's prize-winning contemporary classic Beloved
It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her…
I’m sad the brilliance of Herlihy’s novel has been overshadowed by the (admittedly also brilliant) movie it inspired. What the film can’t include is the dangerous repression of sex and sexuality, described in unrelenting detail, that defined Joe Buck’s childhood. The novel’s indictment of this tyranny and the effects it has on people, both individually and collectively, is embedded in its portrait of gay men driven to self-hatred by religion, discrimination, and social pressure. The homosocial love that develops between Buck and Ratso, Midnight Cowboy tells us, could only happen outside the boundaries—represented in the novel by middle-class economics and its accompanying pieties—of “normal” America.
The basis for the Oscar–winning buddy film. “There is no questioning the rampant power achieved through shriveling, shattering scenes” (Kirkus Reviews).
Midnight Cowboy is considered by many to be one of the best American novels published since World War II. The main story centers around Joe Buck, a naive but eager and ambitious young Texan, who decides to leave his dead-end job in search of a grand and glamorous life he believes he will find in New York City. But the city turns out to be a much more difficult place to negotiate than Joe could ever have imagined. He…
We tend to look to Black or other minority authors when we want to consider race, but racism is a white problem, and it’s important for white artists to face the issue. Joe Christmas passes for white in the post-Reconstruction South, but believes (without knowing for sure) that he might be partly Black. What would be a non-issue in any sensible society becomes, in a country where race defines a person’s value, the central feature of his life, plaguing his thoughts, driving his every decision, torturing him until his pain explodes in rage and violence. White society demands that the anger of a man presumed Black be suppressed with prodigious force and cruelty—thus closing the circle and trapping us all. In my opinion, Faulkner was the greatest prose stylist ever born in America. In Light in Augusthis mastery of language is paired with structural complexity and psychological depth to create a devastating work about the destructive assumptions that underlie the strange American interpretation of our own claim that people were “created equal.”
A landmark in American fiction, Light in August explores Faulkner's central theme: the nature of evil. Joe Christmas - a man doomed, deracinated and alone - wanders the Deep South in search of an identity, and a place in society. After killing his perverted God-fearing lover, it becomes inevitable that he is pursued by a lynch-hungry mob. Yet after the sacrifice, there is new life, a determined ray of light in Faulkner's complex and tragic world.
When World War II ends, Abraham Kunstler wants his share of the American Dream: a factory job, a car, a wife, and family. Getting them will be harder for him than it is for other people, however, because Kunstler was born a woman, and his identity belongs to the man he once loved—and killed.
Dolça Llull Prat, a wealthy Barcelona woman, is only 15 when she falls in love with an impoverished poet-solder. Theirs is a forbidden relationship, one that overcomes many obstacles until the fledgling writer renders her as the lowly Dulcinea in his bestseller.
By doing so, he unwittingly exposes his muse to gossip. But when Dolça receives his deathbed note asking to see her, she races across Spain with the intention of unburdening herself of an old secret.
On the journey, she encounters bandits, the Inquisition, illness, and the choices she's made. At its heart, Dulcinea is about how we betray…
