100 books like The Complete Major Prose Plays

My Lovely Mamá! parodies the decadence and ennui of Bonjour Tristesse. The narrative toys with the sort of decadence Sagan captures, by having Mathilde believe her mother is having an affair and hence attempt, unsuccessfully, to seduce her mother’s lover. The very funny novel hyperbolizes the world-weariness of Sagan’s characters. “I was terribly immature last September,” Mathilde writes, “I’ve aged a lot since then. Inwardly I’m an old, old woman now.” While it parodies certain tropes of teen girl fiction, My Lovely Mamá! nonetheless gives voice to authentic adolescent feelings, especially about sexual desire. When Mathilde receives a marriage proposal, she opts to keep things open-ended, maintaining her freedom: “I was only seventeen and everything was only just beginning, after all.” 

This bejeweled guide to Fin de Siècle art and aesthetics is like a moonlit walk in one of King Ludwig II fairytale castles, populated by androgynous chimeras, drowned princes, and erotic vampires carrying John the Baptist’s head on a platter designed by Moreau. As fabulous and tragic as the author, whose drag mode was that of a convincing English Spinster, Philipe Jullian was born to write this book which has influenced my work since I bought it aged 18, with not a clue about life. For over 40 years I have endeavored to keep a torch burning for the extraordinary decorative aesthetics of the author. Few books are as complete as Dreamers of Decadence for not only does Jullian explore the artists of that curious oeuvre, he also introduces the best of the literature as well as the movement’s strange obsessions and themes, each chapter revealing new facets of the… show more.

I always recommend this short read to anyone wanting to understand the weird, dystopic side of the late 19th-century Symbolist movement. Written in 1884 at the beginning of the avant-garde art movement that launched 20th-century modernism and abstraction, Huysmans tells the tale of an aristocrat repulsed by a Paris transformed by urbanization, commercialization, and massive immigration who builds himself a ‘Fortress of Solitude’ in a quiet suburb and interacts with the world through his imagination with the help of a loyal servant who maintained his physical milieu, silently serving meals and performing domestic tasks. Who doesn’t want to know more about a man determined to beautify his environment by commissioning a jeweler to embed precious stones into the shell of his pet tortoise?

Susanne K. Langer was a philosopher of aesthetics, and a specialist in the nature of symbolism and language. This classic book, dedicated to Alfred North Whitehead, contains her now somewhat famous distinction between “presentational forms” and “discursive forms,” which refers, roughly to symbolism such as sculpture and architecture which present much-at-once, and symbolism such as music and language which disclose their meaning linearly over time. She also brilliantly lays out her views on “Language,” where in a chapter by that name, she critiques instinct theories, challenges naïve views, and speculates on how human beings are evolutionary descendants of singing, dancing, pantomiming apes.

This book provides an excellent description of the various kinds of machine learning approaches and asks the question of whether there will be a Master Algorithm, one single (universal) algorithm that learns all kinds of tasks from data. The author, Pedro Domingos, introduces the different approaches to building intelligence and the research tribes exploring them – Symbolists (with its foundations in Philosophy and Logic), Connectionists (foundations in Neuro/Cognitive Science), Evolutionaries (foundations in Evolutionary Biology), Bayesians (statistical foundations), and Analogizers (Psychology). He also introduces some of his own ideas on what the master machine learning algorithm might look like. It’s a really useful primer for those who are not deeply immersed in machine learning but it’s written for readers with at least a basic engineering and computer science background.

Leonard Cohen is one of my touchstones, an artist I take personally, someone who speaks to me deeply. He is best known as a singer/songwriter, the author of “Suzanne” and “Hallelujah.” He is not quite as well-known as a poet, but that’s how he started and he’d already published books of verse before his first album appeared. He also wrote two novels, the first when he was in his 20s. It is entitled The Favourite Game and it’s an autobiographical, Jewish, coming-of-age story. It’s so good it seems like an early Philip Roth novel.

In an interview, Cohen once said, “There’s no story so fantastic that I cannot imagine myself the hero. And there’s no story so evil that I cannot imagine myself the villain.” His protagonist is a little of both in this book. And the prose, as you might imagine is beautiful, simpler perhaps than in his poetry,… show more.

Dave Barry is most famous as a humor columnist and nonfiction writer. His first novel Big Trouble, with a story that reads like a suspenseful thriller, is full of comedic events and clever twists. It’s worth reading, however, for the prose alone. Sample sentence: “En route to the polling place, the old man picked up seven other voters, all men, some quite aromatic.”

This book, and others by Campbell, has valuable ideas about humanity and mythology that are endlessly useful to fiction writers. Not about craft. About stories. And you’ll get a sense of how stories shape our world. And it has the effects of myth on human existence, fascinating from both a historic and cultural perspective.

Any Maugham story has to be great. This collection is no exception. Usually a character in his own stories, Maugham will play the part of reader’s confidant, recounting a story about a friend of his, or a friend of a friend, as it were second-hand. I particularly like how he handles the theme of money in this collection (unlike Balzac, who introduces money with a truncheon): no big deal; but such a bother. Each story seems a trifling anecdote, distanced, cursory ̶ until the perfect note of pathos slips in. And Matisse’s simple line drawings complement Maugham’s prose nicely.

Because of the way she writes about the past and the way she writes about the present. Because she is at once straightforward and lyrical. Because she writes about places and people with the same acuity and insight. Because she writes with certainty about ambiguity.