Here are 70 books that Twenty Grand fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve always been preoccupied with how personal tragedy, loss, and grief can ultimately teach us truths about existence and our own strength that we might never have learned otherwise. As a child, I was confounded by the fact of death and the transience of life, and as an adult, I’ve spent much time contemplating how literature is able to testify to the magnitude of these things in ways that ordinary language cannot. This interest led me to complete a PhD on the topic of elegiac literature and has also influenced the themes of my own fiction. I hope you find connection and inspiration in the books on this list!
The atmosphere and voice created by Robinson in this timeless and widely beloved novel, which is potent in a way that’s difficult to quantify, has endured in my memory since I first read it as a teenager. In prose rich with imagery and allusion, narrator Ruth tells the story of how she and her sister, Lucille—orphaned after their mother’s suicide—came to be cared for by their aunt, Sylvie, an eccentric drifter, who moves into their rural Idaho home and alters the tenor of their lives.
This is written with the precision of poetry, containing such sentences as, “When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate.” A novel to re-read and savor.
A modern classic, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother.
The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized…
I’m an Irish novelist and occasional screenwriter. My latest book, Duffy and Son, is my sixth. I can be drawn in by any well-told tale, of course, but I’ve always had the strongest reaction to stories with at least some element of comedy. I don’t know, I just find books in which no one says anything funny to be deeply unrealistic. It infuriates me when any piece of fiction is viewed as ‘lesser’ because there’s a chance it might make you smile. The books listed here will definitely make you smile. If you give them a chance, I hope you find them as worthy of your time as I did.
I could have picked anything by George Saunders, really. He’s the closest thing I have to a personal deity. Such is the level of awe and wonder that he invokes in me, I actually find him difficult to discuss. It’s like trying to look directly at the sun.
Suffice it to say that CivilWarLand in Bad Decline—the title refers to a failing theme park—is like all of his other short story collections. It’s beautiful and wise and heart-breaking and deeply intelligent and, yes, desperately funny. I would pay a lot of money to be able to read it again for the first time.
Since its publication in 1996, George Saunders’s debut collection has grown in esteem from a cherished cult classic to a masterpiece of the form, inspiring an entire generation of writers along the way. In six stories and a novella, Saunders hatches an unforgettable cast of characters, each struggling to survive in an increasingly haywire world. With a new introduction by Joshua Ferris and a new author’s note by Saunders himself, this edition is essential reading for those seeking to discover or revisit a virtuosic, disturbingly prescient voice.
Praise for George Saunders and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
Right from an early age, I have always been interested in the fallibility of the human condition, being particularly conscious of my own faults. People who are too good to be true are of little interest, except that I want to know their faults or their secrets. I have found myself drawn to complex characters, those who have good and bad characteristics, and some of the novels and movies that I have enjoyed most feature such characters. In my career as a lawyer, I have met all kinds of people who have made bad decisions or suffered misfortune, and it has always been a pleasure trying to help them.
As the author no doubt intended, right from the first page, I took a dislike to the protagonist (he makes his weekly visit to a prostitute). It emerges that David is, in fact, a sexual obsessive, and it is not long before he is forced to leave his university professorship after aggressively pursuing and bedding one of his students.
I was surprised, therefore, when the story took off in a different direction and ended up as a graphic and sad portrayal of the predicament of white families in South Africa recently coming to terms with black rule. The portrait that emerges is a bleak one that includes violence, dislocation, theft, and (I thought this a nice circular touch back to the MeToo opening chapters) the rape of David's daughter by a young black man. I found the book disturbing as well as compelling.
From the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018.
"Compulsively readable... A novel that not only works its spell but makes it impossible for us to lay it aside once we've finished reading it." -The New Yorker
At fifty-two, Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire, but lacking in passion. When an affair with a student leaves him jobless, shunned by friends, and ridiculed by his ex-wife, he retreats to his daughter Lucy's smallholding. David's visit becomes an…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
When writing about women's lives, it's important to me to get below the surface and question the things that really have an impact on how we live and breathe, how we relate to others as friends or lovers, how we feel guilt, pain, joy, and ecstasy, how we relish triumph and mitigate disaster, how we grow old and hope and think and make our way from start to finish in a turbulent world. I try to tell the truth as a writer and make new discoveries along the way. I’ve published two novels and two collections of short stories, and I’m a reviewer and writer on literature, a teacher too.
This book takes you on a rollercoaster through contemporary lives and dilemmas, moving and inspiring you on the way.
From a young woman teacher with a big alcohol problem and a mess of a relationship through a lonely middle-aged male whose use of sex workers damages his ability to relate to regular women, this is a no-holds-barred exploration of how we live now.
Moshfegh shows us the pain, the humour, the sorrow, and the potential joy, in beautifully written prose with a real edge to it.
An electrifying first collection from one of the most exciting short story writers of our time
"I can't recall the last time I laughed this hard at a book. Simultaneously, I'm shocked and scandalized. She's brilliant, this young woman."-David Sedaris
Ottessa Moshfegh's debut novel Eileen was one of the literary events of 2015. Garlanded with critical acclaim, it was named a book of the year by The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and won…
I love a romance where the hero has his viewpoint changed by the woman he falls in love with. He might become a better family man, or transform his politics, or change his priorities, but it all cases loving her alters him. Additionally, I love a heroine who is exceptional in a distinct way but overlooked or dismissed by others. They can be bluestockings or spinsters, reformers or quiet and shy, but they’re all steadfast and they all derive strength from the hero’s support. In short, the love they find together makes them better people.
I loved this book because Penelope is supposed to be a means to an end, but she ends up being Bourne's everything.
Bourne wants revenge. He believes that his happiness lies in recovering the land that he foolishly lost in a card game. Penelope proves to him that regaining his legacy is not enough. She helps him rediscover the man he would have become if he hadn’t lost everything that mattered to him.
When he lets himself love her, he chooses to abandon his quest for revenge so he can be worthy. Bourne is an absolute sweetheart by the end and is completely devoted to his wife.
A decade ago, the Marquess of Bourne was cast from society with nothing but his title. Now a partner in London's most exclusive gaming hell, the cold, ruthless Bourne will do whatever it takes to regain his inheritance—including marrying perfect, proper Lady Penelope Marbury.
A broken engagement and years of disappointing courtships have left Penelope with little interest in a quiet, comfortable marriage, and a longing for something more. How lucky that her new husband has access to an unexplored world of pleasures.
Growing up in a strait-laced Southern family, I was always fascinated with casinos. In my twenties on a summer hiatus from teaching in North Carolina, I drove to California and became a dealer at Caesars in Lake Tahoe. My mother highly disapproved of my working in a casino, "a place so bad it has 'sin' in the middle." Eventually, I returned east to take a hi-tech job in Boston. I also began working on my MFA in writing at Emerson. My characters were breathed into life from my years in the gambling industry. You learn a lot about the human personality when you watch thousands of people from behind the felt of a blackjack table.
This is a novel based on Frederick’s own gambling addiction on the Mississippi riverboats. Ray and Jewel Kaiser love to gamble, until a fun night out becomes a compulsion. They find themselves showing up at the Paradise casino all hours of the day and night, becoming intimate with the employees and escalating their bets. After visiting the area, I knew the scenes in the casino ring true and the dialogue is so on point, that you root for Ray and Jewel even though in the back of your mind you know the house always wins.
A New York Times Notable Book In this darkly funny story, Ray and Jewel Kaiser try (and push) their luck at the Paradise casino. Peopled with dazed denizens, body-pierced children, a lusty grocery-store manager, and hourly employees in full revolt, this is a novel about wising up sooner rather than later--"a wise and funny tale" (New York Times Book Review) that is "masterfully observed" (John Barth).
James Malloy is a ferry captain--or used to be, until he was unceremoniously fired and replaced by a "girl" named Courtney Farris. Now, instead of piloting Brenton Island’s daily lifeline to the glitzy docks of Newport, Rhode Island, James spends his days beached, bitter, and bored.
Economics isn't really a good starting point for financial market analysis for the simple reason that its models are wildly inaccurate. As behaviorial economists like Daniel Kahneman have been showing, irrationality and the inability to measure risk properly are a very big component of the investment and trading decisions. But statistical risk management is also sloppy when applied to human behavior because people are not objects that reliably behave the same way under similar circumstances. So when you read an economist about markets or an engineer about risk management, you're missing a lot of the story. In the end, technical analysis is fascinating because how and why humans behave is an enduring mystery.
The subtitle is The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System that Beat the Casinos and Wall Street. This book is an easy-to-read narrative of the intersection of the grimy underbelly of betting--with high-minded math. It reminds you that trading is not conducted in a clean little bubble. Technical analysis can give you an edge, but trading is still engaging in battle with opposing forces; strategy and tactics can count as much as building an elegant technical system.
Your opponent on the trading battlefield will try to trick you, like a general in real warfare. He may keep selling and selling after you have bought, triggering a sell signal in your trading system. He is hunting for your sell signal. The mechanical response is to sell—your system says sell, and you should follow your system. To exit a position when the market goes against you is named a stop,…
In 1956, two Bell Labs scientists discovered the scientific formula for getting rich. One was mathematician Claude Shannon, neurotic father of our digital age, whose genius is ranked with Einstein's. The other was John L. Kelly Jr., a Texas-born, gun-toting physicist. Together they applied the science of information theory—the basis of computers and the Internet—to the problem of making as much money as possible, as fast as possible.
Shannon and MIT mathematician Edward O. Thorp took the "Kelly formula" to Las Vegas. It worked. They realized that there was even more money to be made in the stock market. Thorp…
Growing up in a strait-laced Southern family, I was always fascinated with casinos. In my twenties on a summer hiatus from teaching in North Carolina, I drove to California and became a dealer at Caesars in Lake Tahoe. My mother highly disapproved of my working in a casino, "a place so bad it has 'sin' in the middle." Eventually, I returned east to take a hi-tech job in Boston. I also began working on my MFA in writing at Emerson. My characters were breathed into life from my years in the gambling industry. You learn a lot about the human personality when you watch thousands of people from behind the felt of a blackjack table.
How does a girl go from working in a Thai restaurant to running a sports gambling operation in Costa Rica? All roads lead through Las Vegas, where Beth meets Dink a math genius. Sports bettors love to hang out in casinos it’s like a contact high. He hires her and she trains in the Vegas casinos. She not only becomes enthralled with the eccentric Dink and the colorful cast of characters that surround him but she shares their stories with you. It was the early days of Internet gambling, a free for all or so they thought. It is great to view the industry through the observant eyes of Beth whose colorful descriptions bring the characters to life.
“Beth Raymer’s crackling, hilarious memoir ricochets through the gambling underworld in Las Vegas, and is peopled with all manner of lovable wack-jobs, none of whom is quite as wacky—or lovable—as Raymer herself.”—Marie Claire
Beth Raymer waited tables at a dive in Las Vegas until a customer sent her to see Dink, of Dink Inc., one of the town’s biggest professional sports gamblers. Dink needed a right-hand man—someone who would show up on time, who had a head for numbers, and who didn’t steal. Beth got the job.
Lay the Favorite is the story of Beth’s years in the high-stakes, high-anxiety…
Growing up in a strait-laced Southern family, I was always fascinated with casinos. In my twenties on a summer hiatus from teaching in North Carolina, I drove to California and became a dealer at Caesars in Lake Tahoe. My mother highly disapproved of my working in a casino, "a place so bad it has 'sin' in the middle." Eventually, I returned east to take a hi-tech job in Boston. I also began working on my MFA in writing at Emerson. My characters were breathed into life from my years in the gambling industry. You learn a lot about the human personality when you watch thousands of people from behind the felt of a blackjack table.
Standing behind the table, blackjack dealers are always on the lookout for card counters, find one and they are booted out. Can a team from M.I.T. really break the casino? Card counting is all in the math and as he and his fellow team members hit Vegas they learn how to bet on the count. I think this book really shines when he goes behind the scenes to explore the deceptions the team went through to try to deceive the casino. Well, they can for a while and it’s fun to follow them on their rise and fall.
The #1 national bestseller, now a major motion picture, 21—the amazing inside story about a gambling ring of M.I.T. students who beat the system in Vegas—and lived to tell how.
Robin Hood meets the Rat Pack when the best and the brightest of M.I.T.’s math students and engineers take up blackjack under the guidance of an eccentric mastermind. Their small blackjack club develops from an experiment in counting cards on M.I.T.’s campus into a ring of card savants with a system for playing large and winning big. In less than two years they take some of the world’s most sophisticated…
Ava Winston likes her life of routine in Lexington, Kentucky. Then a tornado blows it away. Ava is safe in the basement, but when she emerges, only one corner of her home stands. Rather than crumbling under the loss, she feels a load lifted. Maybe something beyond the familiar is…
The author of biographies, histories, and true crime books, Howard Sounes is best-known for Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, now in an updated edition; Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life; and Fred & Rose, the bestselling story of married English serial killers Fred and Rose West. Other books include Amy, 27, Seventies, Heist, and biographies of Paul McCartney and Lou Reed.
A doctor interviews an elderly Japanese yakuza (gangster) as he recalls his life. Adhering to his own criminal code, the yakuza exudes a wayward nobility as he discusses the choices he made. Bob Dylan saw romance in this and quoted from the yakuza’s dialogue on his album, Love and Theft.
This is the true story, as told to the doctor who looked after him just before he died, of the life of one of the last traditional yakuza in Japan. It wasn't a good' life, in either sense of the word, but it was an adventurous one; and the tale he has to tell presents an honest and oddly attractive picture of an insider in that separate, unofficial world. In his low, hoarse voice, he describes the random events that led the son of a prosperous country shopkeeper to become a member, and ultimately the leader, of a gang organizing…
