We’re asking members of our Writers Council to recommend six of their favorite reads. Whether new or old, best sellers or hidden gems, grand tomes or quick novellas—these books will definitely be worth your time! Next up is National Book Award-winning author Jonathan Franzen (and don’t forget to check out his latest essay collection, The End of the End of the Earth).
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Ms. Hempel Chronicles
By Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum
Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
What appear at first to be just interconnected short stories— albeit beautifully written, distinctively voiced, deeply smart, and very funny— in the end reveal themselves to have been a complete, organic novel about a love like none you’ve read about before.
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Absalom, Absalom
By William Faulkner
Published by Penguin Random House
Faulkner put more into this book than most writers put into their entire oeuvres. Not only a brilliant investigation of the mind of a slaveholder and a racist, not only a High Modern tour-de-force of shifting perspectives and time frames, not only a tragic love story replete with Greek and Biblical overtones, not only the novel that best nails the history of the American South since 1865, not only a page-turner and a gorgeous piece of prose, but the best-ever in vivo demonstration of how stories are constructed and why storytelling matters.
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Corregidora
By Gayl Jones
Published by Penguin Random House
The immensely gifted Jones illuminates the long afterlife of slavery in the love and harm that contemporary descendants of slaves inflict on one another. The main character is a juke-joint singer in the mid-century whose husband pushes her down a flight of stairs and renders her sterile. The story is episodic and incantatory and pretty deeply hopeless; it’s also, in the words of James Baldwin, “the most brutally honest revelation of what has occurred, and is occurring, in the souls of Black men and women.”
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Independent People
By Halldór Laxness
Published by Penguin Random House
A novel about Icelandic sheep farmers that is also a novel about everything. The ride up to the highest point on the roller coaster lasts about fifteen dense pages. After that: hundreds of pages of pure storytelling pleasure, with an almost unbearably moving ending.
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The Beggar Maid
By Alice Munro
Published by Penguin Random House
This was Munro’s breakout collection, written at the peak of her linguistic ferocity and moral anguish. It has the urgency of lived experience, of personal questions needing formulation, if not answers, and her unparalleled mastery of story structure is already evident. The stories all feature the same female character, Rose, which gives this book the distinction, in Munro’s oeuvre, of almost being a novel.
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The Man Who Loved Children
By Christina Stead
Published by Macmillan
A towering novel, sui generis, searing in its portrait of a patriarchy but far larger than politics: large in its linguistic inventiveness, great in its comedy, immense in its compassion, and gigantic in the creation of its three main characters, who live and breathe indelibly, at once archetypical and utterly singular.
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