Andrew Sean Greer’s Less won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2018, and the win surprised many observers who had expected a weightier, more traditionally ambitious novel to take the prize. What they got instead was a comedy – a funny, warm, elegantly constructed novel about a middle-aged gay writer who travels the world to…
Summary All the Pretty Horses is the most emotionally accessible of Cormac McCarthy’s novels, which is not the same as saying it is simple. Published in 1992, it is the first volume of the Border Trilogy and the book that gave McCarthy a mainstream readership after decades of southern Gothic and Blood Meridian. John Grady…
Alan Hollinghurst published The Line of Beauty in 2004 and won the Booker Prize with it – the right book winning the right prize at the right time. The novel is set in Thatcher’s Britain between 1983 and 1987, and it follows Nick Guest, a young gay man from a middle-class family who moves into…
Albert Camus published The Stranger in French in 1942 under the title L’Etranger, and the novel arrived at a moment when its argument – that the universe is indifferent to human life, and that this indifference should be faced without illusion – carried particular force. It has been translated dozens of times, debated by philosophers,…
Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere is the kind of novel that reads like a page-turner while doing the work of serious literary fiction. Published in 2017 and set in Shaker Heights, Ohio – the carefully planned, deliberately integrated suburb where Ng grew up – it tells the story of two families whose collision exposes the…
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is one of the strangest and most beautiful objects in twentieth-century literature. Published in Italian in 1972 and translated into English by William Weaver in 1974, it consists of 55 short prose pieces in which the explorer Marco Polo describes imaginary cities to an aging Kublai Khan. The cities are not…
Summary Olive Kitteridge is a linked story collection published by Elizabeth Strout in 2008 that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year. Its organizing figure, Olive Kitteridge herself, is a retired mathematics teacher in the small coastal Maine town of Crosby, and she is not, by any conventional measure, a likeable person. She…
Henry James published The Portrait of a Lady in 1881 and created what many critics consider the first fully modern novel in English. Its subject is a young American woman who comes to Europe with ideals about freedom and independence and discovers that freedom, when it arrives in the form of money, is not the…
Haruki Murakami published The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in Japanese in 1994-1995 and in English translation in 1997, and it announced something that his earlier novels had suggested: that he was capable of a sustained ambition that exceeded the charming, melancholic registers of Norwegian Wood and the playful surrealism of A Wild Sheep Chase. The novel…
Summary Ralph Ellison published Invisible Man in 1952, and it won the National Book Award that year, and it has not stopped being relevant. The novel follows an unnamed Black narrator from his humiliating graduation ceremony in a Southern town, where he is made to participate in a staged brawl before an audience of drunken…