Nella Larsen’s Passing is one of the most compressed and psychologically dense novels of the Harlem Renaissance. At 96 pages, it is barely a novella, yet it contains more sustained ambiguity than most novels five times its length. Published in 1929 and largely forgotten until the 1970s, when Black feminist scholars began the work of…
Ernest Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises in 1926, and the novel immediately named something that Americans and Europeans were still trying to understand about themselves: the damage that World War I had done to a generation’s sense of purpose, pleasure, and identity. The title comes from Ecclesiastes – “The sun also rises, and the…
Susanna Clarke published Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell in 2004 after ten years of writing, and the novel was recognized immediately as something extraordinary. It won the Hugo Award and the Whitbread First Novel Award and made its author, briefly, the most discussed debut novelist in English. Clarke had written a book that was simultaneously…
Ernest Hemingway finished A Farewell to Arms in 1929, writing and rewriting the ending dozens of times before he found the version that satisfied him – or rather, the version that satisfied him least badly. The novel is a war story and a love story, and in Hemingway’s telling those two things are not opposites…
E.M. Forster published A Room with a View in 1908, and it remains the most immediately pleasurable of his novels-lighter than Howards End, less politically charged than A Passage to India, possessed of a comic ease that occasionally disguises the seriousness of its social observation. It is a novel about the relationship between convention and…
Jeffrey Eugenides’s debut novel, published in 1993, opens with one of the most arresting first sentences in contemporary American fiction-”On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her life, neighbors were trying to figure out exactly why”-and sustains the tension of that opening across a novel of unusual formal ingenuity and emotional restraint. The five…
Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre in 1847 under the name Currer Bell, and its success was immediate and enormous-a contrast to her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights, published the same year, which would wait for posthumous recognition. Jane Eyre is the more accessible novel: it has a linear narrative, a recognizable protagonist whose development we follow…
Emily Brontë’s only novel, published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, was received with a mixture of hostility and bewilderment that feels, in retrospect, like the appropriate response to something genuinely new. Wuthering Heights is not a love story in any ordinary sense; it is a study in obsession and its costs, written in…
Franz Kafka never completed The Trial, and his instructions to Max Brod were to burn the manuscript. Brod published it instead in 1925, the year after Kafka’s death, and literary history is in his debt. The novel-fragmentary, nonlinear, deliberately incomplete-has become one of the founding texts of twentieth-century literature, and the adjective derived from its…
Hermann Hesse published Siddhartha in 1922, drawing on years of study of Eastern philosophy and religion, and produced a work that is less novel than prose poem-a philosophical parable written in a style of deliberate simplicity that belies its intellectual seriousness. It was not the novel that won Hesse the Nobel Prize in 1946; that…