Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel, published in 2015, won the Pulitzer Prize and announced a major new voice in American fiction-one that used the form of the spy thriller to do something no thriller typically attempts: a thorough, unsentimental examination of the Vietnam War from a perspective that American literature has systematically avoided, which is…
Jeffrey Eugenides’s second novel, published fourteen years after The Virgin Suicides, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and demonstrated that his debut was not a fluke but a first movement in a project of unusual scope. Middlesex is a multigenerational family saga narrated by Cal Stephanides-born Callie, a woman who in her teenage years discovers…
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, published in 1996, is the most argued-about American novel of its generation, which is appropriate because it is itself an argument-with entertainment, with addiction, with the novel form, with the cultural logic of a society that has confused pleasure with meaning. At 1,079 pages plus nearly 100 pages of footnotes,…
Don DeLillo published White Noise in 1985 and it feels, from the vantage of the twenty-first century, both period piece and prophecy. Its subject-the oversaturation of consumer culture, the management of death-anxiety through media and medication, the terror lurking beneath the surfaces of American middle-class life-has only grown more relevant. The supermarket, DeLillo’s central symbol,…
Junot Díaz’s first novel arrived in 2007 after a decade-long gap since his story collection and promptly won the Pulitzer Prize, demonstrating that a debut novel could do in one gesture what takes most writers a career to achieve: invent a form entirely its own. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a Dominican-American…
Jonathan Franzen’s third novel, The Corrections, appeared in 2001 to a level of critical acclaim that made it the defining literary event of its year-a status somewhat overshadowed by the September 11 attacks that occurred the week of its publication. It is a long, ambitious, and in many ways brilliant book: a family novel that…
Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, published in 2016, takes on an almost impossible formal challenge and meets it with a confidence that seems improbable in a first book. Homegoing traces two branches of a Ghanaian family across seven generations-from the early eighteenth century to the present day-moving in alternating chapters between the descendants of two half-sisters:…
Min Jin Lee spent nearly thirty years researching and writing Pachinko, and the novel that resulted from that labor is one of the most significant works of American literature of the past decade-a multigenerational saga that spans nearly a century of Korean and Korean-Japanese history with the comprehensiveness and emotional authority of a great nineteenth-century…
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s third novel, published in 2013, is her most expansive and most explicitly political-a novel about race in America and race in Nigeria, about the differences between them, and about what happens when an African woman arrives in America and discovers she has become “Black” in a way she was not in Lagos….
Hosseini’s second novel, published in 2007, is in most respects a stronger work than The Kite Runner: more formally controlled, more emotionally complex, and-because it centers on two women rather than a man-more willing to confront the specific texture of female experience in Afghanistan across four decades of catastrophe. If The Kite Runner told the…