When Toni Morrison published Song of Solomon in 1977, it announced-before Beloved, before her Nobel Prize-the full scale of her literary ambition. The novel is sprawling, mythic, and wildly alive: a bildungsroman that reaches back through African American history and forward into something like redemption. It is Morrison at her most exuberant, and that exuberance…
Toni Morrison’s Beloved, published in 1987 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize the following year, stands as one of the most formally daring and emotionally devastating novels in American literary history. Inspired by the true story of Margaret Garner-an enslaved woman who in 1856 killed her infant daughter rather than allow her to be recaptured into…
F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in 1925 to modest commercial reception and mixed reviews. He would not live to see it become what it is today: perhaps the single most taught, most argued-over, most cinematically adapted American novel ever written. That posthumous ascension is itself a kind of Gatsbyian story-the dream achieved too…
Harper Lee’s debut novel arrived in 1960 like a thunderclap over the American literary landscape, and more than six decades later it has not lost a single volt of its moral electricity. Set in the fictional Alabama town of Maycomb during the Great Depression, the novel unfolds through the eyes of young Scout Finch, whose…
There is a moment in Educated, Tara Westover’s extraordinary memoir of growing up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho and eventually earning a PhD from Cambridge, when the author realizes she has been given two entirely different accounts of her own childhood, one from her family and one from documents and records. She cannot…
The Remains of the Day By Kazuo Ishiguro · Faber & Faber · 1989 · 258 pages ISBN: 978-0-571-15435-3 · Genre: Literary Fiction WritersReview Rating: 9/10 Review There are novels that become permanent fixtures of the literary conscience, books you carry inside you long after the final page, whose characters resurface unbidden in your own…