Beloved
Beloved opens with one of the most arresting first lines in American fiction - "124 was spiteful" - and never lets up from there. Set in…
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The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is one of the most unsettling novels you will ever read - not because it trades in the grotesque…
The Color Purple
The Color Purple's opening - a stepfather's warning to a fourteen-year-old girl never to tell anyone but God what he has done to her -…
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Some books arrive with so much cultural weight attached that opening them feels less like reading than like entering a room everyone else has…
Slaughterhouse-Five
There are war novels that try to make sense of the thing, and then there is Slaughterhouse-Five, which gives up on sense entirely and is stronger…
The Catcher in the Rye
Returning to J.D. Salinger's 1951 novel decades after first encountering it in a high-school classroom is a disorienting experience, because…
Brave New World
Almost a century on from its 1932 publication, Brave New World remains one of the stranger, sharper dystopias in the Western canon - a novel that…
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing Reading and Life
There is a particular kind of book that arrives trailing the aura of a coveted classroom, and George Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain…
Feel Free: Essays
To open Feel Free is to be admitted, for four hundred or so pages, into the company of a mind that refuses to stand still. Zadie Smith's…
Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem Is Translated
There is something faintly improbable about a fifty-page book, built around a four-line poem written in the eighth century, becoming a touchstone…
How Fiction Works
James Wood's How Fiction Works arrives with a title that dares you to call its bluff, and for roughly two-thirds of its compact 250 pages it…
Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays
Few contemporary essayists can make a book review feel like an ethical ambush, and fewer still can turn a puff piece for a food magazine into a…
