Monday, October 7, 2019

Six of Tim O'Brien's favorite works of fiction

Tim O'Brien received the 1979 National Book Award for Going After Cacciato. Among his other books are The Things They Carried, Pulitzer Finalist and a New York Times Book of the Century, and In the Lake of the Woods, winner of the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. He was awarded the Pritzker Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military writing in 2013.

O'Brien's new book is Dad's Maybe Book, a work of nonfiction which "shares wisdom from a life in letters, lessons learned in wartime, and the challenges, humor, and rewards of raising two sons."

At The Week magazine, O'Brien recommended six of his favorite books. One title on the list:
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (1961).

Among the best novels of the past 75 years, Revolutionary Road is a story of a marriage gone sour. A suburban couple dreams about heading for Paris; it never happens. This is a heartbreaking and really human story, beautifully written.
Read about the other entries on the list.

Revolutionary Road also appears on Diana Evans's list of five books for helping with loss, Jenny Eclair's six best books list, the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five top books for Mad Men fans, Hanna McGrath's list of five fictional characters who tell it like it is, John Mullan's list of ten of the best Aprils in literature, Selma Dabbagh's top ten list of stories of reluctant revolutionaries, Laura Dave's list of books that improve on re-reading, Tad Friend's seven best fiction books about WASPs, and James P. Othmer's list of six great novels on work.

--Marshal Zeringue