Top 10 literary scenes from the battle of the sexes

Eli Gottlieb has worked as a Senior Editor of Elle Magazine and taught American Literature as a Lecturer at the University of Padova, Italy. His first novel, The Boy Who Went Away, won the prestigious Rome Prize, the 1998 McKitterick Prize from the British Society of Authors, and was a New York Times Notable book. He is a contributing editor for 5280 magazine.

His latest novel is Now You See Him.

For the Guardian, he named his "top 10 scenes from the battle of the sexes." One novel on the list:

Herzog by Saul Bellow

Arguably his most perfectly achieved book (Auden told him it's only fault was it was too well-written) it's also a novel of paybacks for real-world slights. That may account for the prussic acid nastiness with which the adulterous lovers at the heart of the book are depicted. Bellow stands quite justly accused of writing somewhat one-dimensional female characters, but the dialogues between the power-mad bluestocking wife and the thwarted professor-husband, are fabulously, irresistibly mean-spirited.

Read about the other items on Gottlieb's list.

Read an excerpt from Now You See Him, and learn more about the book and author at Eli Gottlieb's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Eli Gottlieb's Now You See Him.

--Marshal Zeringue

Best books written by classical musicians

Neil Fisher, classical, opera and dance editor of The Times (London), compiled a critic's chart of "the best books written by classical musicians."

One title on his list:

Mozart in the Jungle by Blair Tindall

A disgruntled oboeist lifts the lid on the seamy side of modern orchestral life.

Read about all six books Fisher's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books about historical conquest

David Day, author of Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others, named a five best list of books about historical conquest for the Wall Street Journal.

Number One on his list:

History of the Conquest of Mexico
by William Prescott
1843

History can be understood in many ways, but one of the most compelling is to track the movement of peoples and their later attempts to put their stamp on newly conquered lands. Spain's conquest of Mexico in the 16th century is a dramatic example. A rousing narrative of that conquest was written in the early 1840s by the partially blind American historian William Prescott, who combined admiration for the Spanish conqueror Cortés with a relatively sensitive portrayal of the vanquished Aztecs. "It is but justice to the Conquerors of Mexico," Prescott writes, "to say that the very brilliancy and importance of their exploits have given a melancholy celebrity to their misdeeds." This hugely influential book was based on research in Spanish archives and was published as Americans were completing a sweep across land that they had claimed as their own.

Read about all five books on Day's list.

The Page 99 Test: David Day's Conquest.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 literary Gypsies

Jessica Duchen's most recent novel is Hungarian Dances.

For the Guardian, she named her top 10 literary Gypsies.

She writes: "It's fascinating that century after century, Gypsies are both the most romanticised people on earth and the most vilified: this is almost as much the case now as it was two centuries ago. Writers, of course, have been milking the situation for donkey's years. My second novel, Hungarian Dances, tells the story of a British-born violinist, Karina, whose discovery of hidden truths about her Hungarian family history and her formidable grandmother Mimi's Roma background challenges her own sense of identity."

One title on Duchen's list:

Mr Rochester (in disguise) in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre

Mr Rochester takes advantage of the much-caricatured superstition that Gypsies are clairvoyant, and with good reason: when he disguises himself as a Gypsy fortune-teller, it gives him the power over Jane and Blanche to see beyond the superficial niceties that the women present to his usual incarnation. Jane is terrified by the fortune-teller's aspect – afraid of "her" dark skin, and of something or someone different from herself. Simultaneously, of course, she's transfixed.

Read about the other nine titles.

The Page 99 Test: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

Jane Eyre also made the Guardian's top 10 list of "outsider books" and its top 10 list of romantic fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Kozol's 5 most important books

Jonathan Kozol is an activist and National Book Award winner best known for his works on public education. His latest book is Letters to a Young Teacher.

He told Newsweek about his five most important books. One book on the list:

"The Souls of Black Folk" by W.E.B. Du Bois.

Unlike most political books, it is also a work of artistry and beauty. It captured my soul.

Read about the other books on Kozol's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nonfiction books with brilliant opening chapters

Edward Dolnick is the author of Down the Great Unknown, The Rescue Artist, Madness on the Couch, and The Forger's Spell.

A former chief science writer at the Boston Globe, he has written for the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, and many other publications.

Invited by Powells.com to "[r]ecommend five or more books on a single subject of personal interest or expertise," he came up with:

Five Nonfiction Books with Brilliant Opening Chapters:

The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon B. Johnson, Vol. 1 by Robert A. Caro

Freedom at Midnight by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins

Maximum City by Suketu Mehta

The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory by William Manchester

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

Read the interview from which this list is drawn.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best: books on the Olympics

ESPN's Jeremy Schaap named a five best list of books on the Olympics for the Wall Street Journal.

One title on the list:

You Can't Go Home Again
By Thomas Wolfe
Harper, 1940

"You Can't Go Home Again" isn't really about the Olympics, but its protagonist, George Webber, spends the summer of 1936 in Berlin, where he cheers for Jesse Owens and bears witness to the passion of the German masses as they embrace their Führer. The Games of the 11th Olympiad were the most significant Olympics of the modern era, and Thomas Wolfe -- who was himself there -- captures the atmosphere with, well, a novelist's eye. Here he describes the scene when Hitler approached the Olympic stadium: "At last he came, and something like a wind across a field of grass was shaken through that crowd, and from afar the tide rolled up with him, and in it was the voice, the hope, the prayer of the land." Published posthumously (Wolfe died of tuberculosis in 1938, at age 37), after the German invasion of Poland but before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, "You Can't Go Home Again" makes it clear that Americans, and everyone else, could ignore Hitler's Germany only at their peril. "There seemed to be something ominous about it," Wolfe writes about the prevailing mood in Berlin as the opening ceremony approaches. "One sensed a stupendous concentration of effort, a tremendous drawing together and ordering in the vast collective power of the whole land. And the thing that made it seem ominous was that it so evidently went beyond what the games themselves demanded."

Read about the other four books on Schaap's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten westerns

Clive Sinclair is the author of several novels and short stories, including True Tales of the Wild West.

For the Guardian, he selected his top ten westerns.

His account of what goes into a good western opens: "I can't go to bed with John Wayne, so I do the next best thing: I go to bed with my girlfriend, who once met the great man. That's how much I love westerns." [read on]

Number One on Sinclair's list:

The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains by Owen Wister

In the 1880s a weedy Easterner named Owen Wister had something like a nervous breakdown. Wyoming, with its wide-open spaces and healthy pursuits, was prescribed as a cure. Wister was immediately smitten by the taciturn cowboys and the rules imposed upon them by the cattle barons. Collecting his notes he produced the novel that is the western's sine qua non. It was Gary Cooper, I think, who first spoke the immortal line on camera: "When you call me that, smile!" Researching for my own book I came upon the Occidental Hotel in Buffalo, Wyoming, where I was shown the very room in which Wister composed a part of his masterpiece. Some claim it was the very room whither the Virginian repaired to claim his Molly after his climactic shoot-out with Trampas. A good corrective to Wister's world view - in which the cattle barons (the "quality") were born justified - is Michael Cimino's unfairly vilified Heaven's Gate.

Read about the other nine titles.

--Marshal Zeringue

Critic's chart: best faked memoirs

Iain Finlayson, who reviews non-fiction for the London Times, named a critic's chart of the best faked memoirs.

Number One on the list:

Col Crockett's Exploits by Davy Crockett

Pseudo-autobiography based on faked journal, claimed to have been found at the Alamo.

Read about all six titles on Finlayson's chart.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 10 oddest travel guides

For Slate, Paul Collins named the "10 [travel guidebooks] that are so transfixingly odd that they've remained readable long beyond their original itineraries."

Number One on the list:

The Truth About Hunting in Today's Africa, and How To Go on Safari for $690.00, by George Leonard Herter (1963)

Equal parts Hemingway and Cliff Clavin, mail-order hunting goods retailer George Herter was one of America's great oddball writers. His self-published guide—bound in tiger-print cloth—is a malarial fever of anecdotes, family safari photos, and horrifying advice: "Baboons are simply too small for leopard bait. ... A live dog is one of the best leopard baits." Hunting with a phonograph of distressed goat calls is encouraged; so is the importation of animals: "Leopard farming would be far more profitable than mink farming," he proposes. As the corpses of rhinos, lions, elephants—and one of their guides—pile up for more than 300 pages, Herter never misses a chance to sell his sporting goods with such photo captions as: "A Masai warrior admires a pair of Hudson Bay two point shoes."

Read about the other nine titles on Collins' list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Critic's chart: top Olympics books

For the Times (London), Calvin Shulman named a critic's chart of six top Olympic books.

One book on his list:

The Marathon Makers by John Bryant

Why is the marathon distance 26 miles and 385 yards?

Read about the other books on Shulman's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best: psychological crime novels

For the Wall Street Journal, novelist Andrew Klavan named a five best list of psychological crime novels.

Number One on his list:

Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
1866

Destitute and depressed in St. Petersburg, the former student Raskolnikov conceives the idea that an "extraordinary man" should be free of socially constructed moral constraints. Working off that theory, he brutally ax-murders a pawnbroker and her sister -- and discovers, to his horror, that he has violated not a mere social construct but the unfathomable Moral Law Within. His escape from the crime scene is as suspenseful as anything in Hitchcock. The scenes of his psychological duel with the canny police detective Porfiry Petrovich have been imitated endlessly yet never matched. But if Dostoevsky had written only the heart-wrenching scene in which the prostitute Sonya reads to the murderer from the Gospels, he could have retired after a life's work well done.

Read about the other four titles on Klavan's list.

Klavan's latest novel, Empire of Lies (Harcourt), has just been published..

--Marshal Zeringue