LADDER OF YEARS by Anne TylerRead about the other entries on the list.
I’m a big fan. She sets her books in Baltimore and concentrates on family relationships. This is about a woman who walks down the beach away from her family, gets on a bus and starts a whole new life. I’ve always loved that idea of stepping away from everything you’ve built up.
Read about the other entries on the list.The Lights in the Sky Are Stars, by Fredric Brown
When it comes to space travel, Frederic Brown’s take is an intriguing one: in this version of 1997, space travel to Mars and Venus is possible, but is being held back by political operatives who view the efforts as a waste of money. The narrative follows a rocket mechanic named Max Andrews who’s working to make his way to the stars. He marries a senator, Ellen Gallagher, and together, they push for funding for a new rocket that will go to Jupiter. Brown accurately predicts the present state of manned spaceflight, and certainly takes a hard turn from what one might expect from a book ostensibly about space travel.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence (novel)Read about the other entries on the list.
Yes, Connie is a pretty obvious character whose body is focused on way more than her mind. Yes, Mellors the gardener is an obvious choice with speeches that remind me of Dick Van Dyke’s chimney-sweep English. But Jesus, in this era of airbrushing, silent and statue-still photographed bodies, these breasts are in motion, having fun: purely positive attributes swinging”softly, like bells”, stroked under nighties, wrapped “in honeysuckle” and held up to that “heavy rain”
Read about the other entries on the list.The Legend Trilogy by Marie Lu
The world in Marie Lu’s trilogy is our own, in the future. What sets this world apart from other dystopian worlds for me is that it is a whole world. While the first book stays in the oppressive regime of Los Angeles, the rest of the series opens the world up and we get to see other parts of the world which have evolved in clever and realistic ways, but we also get to see the outside world’s views of the oppressive government which seems so mighty from the inside. The whole thing adds up the most complex well-realised future world I can think of.
Amy Parker was born in Okinawa, Japan, and spent most of her childhood on diplomatic and military compounds overseas. She returned to the United States after her high school graduation and attended Indiana University, where she studied comparative literature. She won a Michener fellowship in fiction from the University of Texas, Austin. Afterward, she spent four years doing intensive monastic practice at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the oldest Soto Zen monastery in the United States, and at Green Gulch Farm and Zen Center in Mill Valley, California. She received lay ordination in the Soto Zen lineage in 2007. She left the monastery for the Iowa Writers Workshop, where she graduated in 2012. She currently lives in Wichita with her son.The IlluminationRead about the other entries on the list.
by Kevin Brockmeier
Two threads bind the characters together in Brockmeier’s The Illumination. First, wound sites begin to emit light. Pain shines andsuffering is made luminous and visible. Second, a journal compiled of daily love notes from a husband to his wife circulates through the hands of the characters, shedding light on their own predicaments, providing a counterpoint of warmth, love, and humor to their own immense pain. The journal itself is a masterpiece of deeply observed details, a celebration of a beloved in all her particularity. Brockmeier is one of the greatest prose stylists working today, and his tenderness for the human condition registers in every line.
One of Straub's six favorite books, as shared at The Week magazine:The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil GaimanRead about the other entries on the list.
For me, this is Gaiman's most successful foray into adult fiction, though delivered with the emotional directness of Stardust and Coraline. An unnamed narrator explores the rural Sussex of his childhood, with unsettling results.
Read about the other entries on the list.Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
In this verse novel Carson points to the fact that poetry and fiction have never been strictly separate categories. She combines myth and modernity in the guise of a boy named Geryon, who is also a red, Ancient Greek monster with wings. He begins to write an autobiography at the age of five, and later he falls in love with a boy named Herakles, who leaves him. As usual, Carson brings "eros the bittersweet" very much to life, and described the heaviness of lost love in a tone of elegant lightness.
One of Time magazine's top ten YA and children’s books of 2015:Confessions of an Imaginary Friend, Michelle CuevasRead about the other entries on the list.
Jacques Papier is going through an early-life crisis: None of the kids or teachers at school seem to like him—in fact, they always ignore him. That’s because, as he eventually discovers, he’s not a real boy at all, but the imaginary friend of his sister, Fleur. Stunned by this news, Jacques tries to convince Fleur to set him free in this funny and bittersweet growing-up story.
The Wall by by Marlen HaushoferRead about the other entries on the list.
One of the subsets of loneliness literature is the disaster that leaves a single survivor, a genre that dates right back to Robinson Crusoe, marooned on his island. It's frequently deployed in science fiction – I Am Legend springs to mind. But you might also consider Marlen Haushofer's The Wall, a 1963 Austrian novel that deals with the travails of an unnamed woman who must survive in the rural landscape where she has been vacationing, after an unexplained event creates a transparent wall that seals her off from the outside world, with only a cow, a cat, and a dog for company.
The Secret Agent by Joseph ConradRead about the other entries on the list.
They call him the professor, and he is the perfect anarchist. Carrying enough explosives under his clothing to annihilate any block he walks by, the self-developed rubber ball detonator sitting resting in his hand at all times, he is safe from the police. However, he has two problems. One: the time lag between ignition and explosion, a technical flaw he is working to improve, is a horrifying 20 seconds. Two: he is afraid; afraid that the busy, antlike crowd around him, which he constantly threatens to attack, might be insensible to fear.
Blog she tagged six strange and stunning takes on familiar stories, including:The Star-Touched Queen, by Roshani ChokshiRead about the other entries on the list.
Maya isn’t like other princesses. She spends most of her time eavesdropping on matters of court instead of dolling herself up and dreaming of marriage. After all, she knows her match would mean destruction for anyone who chooses her—death and darkness are written in her stars. But when her beloved, distant father asks her to make the ultimate sacrifice to help save his kingdom, she’s on the verge of giving in. Until she meets Amar, the King of Akaran, and realizes they might just be a match made in heaven—or hell. A spin on the Greek myth of Hades and Persephone melded with the magic of Indian folklore, Star-Touched is riveting, chock full of flesh-eating (but fun!) horses, jeweled gardens, and a love that just might destroy the world.
Radiance, by Catherynne M. ValenteRead about the other entries on the list.
Radiance weaves so many subgenres into its delicate web, it’s almost literally head-spinning. To briefly sum up its appeal, however, let us say it’s a decopunk space opera noir that glorifies an alternate Golden Age of Hollywood, maintains a complicated mystery, and does it all in epistolary format. The enigma at the heart of this celestial narrative is the disappearance of upstart docu-director Severin Unck, darling daughter of a legendary filmmaker, while shooting her latest film near Venus. While what happened to Severin is the core of this story, it is by no means the most interesting element. You unwrap the mystery layer by layer, as you learn just how life led her to that distant planet to begin with, exploring decades of wildly alternate cinema history along the way.
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