Five best revolutionaries in novels

Joseph Epstein is the author, most recently, of The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff: And Other Stories.

For the Wall Street Journal he named a five best list of novels featuring revolutionaries, including:

Darkness at Noon
by Arthur Koestler (1941)

'Darkness at Noon' chiefly takes place in a prison cell in the Moscow prison known as the Lubyanka. It is a tour de force, recounting the inner thoughts of Rubashov, a Nikolai Bukharin-like character, once a central Bolshevik figure, being interrogated by Stalinist henchmen who prepare the way for his false confession of treason at the famous Moscow Trials of the late 1930s. Arthur Koestler brilliantly sets out the entrapment of a man who feels himself locked into the "logic of history" and squeezed by the pincers of Marxist dialectic. After 40 years living in strict adherence to the party line, Rubashov finds himself accused of being "a counter-revolutionary and a traitor to the Fatherland," destined never to see the Promised Land of the completed revolution to which he gave his life. The novel ends with a pistol shot, not in Stendhal's metaphorical theater but to the back of Rubashov's head.

Read about the other books on the list.

Darkness at Noon is one of Ernest Lefever's five best Cold War classics.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five great books that worked as films

At The Daily Beast, Jane Ciabattari named "five masterpieces of fiction that also worked as films, with varying degrees of tinkering by the filmmakers," including:

Atonement

Ian McEwan has said of Briony Tallis, the writer at the center of his 2001 novel Atonement, “I think she is perhaps my fullest invention, as a person—deeply flawed and yet I hope still sympathetic.”

He describes Briony’s yearnings and dissemblings in sinuous prose in the languid and impressionistic first section of the novel, which takes place during a summer heat wave in 1935 in the English country home of the Tallis family in Surrey. Papa is away in London. Mum is in bed. Briony, a precociously orderly 13-year-old, has written a play to celebrate her brother Leon’s homecoming. He’s brought along a doltish but wealthy classmate for sister Cecily. But Cecily is smitten with Robbie, the housekeeper’s son (they’ve both just graduated from Cambridge, Robbie with help from the Tallis family). Also on hand: coquettish cousin Lola, 15, and her twin younger brothers. By the end of the day, the twins have been lost, Lola raped, and Briony has pointed the finger at Robbie.

Joe Wright’s 2007 film version (with a screenplay by the playwright Christopher Hampton) follows the novel’s structure. Keira Knightley and James McAvoy sizzle as the young lovers in summer; Saoirse Ronan is eerily controlling as young Briony, watching their sexual explorations with a mixture of confusion, envy, and manipulative resolve.

Both novel and film give a spectacularly intricate rendering of the shattering 1940 British retreat and evacuation at Dunkirk and the experiences of young women nursing the wounded. The last scene finds Briony at 77, an accomplished novelist now, facing dementia, still haunted by her actions, as unreliable a narrator as ever. The novel describes a family reunion in the country for Briony’s birthday. The film simply focuses on Vanessa Redgrave, who brings to Briony’s final devastating monologue a subtlety and raw power to match McEwan’s remarkable novelistic skills.

Read about the other adaptations on the list.

Atonement also appears on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best scenes on London Underground, ten of the best breakages in literature, ten of the best weddings in literature, and ten of the best identical twins in fiction. It is one of Stephanie Beacham's six best books.

Also see: Best book to film adaptations.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Evison's six favorite books

Jonathan Evison is the author of All About Lulu, which won the Washington State Book Award. In 2009, he was the recipient of a Richard Buckley Fellowship from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation.

His new novel is West of Here.

For The Week magazine, Evison named his six favorite books.

One novel on his list:

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Melville’s shorter novels find him at the top of his game as a pure craftsman, but Moby-Dick is something else, something rarer. Moby-Dick is unfettered genius, furious, unhinged, and at times frustrating. A work so powerful it can barely sustain the force of its own invention, containing every narrative mode you can think of.

Read about the other books on Evison's list.

Moby-Dick also appears among Bella Bathurst's top 10 books on the sea, John Mullan's list of ten of the best tattoos in literature, Susan Cheever's five best books about obsession, Christopher Buckley's best books, Jane Yolen's five most important books, Chris Dodd's best books, Augusten Burroughs' five most important books, Norman Mailer's top ten works of literature, David Wroblewski's five most important books, Russell Banks' five most important books, and Philip Hoare's top ten books about whales.

The Page 99 Test: All About Lulu.

--Marshal Zeringue

Antonio Carluccio's six favorite books

Antonio Carluccio became the manager of Terence Conran's Neal Street Restaurant in Covent Garden in 1981, and became its owner in 1989. (Jamie Oliver, the celebrity chef, got his professional start under Carluccio at the restaurant, which is now closed.)

Carluccio has written over a dozen books on Italian cuisine and mushrooms, and appeared on television in the BBC's Food and Drink Programme, and in his own series Antonio Carluccio's Italian Feasts in 1996. In 2011 his travels around Italy were filmed for the BBC series Two Greedy Italians.

For The Daily Express he named his six favorite books.

One title on his list:

Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History
by Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari

This was recommended to me by a friend, and it really does tell you everything you could possibly want to known about Italian cooking, from a historical viewpoint. The sort of book to dip in and out of, it’s a must-buy if you love Italian cuisine.

Read about the other books on Carluccio's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books on World War II

Richard Snow, the former editor of American Heritage magazine, is the author, most recently, of A Measureless Peril: America in the Fight for the Atlantic, the Longest Battle of World War II.

For the Wall Street Journal, he named five essential books on World War II, including:

The Caine Mutiny
by Herman Wouk (1951)

Growing tensions aboard a decaying World War I-era destroyer, a terrifying storm at sea, a spellbinding court martial, good jokes and a nice little 1940s Manhattan love story thrown in too. "The Caine Mutiny" is not considered a serious piece of war literature. It should be. The novel contains a powerful meditation on the obligations of military command and obedience, and in its appealing hero, Willie Keith, it charts the trajectory from college twerp to capable officer that so many thousands of Americans followed in those years. The book conveys the universals of what at first might seem a narrow naval existence: Anyone who has spent time in the close quarters of an office (or, for that matter, a book group) will recognize the rub and chafe of life in the Caine's wardroom. My father saw very different sea duty (Atlantic submarine-hunting as opposed to the Caine's Pacific minesweeping), but he believed that this book summoned his experience of the war at sea more precisely than any other.

Read about the other books on the list.

"Each time I revisit [The Caine Mutiny] I’m more awed than the last," writes Dawn Shamp. "The manner in which he develops the character of Willie Keith is nothing short of brilliant. Wouk’s style is spare yet complex. Every word counts."

Also see: Five best works of fiction about World War Two.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten outsiders' stories

Stephen Kelman grew up in the housing projects of Luton. He's worked variously as a careworker, a warehouse operative, and in marketing and local government administration.

Pigeon English, his first novel, will be available in the U.S. in July.

[T]he outsider [Kelman writes]... is an endlessly fascinating creature: he can be a benign commentator on his adoptive society, or a harsh critic; he can be the underdog or the agitator; his fish-out-of-water status can lend itself equally to comedy and tragedy. The entire spectrum of human experience can be captured within his detached or awed gaze. For both reader and writer, the outsider is an instrument that allows us to see the world in an unfamiliar way, and that for me is one of the prime aspirations of literature.

One of Kelman's top ten outsiders' books, as told to the Guardian:

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Balram Halwai, the narrator of this spry jaunt through modern India, is an economic migrant lured to the big city in search of the wealth his country's embrace of capitalism has promised him. He finds that the material world is a corrupting place. A look at how aspirations, even at their most prosaic, can untether us from our moral selves, and how the globalised world has made us all outsiders in one form or another.

Read about the other titles on the list.

The White Tiger is one of The Freakonomics guys' six best books.

The Page 69 Test: The White Tiger.

Also see: Neil Griffiths's top 10 books about outsiders.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten works of science fiction that are really fantasy

There is a difference between science fiction and fantasy. "The boundaries ... have always been permeable," writes Annalee Newitz at io9, "but sometimes there's a story that feels just like scifi - until you think about it a little bit. And you realize it's pure fantasy."

One top contender from her list of SF that's really fantasy:

Anathem, by Neal Stephenson

It may be set on another planet and involve some of the most outrageously awesome depictions in literature of the scientific process - as well as hyper-realistic space travel - but Anathem's central premise is metaphysical rather than scientific. The "aliens" in the novel are not from another part of the universe, but instead from a dimension which is "less perfect" than those of the main characters. Stephenson tips his hat to many Western metaphysical theories in explaining this conundrum, which is a big hint to the reader that lurking beneath the hard science fictional armor of this plot is a story of cultural progress that relies more on philosophical principles than scientific ones.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Neal Stephenson made Charlie Jane Anders's list of the 20 biggest science fiction movers-and-shakers of 2008.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books on U.S. intervention abroad

Lawrence F. Kaplan is editor of Entanglements. Previously, he was editor of World Affairs, executive editor of The National Interest, and senior editor at The New Republic, for which he reported from Iraq during 2005-2007. Kaplan is also a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the U.S. Army War College. He is a graduate of Columbia University, Oxford, and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

With Eve Gerber at The Browser, Kaplan discussed five books on American intervention abroad, including:

Dispatches
by Michael Herr

Next is Dispatches, a memoir of Michael Herr’s time reporting for Esquire from the Vietnam War. Reading this book is a scarring rite of passage for students of American entanglements.

Dispatches came out in 1977, soon after the fall of Saigon. It’s delivered in the voice of the New Journalism of the era. Herr takes us up close, on patrol with American troops. It’s so vivid that it reads like fiction. Herr’s book shows us the dark side of America’s foreign policy and the consequences of ideas hatched in air-conditioned conference rooms in Washington DC. American foreign policymakers and foreign policy watchers, including myself, do not always fully appreciate that their ideas trickle down. Ideas are enshrined in official policy and official policy trickles down. And then the next thing you know, you have 19-year-old kids out there at the sharp end of these policies. Herr’s book is essential reading until we come up with a worthy heir for the Iraq war. It drives home how careful we must be with the ideas put on the table. It’s the most worn cliché in the world, but ideas really do have consequences, particularly in American foreign policy.

How should the personal cost to American combatants be factored into the decisions of US policymakers?

The military is an instrument of American foreign policy; it is a servant of the state. Today we have an all-volunteer army whose job it is to fight the nation’s wars. That said, the military is not a machine – it is made up of human beings, mostly people in their late teens and early twenties who join the services for a variety of reasons. There is no need to place them on a pedestal or regard them as victims, that is not the way they regard themselves. But one has to be cognisant that decisions impact and cost lives, the lives of our forces, enemy forces and civilians caught in the middle.

Given the full extent of American power, there is always a temptation to deploy force casually, without adequate reflection. Every president goes through his own cost-benefit analysis before giving the green light to the use of force. Obama, more than other presidents, certainly more than his predecessor, has made a public display of running through the costs and the benefits of the surge in Afghanistan and intervention in Libya. Obama took a lot of hits, including from me, for agonising like Hamlet before coming to a decision in both cases. But I give him credit for carefully considering every side of the argument and there are about a dozen sides to these arguments. The president has to sign condolence letters every time a service member is killed. This practice is more than a deserved courtesy – it is a form of discipline that keeps the costs of war in front of the mind of the commander-in-chief.

Read about the other books on Kaplan's list.

Dispatches appears on Gail Caldwell's five best list of memoirs and Judith Paterson's list of the 10 best books of social concern by journalists.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chika Unigwe's six favorite books

Chika Unigwe was born in Nigeria and now lives in Belgium. She was a 2008 UNESCO-Aschberg fellow and a 2009 Rockefeller Foundation fellow (at the Bellagio Center), and she holds a Ph.D. from the University of Leiden. She is the recipient of several awards for her writing, including first prize in the 2003 BBC Short Story Competition and a Commonwealth Short Story Competition award. In 2004 she was shortlisted for the Caine prize for African Writing. Her stories have been on BBC World Service and Radio Nigeria. Her second novel, On Black Sisters' Street, is now available in the U.S.

One of her six favorite books, as told to The Week magazine:

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

A great introduction to literature that takes in all the great themes: love and lust, commitment and betrayal, life and death. The writing is beautiful. I have never read a more elegant account of a woman throwing herself into the path of a train.

Read about the other books on the list.

Anna Karenina also appears on Eleanor Birne's top ten list of books on motherhood, Esther Freud's list top ten list of love stories, Elizabeth Kostova's list of favorite books, James Gray's list of best books, Marie Arana's list of the best books about love, Ha Jin's most important books list, Tom Perrotta's ten favorite books list, Claire Messud's list of her five most important books, Alexander McCall Smith's list of his five most important books, Mohsin Hamid's list of his ten favorite books, Louis Begley's list of favorite novels about cheating lovers, and among the top ten works of literature according to Peter Carey and Norman Mailer. John Mullan put it on his lists of ten of the best births in literature, ten of the best ice-skating episodes in literature, and ten of the best balls in literature.

Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street is one of E. C. Osondu's top ten immigrants' tales.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best bicycles in literature

For the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best bicycles in literature.

One title on the list:

Five Red Herrings, by Dorothy L Sayers

Only a really strong cyclist can be the murderer ... Sayers's whodunit is solved by Lord Peter Wimsey, who works out that though the suspect boarded a train that left the scene before the crime was committed, he could return to do the deed by cycling across country faster than Chris Hoy to another station where the train stops later.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Also see Marjorie Kehe's list of ten great books about cycling, Matt Seaton's top 10 books about cycling, and William Fotherham's top ten cycling novels.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best stories of fathers and daughters

Alexandra Styron is the author of the novel All the Finest Girls. A graduate of Barnard College and the MFA program at Columbia University, she has contributed to several anthologies as well as The New Yorker, the New York Times, Avenue, Real Simple, and Interview, among other publications.

She is the youngest daughter of William Styron, author of Sophie’s Choice, Lie Down in Darkness, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Alexandra Styron's new book is Reading My Father: A Memoir.

One title on her list of the five best stories of fathers and daughters, as told to the Wall Street Journal:

To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee (1960)

In 1966, the year I was born, the school board for Hanover County in Virginia banned Harper Lee's best-selling novel from the school libraries after one member, Mr. W.C. Bosher, saw his son's copy and pronounced the story of a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman "immoral literature." (The following year, another racially tinged controversy erupted after the publication of my own father's novel, "The Confessions of Nat Turner.") Perhaps it was the familiar Southern-ness of Harper Lee's tale, but no novel of my childhood left a deeper mark than "To Kill a Mockingbird." I was one of a doubtless large club of girl readers who fancied themselves as plucky and charming as the book's inimitable narrator, Scout. We were girls who also unconsciously set our gauge of a man's character to that impossibly perfect polestar, Atticus Finch. The sine qua non in round-ups of father-daughter stories, "Mockingbird" is also a primer on the essentials of humanity, humor and good story-telling. And, begging Mr. Bosher's pardon, it is the most exquisitely "moral" American novel since Huck and Jim set off down the mighty Mississippi.

Read about the other books on the list.

To Kill a Mockingbird also made TIME magazine's top 10 list of books you were forced to read in school, John Mullan's list of ten of the best lawyers in literature, Lisa Scottoline's top ten list of books about justice, and Luke Leitch's list of ten literary one-hit wonders. It is one of Sanjeev Bhaskar's six best books.

In Reading My Father "there’s a lot of territory, emotional and literary, that [Styron]... quite skillfully covers," says Kate Feiffer, who grew up with Alexandra Styron.

--Marshal Zeringue

George Vecsey's six favorite books

New York Times sports columnist George Vecsey is the author of Stan Musial: An American Life.

One of his six favorite books, as told to The Week magazine:

Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe

My parents introduced me to Wolfe at 15, and soon I was staying up past midnight to join Wolfe’s family in Asheville, N.C. Wolfe felt like such an observer, an outsider—a writer—that he filled my teenage heart with a major dose of angst and ambition.

Read about the other books on Vecsey's list.

--Marshal Zeringue