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| Rope Burns by F.X. Toole |
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| The Cave by Jose Saramago |
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| House of Splendid Isolation by Edna O'Brien |
"Billy didn't need someone to pour him his drinks, he needed someone to tell him that living isn't poetry. It isn't prayer. To tell him and convince him. And none of us could do it, Danny, because every one of us thought that as long as Billy believed it was, as long as he kept himself believing it, then maybe it could still be true. Jesus Christ, Danny," he said, and then stopped. In the silence that followed, I fully expected him to say, It was a lie. It was a lie and Billy knew it." (P. 194)
"In my half-century quest to memorize the face of America, I've come to value the communities of fellow travelers, even those who get no farther than over to the next hollow or across to the other side of the river.
"A journey into the land is an opening to escape limitations of inadequate learning and go beyond bonds of prejudice and get past restrictions of ignorance. Such a trip is an invitation to listen to new voices--within and without--that will speak and inform. It's an opportunity to put a face on a country, a face composed of smiles, grins, scowls, of concerns, hopes, and dreams, all of them more useful on a human visage than on a yellow lapel-button or a road map."
[from Heat-Moon, William L. Here, There, Elsewhere, New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2013, p. 350.]
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| Charming Billy by Alice McDermott |
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| Wizard - The Life & Times of Nicola Tesla: Biography of a Genius by Marc Seifer |
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| The World at Night by Alan Furst |
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| Josef Skvorecky's The Cowards |
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| Ride with Me, Mariah Montana by Ivan Doig |
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| Here, There Elsewhere by William Least Heat-Moon |
"In my half-century quest to memorize the face of America, I've come to value the communities of fellow travelers, even those who get no farther than over to the next hollow or across to the other side of the river.
"A journey into the land is an opening to escape limitations of inadequate learning and go beyond bonds of prejudice and get past restrictions of ignorance. Such a trip is an invitation to listen to new voices--within and without--that will speak and inform. It's an opportunity to put a face on a country, a face composed of smiles, grins, scowls, of concerns, hopes, and dreams, all of them more useful on a human visage than on a yellow lapel-button or a road map."
[from Heat-Moon, William L. Here, There, Elsewhere, New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2013, p. 350.]
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| Townie by Andre Dubus III |
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| Light Years by James Salter |
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| Margaret Drabble The Gates of Ivory |
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| A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers |
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| Benediction by Kent Haruf |
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| Simon Winchester's Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms,and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories |
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| Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz |
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| 2666 by Roberto Bolano |
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| The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr |
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| The Stories of Muriel Spark |
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| Taco USA by Gustavo Arellano |
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| Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro |
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| The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie |
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| The Game Players of Titan by Philip K. Dick |
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| The Radetsky March by Joseph Roth |
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| A Far Cry From Kensington by Muriel Spark |
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| The Double by Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
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| New Ways To Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families by Colm Toibin |
"...all fiction comes from a direct source and makes its way indirectly to the page or the stage. It does so by finding metaphors, by building screens, by working on half truths, moulding them towards a form that is both pure and impure fabrication. There is simply no other way of doing it. Most plays, novels, and stories use the same stealthy process. [Sebastian] Barry, by stealing [Charles] Haughey,
simply exposed an age-old system."*
(*) Excerpted from Colm Toibin's New Ways To Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families. New York: Scribner, 2012.
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| Where You Once Belonged by Kent Haruf |
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| Fifth Business by Robertson Davies |
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| Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls |
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| Stoner by John Williams |
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| Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape by Barry Lopez |
"At the heart of this narrative, then, are three themes: the influence of the arctic landscape on the human imagination. How a desire to put a landscape to use shapes our evaluation of it. And confronted by an unknown landscape, what happens to our sense of wealth.
"What does it mean to grow rich? Is it to have red-blooded adventures and to make a fortune, which is what brought the whalers and other entrepreneurs north? Or is it, rather, to have a good family life and to be imbued with a far-reaching and intimate knowledge of one's homeland, which is what the Tununirmiut told the whalers at Pond's Bay wealth was? Is it to retain a capacity for awe and astonishment in our lives, to continue to hunger after what is genuine and worthy? Is it to live at moral peace with the universe?
"...It is possible to imagine afresh the way to a lasting security of the soul and heart, and toward an accommodation in the flow of time we call history.... That dream is the dream of great and common people alike." [from Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, pp. 13-14]
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| Wait Until Spring, Bandini by John Fante |
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| Cain at Gettysburg by Ralph Peters |
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| Jeremy's Version by James Purdy |
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| Give Us a Kiss by Daniel Woodrell |
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| Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver |
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| Cartesian Sonata by William H. Gass |
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| The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler |
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| Ask the Dust by John Fante |
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| Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx |
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| The Professor of Desire by Philip Roth |
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| The Road to Los Angeles by John Fante |
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| John Fante's The Brotherhood of the Grape |
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| King of the Vagabonds by Neal Stephenson |
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| The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary |
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| Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford |
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| The Wine of Youth by John Fante. Selected Stories. [Clockwise from top left: Book cover of edition I'm reading; Fante and his dog; Dago Red, stories from which appear in The Wine of Youth; Italian version of My Father's God (story); French version of The Wine of Youth.] |
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| Odalisque by Neal Stephenson. Stephenson is surrounded by historical characters who hover over the pages of Odalisque: [L:top & bottom: Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz; R:top & bottom: William of Orange, Sophia of Hanover] |
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| Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand |
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| A History of God by Karen Armstrong |
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| The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes |
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| The Story of the Night by Colm Toibin |
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| Red Gold by Alan Furst |
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| Mocking Desire by Drago Jancar |
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| Fraud by Anita Brookner |
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| The Flame Throwers by Rachel Kushner |
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| Ham On Rye by Charles Bukowski |
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| On the Rez by Ian Frazier |
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| Mission to Paris by Alan Furst |
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