Fiction
Heim, Scott
Mysterious Skin
The summer I was eight years old, five hours disappeared from my life.
Thompson, Jim
The Grifters
Darn! I been grifted!
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand
Journey to the End of the Night
Here’s how it started.
Chabon, Michael
The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay
In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.
Genet, Jean
Querelle
The notion of murder often brings to mind the notion of sea and sailors.
(PDF only)
Tartt, Donna
The Secret History
The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.
Capote, Truman
In Cold Blood
The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.”
Mishima, Yukio
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
“Sleep well, dear.”
Powers, Richard
The Echo Maker
Cranes keep landing as night falls.
Fuentes, Carlos
The Death of Artemio Cruz
I wake . . . the touch of that cold object against my penis awakens me.
Irving, John
In One Person
I’m going to begin by telling you about Miss Frost.
Hardy, Thomas
Jude the Obscure
The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.
Pynchon, Thomas
Bleeding Edge
It’s the first day of spring 2001, and Maxine Tarnow, though some still have her in their system as Loeffler, is walking her boys to school.
Doctorow, E.L.
Ragtime
In 1902 Father built a house at the crest of the Broadview Avenue hill in New Rochelle, New York.
Woolf, Virginia
The Voyage Out
As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm.
Woolf, Virginia
Orlando
He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.
Dos Passos, John
42nd Parallel
(U.S.A. Trilogy #1)
General Miles with his gaudy uniform and spirited charger was the center for all eyes, especially as his steed was extremely restless.
Ishiguro, Kazuo
Never Let Me Go
My name is Kathy H. and I live in a room, and I got no sister and no dog, and I am STUPID!
I’ve added some reviews of this book in the Commentary section below.
Kundera, Milan
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!
Cain, James M.
The Postman Always Rings Twice
They threw me off the hay truck about noon.
Cather, Willa
My Antonia
Last summer, in a season of intense heat, Jim Burden and I happened to be crossing Iowa on the same train.
Barnes, Julian
The Sense of an Ending
I remember, in no particular order:
—a shiny inner wrist;
—steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;
—gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house;
—a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torch beams;
—another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface;
—bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door.
Burroughs, William S.
Junkie
I was born in 1914 in a solid, three-story, brick house in a large Midwest city.
Burroughs, William S.
Queer
Lee turned his attention to a Jewish boy named Carl Steinberg, whom he had known casually for about a year.
Conrad, Joseph
Nostromo
In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco—the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity—had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo.
Maugham, W. Somerset
Of Human Bondage
The day broke gray and dull.
Stead, Christina
The Man Who Loved Children
All the June Saturday afternoon Sam Pollit’s children were on the lookout for him as they skated around the dirt sidewalks and seamed old asphalt of R Street and Reservoir Road that bounded the deep-grassed acres of Tohoga House, their home.
Greene, Graham
The Power and the Glory
Mr Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust.
Grass, Günter
The Tin Drum
Granted: I’m an inmate in a mental institution; my keeper watches me, scarcely lets me out of sight, for there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can’t see through blue-eyed types like me.
Faulkner, William
Absalom, Absalom!
From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that—a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.
Commentary / Articles
Poteshman, Allen
Unusual Option Market Activity and the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001
The Journal of Business, Vol. 79, No. 4 (July 2006), pp. 1703–26
Sexton, David
Commentary on Never Let Me Go
Literary Hub, April 26, 2023
Menand, Louis
Review of Never Let Me Go
The New Yorker, March 20, 2005
Kerr, Sarah
Review of Never Let Me Go
New York Times, April 17, 2005
Cusk, Rachel
Review of Never Let Me Go
The Guardian, January 28, 2011
Franzen, Jonathan
Article on The Man Who Loved Children
Jonathan Franzen wrote this article about The Man Who Loved Children in 2010.
Jarrell, Randall
Article on The Man Who Loved Children
This is really cool. Franzen told us how great this book is in 2010. But he was not the first. Randall Jarrell (not a well-known name today, but he was a Poet Laureate of the United States in the 1950s) wrote this article in 1965. Here is a facsimile of the actual pages of the Atlantic Monthly in which it appeared.