In a blistering satire wherein segregation is reintroduced in a small California town, novelist Paul Beatty takes aim at just about everyone in America.
Nathaniel Rich’s new novel is Odds Against Tomorrow; he is also the author of The Mayor's Tongue. He lives in New Orleans. Follow @nathanielrich on Twitter.
Mary Gaitskill’s novel about a stunning and cruel supermodel would be unrecognizable to the cookie-baking hyper-friendly #girlsquads of today.
In Independence Day, the Everyman hero of of Richard Ford’s series glides along as his own revolution is surrendered.
A critical hit when it was published, this novel of a toxic America full of people poisoned by reality has achieved the status of unquestioned literary classic.
Edward Abbey’s madcap Monkey Wrench Gang inspired the likes of Earth First!—and the incoherent motives of both radical groups led to pretty much nothing.
Well before he’d even touched LSD, the novelist /pharmaceutical visionary saw the potential of mind control for fun and profit in the The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
In Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov wrote a love letter to the English language, skewered ’50s America, and created a pedophile protagonist who was both loathsome and likeable.
Long before he wrote the gritty Harlem crime novels that would secure his reputation, the take-no-prisoners author crafted a debut novel so dark it still unsettles.
Alicensed pilot himself, Faulkner tackled the bizarre subculture of daredevil fliers in Pylon, a novel permeated with the Depression’s desperate neuroticism.
The 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was a massive hit—everybody from the Prince of Wales to William Faulkner loved it—and personifies the Jazz Age.