[This collection of short stories is a C4 Great Read.]

Author: Bruno Schulz

1977, Viking Penguin

Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories

Originally written for an audience of one, Bruno Schulz composed the first draft of The Street of Crocodiles in a series of letters to a friend. After editing, publishing, republishing, and translation, these stories still retain the intimacy of personal correspondence. Each one invites you into the narrator’s life, his city, home, and family, and insists that you stay, not just for supper, not just for the night, but as a guest in one of the extra rooms at the top of the stairs.

It’s neither a novel nor a conventional story collection. While characters and conflicts reappear throughout, there’s no continuous narrative arc, and though each piece has its own peculiar preoccupations, the setting and the narrator remain constant from one to the next. It reads like both a childhood memoir and a work of mythology, at once willfully domestic and larger than life. …
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[This collection of short stories is a C4 Great Read.]

Author: Tom Rachman

2010, The Dial Press

Filed under: Literary, Short Stories

The Imperfectionists is yet another book miscategorized by its own cover. This is not a novel, not by a long shot, but the fact that it’s not a novel is one of the reasons it works so well.

This is a collection of stories. They are, very loosely, linked: they all feature people connected in some way to a nameless English-language international newspaper based in Rome. Some characters appear in multiple stories, a few in nearly all of them. But instead of a single narrative arc, The Imperfectionists chronicles the interior lives and private problems of each of its varied characters, and it’s that variety and interiority (along with, of course, excellent writing) that makes this collection so strong. …
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[This novel is a C4 Great Read.]

Author: J.D. Salinger

1961, Little, Brown & Company

Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories

I suspect many of you have already read this book, either because it was assigned in school way back when, or because gobbling up J.D. Salinger is an American teen rite of passage. I, it shames me a little to admit, never did. But now I have. Good on me.

This is going to be a real brief review, and not even much of a review. More of like a signpost point to why you should read this. It’s short, it’s funny, and it’s superbly written. I guess that’s about the sum of it. I’ll go on though.

Franny and Zooey is comprised two short stories (originally published in the New Yorker—in fact, there’s a bunch of good Salinger in their archives, like the novella, Hapworth 16, 1924, unpublished outside the magazine) attached together. As a whole, it makes up about 100 pages and 5 scenes. …
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[This first-hand account of life inside Sing Sing is a C4 Great Read.]

Author: Ted Conover

Vintage Books, 2001

Filed under: Literary, Nonfiction

When Ted Conover wanted to write a book about the lives of prison guards, he started the way most journalists would: he asked the New York Department of Correctional Services (DOCS) for access. They denied him permission.

Considering Conover’s methods as a writer, he probably wanted to be denied. He’s an immersion journalist—one who embeds himself in the lives he wants to chronicle. He becomes one of his subjects. So after the DOCS said no, Conover became a “Newjack,” or a rookie guard, at Sing Sing, one of the most notorious prisons in the country. Newjack is the result of Conover’s experience.

At it’s core, Newjack reads like a travel narrative, and Conover’s experience is a journey. Conover guides us through the prison block, and shows us its inhabitants. He explains his training, and he points out how it left him mostly unqualified for what he would encounter within the walls. He tells us about Sing Sing’s infamous history—its menacing wardens, death chamber, and well-used electric chair—and he shows us how life inside is still just as nasty as it was when Sing Sing was the death penalty capital of the country.

…
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[This novel is a C4 Great Read.]

Author: Millard Kaufman

2010, McSweeney’s

Filed under: Literary, Mystery, Thriller

Misadventure is a terrific book. Its author, the late Millard Kaufman, was McSweeney’s's famous “boy novelist,” renowned for publishing his first novel, Bowl of Cherries, at 90.

While this is only his second novel, Kaufman’s been writing his whole life. He worked in 1950s Hollywood as a screenwriter, and it shows. Misadventure hovers somewhere between mystery and thriller—let’s call it “suspense”—and its tone and feel are reminiscent of Tinseltown’s Golden Age.

It’s a book that isn’t shy about having an intricate, twisting plot, but it still gets its drive from vivid characters and the way it dives headfirst into conflicts, one after another. …
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[This novel is a C4 Great Read.]

Author: Bernard Malamud

1966, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Filed under: Literary

I didn’t know much about Bernard Malamud before I read The Fixer. I’d heard his name before, but that was where it ended. Not one of his books appeared on any syllabus in any class I took in undergrad or in graduate school, and only one person ever recommended him to me. So now I’m a little miffed that I’ve only just discovered him. How did I miss this? Forget that Malamud won a couple of National Book Awards and the Pulitzer, forget that there’s a PEN award named after him, this is just some of the best prose I’ve ever read. His name belongs next to Saul Bellow and Phillip Roth, and The Fixer belongs next to some of the most important books of the 20th century. …
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[This novel is a C4 Great Read.]

Author: Robert Coover

Overlook Duckworth, 2010

Filed under: Literary, Mystery

If you’re a fan of postmodernism, I’m assuming you already have this book. I’m assuming it was delivered to your door—in an envelope marked only with a muted trumpet—by a nameless letter carrier you will never meet.

This review is for everybody else, everybody who didn’t get the muted trumpet joke (was it even a joke?). This is not an essay about postmodernism, its only purpose is to help you decide whether you should read this book.

In short, you should. Noir is very, very good. The mystery part of it is pretty hard to follow, but Coover’s enthralling writing, great humor, and boundless creativity make for a really fun read. And at barely 200 pages, you’ll be lucky to stretch it out for three days. …
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[This novel is a C4 Great Read.]

Author: Edward P. Jones

2003, Amistad

Filed Under Literary, Historical

It’s difficult to decide where to start discussing The Known World.  The novel opens and closes in 1855 on the plantation of Henry Townsend, a black slave-owner living in Manchester County, Virginia.  In between, the narrative casts so far into the past and the future that beginnings and endings seem to merge.  The past is ever present, and the future provides historical context for events yet to pass.  The Known World begins and ends in nearly every paragraph.

I admit it’s confusing at first.  The prose is full of time cues, reminding the reader of where the story is and of the order in which certain events fall.  You’ll probably have to reread early passages or even the entire first chapter, but once you get used to the rhythm of it, my guess is you’ll be hooked.  Jones’ manages to make all the temporal pointing sound like a refrain, and soon the novel starts to read like a long hymn to history. …
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[This graphic novel is a C4 Great Read.]

Written and illustrated by David Lapham

Vertigo, 2007

Filed under: Graphic Novels

David Lapham’s 2007 graphic novel Silverfish reads like an illustrated screenplay for a never-filmed John Carpenter-style suburban thriller. And while writer/illustrator Lapham is clearly familiar with (and fond of) the conventions of such films (Chief of Police father, bratty, rich-girl best friends, overly nice strangers with terrible secrets, etc.), he isn’t merely paying tribute to a lost genre, but reviving it in a separate medium.

If cinematic horror has largely abandoned atmosphere, suspense, and character, why shouldn’t comics pick up the slack? It’s not the novelty of “cinematic comics” that makes Silverfish such an exciting read, though; any comic that uses wide panels and dramatic visuals can make the same claim. Urgent pacing, realistic (if supernaturally tinted) danger, and a bold visual style set Silverfish apart in a field flush with predictable plots and flat characters. …
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This book has been chosen as a Great Read

Author: Wallace Stegner

1938

Filed Under Literary, Historical, Western

A friend of mine loaned me The Big Rock Candy Mountain as the capstone to a conversation about Great American Novels.  Wallace Stegner is an author I’d heard a lot about but never read.  As a novice, I was a little intimidated by the bulk of the book.  My friend assured me it was well worth the 563 page commitment.  And it was.  That and more.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain is an American saga about the trials of the Mason family. Set against the historical sweep of the early 20^th century, the closing of the West, the First World War, the Roaring Twenties, and the Great Depression, Bo Mason leads his wife and sons in the reckless pursuit of their fortune, leaving his wife Elsa to salvage a life for all of them in the margins of her husband’s endless ambitions. …
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