by Budd Schulberg (Really a story about drunken F.S. Fitzgerald's boozy last years in Hollywood)
What Makes Sammy Run
by Budd Schulberg (page turner about Hollywood ambition. Hard boiled 1940s dialogue)
The Narrow Corner
by Somerset Maugham (a colonial steamer-ride to Southeast Asia, when it was really off the map)
The Reserve
by Russell Banks (just good writing. A writer that's gotten better with age!)
Last Night at the Lobster
by Stewart O'Nan (A deep journey into that Red Lobster, in the mall parking lot, during a blizzard)
The Pat Hobby Stories
by F.S.Fitzgerald (He got paid less than $100 a story, and needed every cent. Real potboilers and page turners)
Roughing It
by Mark Twain (Steamships, gold rush, mormons, San Francisco and the world)
Music of Chance
by Paul Auster (setting + 2 characters = story)
Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates (Best captures suburbs)
Car
by Harry Crews (A man eats a car.)
Feast of Snakes
by Harry Crews
The Fork River Space Project
by Wright Morris (great short novel if you can find it)
The Nuclear Age
by Tim O'Brien
Alas Babylon
(apocalypse comes to Florida)
Cloudsplitter
by Russell Banks (John Brown gets all messianic and takes his family along with.)
Aftermath
by Brian Shawver (More dark tales of suburban restaurant management)
American Brutus
by Michael Kauffman (John Wilkes Booth: Another messianic son)
Finn
by Jon Clinch (Dark Americana inwhich the blindly ambitious heretic always returns to the River.)
A Bend in the River
by VS. Naipaul (What do YOU know about East Africa?)
Rimbaud: A Biography
by Graham Robb (The first documented counter cultural romantic warrior poet (before the days of institutionalized, dorm-room poet-revolutionaries. Real blood, mud, diahrea, sexand disappearance).
Mark Twain: A Life
by Ron Powers (The man went around the world making people laugh from Hannibal, MO. to Northern India).
Stride Toward Freedom
by Martin Luther King (Before he was a postage stamp)
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy (Father and Son and apocalypse)
Youth
by Josef Conrad
Short Stories
by Haruki Murakami (Opens up ideas of narrative)
Cannery Row
by John Steinbeck (Take me to the Palace Flophouse).
Whistle
by James Jones (WWII aftermath)
The Quiet American
by Graham Greene (Colonialism turns into the Vietnam War)
A Rumor of War
by Philip Caputo (Vietnam war memoir that reads like fiction . . . but it ain't).
Ask the Dust
by John Fante (Los Angeles on less than 5 cents a day).
Harpo Speaks
by Harpo Marx
Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
Mother Night, Breakfast of Champions, Slapstick
by Kurt Vonnegut
Hard Times
by Studs Terkel
(Interviews with americans in the Great Depression. It was bad.)
Underworld
by Don DeLillo
(It's long. I read it once on several busses in Mexico. I skimmed the parts about baseball, but it pretty much captured something about the United States from 1950-2000).
Short Stories
by Somerset Maugham
(Again, dust off the leather-bound volumes at your grandmother's house).
April Parade
by Richard Yates
Book of Illusions
by Paul Auster
(Silent movies in a book)
Oracle Night
by Paul Auster
(Trapped in a bomb shelter in KC, MO).
Lorca: A Dream of Life
by Leslie Stainton
(A biography of the Andalusian poet. From Granada to the world via trains and steamships.)
Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels
by Jack Kerouac
(I read them before I ever saw San Francisco or the mountains out west. I guess that they have something to do with how I got there.)
Makes Me Wanna Holler
by Nathan McCall
(Loaned to me in a dorm in Washington DC. A true story of growing up a black man.)
Soledad Brother
by George Jackson
(Reflections from prison before his murder.)
The Strawberry Statement
by James Simon Kunen
(1968 Columbia University uprising. "Never trust anyone over 3.")
In Cold Blood
by Truman Capote
(Don't read it in a farmhouse in western Kansas).
PrairyErth
by William Least-Heat Moon
(The Flint Hills in 4-dimensions)
The Fools Progress
by Edward Abby
(A western writer's requiem.)
Angle of Repose
by Wallace Stegner
(Northern California in deep).
A Confederate General from Big Sur, Trout Fishing in America
by Richard Brautigan
(Goofing off in California).
The Darling
by Russell Banks
(Liberia mon amour)
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