Former Teamster Thomas Kelly is the author of Payback and The Rackets. His new novel, Empire Rising, has just been published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Scribner, $13). Eighty years on, this novel still sparkles like the Manhattan skyline. It is a brilliant deconstruction of the American dream. I reread it every few years, and it gets better each time. It amazes me how contemporary it feels. Buy it at Amazon.com
Fat City by Leonard Gardner (University of California, $16). Gardner’s ode to small-time boxers in California’s Central Valley is not just the best boxing novel ever written. It is a perfectly crafted gem of a book. Like Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, Gardner is a writer of immense talent who has produced only one novel.
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Beauty Before Comfort by Allison Glock (Random House, $13). This memoir about an amazing woman (the author’s grandmother) is part ode to the lost America of the industrial town, part examination of what it is like to be stuck in a small place with big dreams, and part graciously detailed portrait. Everything in the book is infused with heart and verve, and the characters jump right off the page.
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (Broadway, $15). O’Brien’s story of American boys surviving the jungles of Vietnam will stand the test of time. Filled with lucid prose and startling insight about men at war, it is a novel that haunts you long after you finish it.
This Side of Brightness by Colum McCann (Picador, $13). A beautifully written novel, set against the backdrop of the building of New York City, that describes one family’s tragic fall. McCann is easily one of the best young writers to come along in years. Whether he’s writing about the sandhogs who built New York’s tunnels or the heartache of motherhood, he hits it right on every time.
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