Alec Wilkinson

Alec Wilkinson is the author of several nonfiction books. His most recent work, My Mentor: A Young Man’s Friendship with William Maxwell (Houghton Mifflin, $22), was published in April.

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell (Vintage Books, $10). A novel about the consequences of the murder of a tenant farmer in a small town in central Illinois at the beginning of the 20th century. Flawless and deeply felt; in the minds of many people one of the greatest American short novels.

The Viceroy of Ouidah by Bruce Chatwin (Viking Press, $12). Chatwin was earlier in his career—this is his second book, published in 1980—an exceptionally interesting and versatile stylist. The book is an imaginative account of the career of Francisco Felix de Souza, a Brazilian slave trader, and it is taut and spare and strange.

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The Sudden View by Sybille Bedford (out of print). A travel book about Mexico by a brilliant and acute observer. Handsomely written, published in 1953. Mainly a novelist, Bedford in this book is effortlessly funny and original. A dispatch from an unfailingly reliable witness.

Great Plains by Ian Frazier (Picador USA, $13). Also a travel book. During the 1980s Frazier lived in Montana and made trips up and down and across the plains, mostly visiting historical sites. His perceptions are uncannily singular but also resonant and penetrating, and the writing is in all places understated and beautiful. An immensely instructive and companionable book.

The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel edited and translated by Walter Morison (out of print). Perhaps the best edition of Babel’s stories. Morison’s translations are unflowery and without literary pretensions and so are deeply literary—that is, they preserve the essence of Babel’s storytelling without ever striving for an effect. Babel’s stories are concise to the point of being poetic; many are a page and a half long. The characters are Cossacks and Jewish gangsters and their families, and Babel’s writing is such that you feel their presence.

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene (Penguin USA, $14). Greene was a masterful narrative writer and this is widely regarded as his best novel. It’s about a priest in southern Mexico during an anti-clerical purge. He is frail in his disciplines—a whisky priest—but his sense of the value of human life is enlarged. Hunted down like game, he becomes, almost inadvertently, a heroic figure. One long astonishment.