Myla Goldberg

Myla Goldberg is the author of Bee Season (Knopf, $13). She is currently at work on her next novel, Wickett’s Remedy.

USA: The 42nd Parallel/1919/Big Money by John Dos Passos (Library of America, $40). This guy is every inch as important as Faulkner and Steinbeck and all those other canonical dead guys. These books tell a great story, and they do it in a way that is still inventive almost 70 years after the fact, creating an epic and memorable portrait of early-20th-century America.

The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz (Viking Press, $14). Beautiful, hallucinatory short stories that make the mundane mythic. Schulz rarely ever left the confines of the small Polish town of his birth; his imagination was so intensely vivid he didn’t need to.

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Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (Perennial Classics, $14). I avoided this book forever because it was perpetually assigned in English lit classes, but then I finally picked it up and had the top of my head blown off by the power of its language. Beautiful prose and a keen eye and ear for the way people talk, think, and act make it an indelible read.

The Life of Insects by Victor Pelevin (Penguin USA, $12). It’s about insects, who are people, who are insects, and if anyone but Pelevin had tried to write it, it would have probably been really awful, but instead it’s a brilliant and often comic allegory about human nature and life in postcommunist Russia.

Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell (Vintage Books, $16). Mitchell had an incredible knack for tracking down and then capturing on paper the personalities and places of old New York. Each piece in this collection presents such a vivid portrait you’ll finish up half convinced you drank beers with these characters yourself.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville (Bantam Classics, $5). I picked this up out of a postcollegiate English major’s guilt for never having cracked it, and told myself I was allowed to stop after 50 pages. Instead I found myself in for one of the rides of my life. It’s innovative, smart, by turns funny and thrilling, and I have absolutely no idea how the guy was able to pull it off.