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 Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
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.