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British historian Dan Jones is the author of The New York Times nonfiction best sellers The Plantagenets and Powers and Thrones. Lion Hearts, the third novel in his Essex Dogs trilogy, a thriller series set in 14th-century France and England, is now in paperback.
‘American Tabloid’ by James Ellroy (1995)
Often described as a crime writer, Ellroy is to my mind one of the greatest living writers of historical fiction. American Tabloid is part of his Underworld USA Trilogy, alongside The Cold Six Thousand and Blood’s a Rover, and it’s a grotesque vision of the events surrounding John F. Kennedy’s assassination. It’s biting, fevered, slangy, and ugly. Buy it here.
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While working with the artist Marina Amaral on three books about the history of photography, this was my bible. The great Life magazine photographers—Alfred Eisenstaedt, Robert Capa, and all—were pioneering, fearless, and often weird. John Loengard’s oral interviews tell their story. Buy it here.
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Eliot was the English Tolstoy, with a vicious sting in her tail. I listened to this on audiobook, and its one-liners are so savage that I would have to pull the car over to write them down. Eliot blows Dickens and Austen out of the park. This is a majestic and hilarious book. Buy it here.
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When my daughter was assigned this novel in school, I read it so that the two of us could discuss it on long drives. Whoa, baby! Waugh on his turn from satirical humorist to dark inquisitor of the human condition is in full effect here. Is the morality fable at the end an allegory of purgatory or hell? My daughter and I are still debating that. Buy it here.
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