The Greatest Literary Fiction

It's maybe not the oldest story in the world, as The Epic of Gilgamesh is sometimes called. There had been other stories floating around the ancient world before the various versions of Gilgamesh, and who knows.... Critique • Quotes • Translations • Buy the book

Many notable literary figures have acclaimed the Iliad as a transporting work of art. I don't entirely get it. Even after having read several different translations of the epic poem. I suspect any.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Translations • Buy the book

This one has it all. The Odyssey is not only a great romantic, adventure epic, but it's terribly realistic in its depiction of human nature and a brilliantly crafted narrative. Authors today could learn from.... Critique • Quotes • Translations • Buy the book

Separately the plays in Aeschylus's house of Atreus trilogy are skimpy. Or they may seem so to the modern reader or theatregoer. In each instalment the narrative turns on a single great dramatic incident. In Agamemnon.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

It's the concluding instalment of Sophocles's so-called Theban trilogy about the tragedy of Oedipus and its ramifications. But Antigone was actually the first written and produced—more than a decade before the supposed.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book

For a modern reader, the ancient drama of Oedipus Rex can be startlingly accessible. There is little of the struggle through the language that one experiences with even more recent plays, such as Shakespeare's.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book

My first reaction to Ovid's Metamorphoses was mystification. This was one of the great books of Western culture. Ovid was said to be wickedly delightful to read compared to other ancients. And I was reading.... Critique • Quotes • Translations • Buy the book

It wasn't called Beowulf until 1805 and was not printed till 1815, more than a millennium after its appearance in manuscript. But to early Anglo-Saxons, the slaying of the monster Grendel.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Translations • At the movies • Buy the book

Sometimes The Tale of Genji is called the world's first novel, though it can feel more like the world's first soap opera. To begin with, it never ends. It's very, very long and the plot never comes to a resolution. Various.... Critique • Quotes • Translations • Buy the book

It can be difficult to read Edward II today as a Christopher Marlow play. One keeps sliding into thinking of it as minor Shakespeare—you know, all those early plays with kings and numerals in their titles. Partly this is a matter of.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Possibly Shakespeare's best-known play. Everyone knows the story of star-crossed lovers who defied their families—the feuding Capulets and Montagues—and ended their lives tragically. Romeo and Juliet is a play with.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

I once read all Shakespeare's historical plays in chronological order. Not in the order he wrote them, but in the order of the historical events they supposedly relate. Like many before me, I discovered that (1) the historical.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

The major issue of contention whenever The Merchant of Venice comes up, of course, is the portrayal of Shylock, the Jewish money-lender, the villain of the piece for the most part. So let's deal with that first. On the side of.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

This play ought to be called Brutus, since the central theme concerns that character's decision to join an assassination conspiracy and the repercussions of his action. The titular figure, Julius Caesar, is dispensed with by the.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Hamlet is such a famous play—so much the great drama, the one that everyone in the world can quote at least six words from—that we usually can't see how strange it is that this should be so. Look at the.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Interesting thing about Othello is that it concerns a man of African heritage who is victimized in a white European society, and yet racism is never the central issue. Othello, the "Moor of Venice", is done in by Iago's.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

First, get refined ideas of "classic" out of your mind when you approach Don Quixote. For, as with many of the greatest works of prose literature, this is a lively, earthy story of flesh-and-blood people. Sure, the central.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book

A straightforward play really, about a dysfunctional family. People thinks it's cosmic because of that annoying storm in the middle. That's not my opinion but the summary of Jonathan Miller, given in a television interview.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book

Macbeth was actually king of Scotland for seventeen years, though you would never get this from one of Shakespeare's most popular plays. Historians consider Macbeth and his wife to have been relatively good and.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy,

A favourite play. Not exactly sure why. It doesn't present many of the elements generally admired in drama. No great tragedy. Not much scintillating wit. Little realism. A fantastic plot and several fantasy characters, which.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book

There's so much to enjoy here, it's surprising this is not Molière's most popular play. After its initial run of twenty performances, it was hardly performed for several centuries until revived in the mid-1900s. And even now... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book

Aphra Behn's most famous work might disappoint a reader who has heard it's a staunchly anti-slavery, anti-colonialist or feminist work. One may find Oroonoko is none of those things, at least by modern standards.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

The biggest mystery about Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe may be why it is so well known, so fondly remembered, so enshrined in our culture. As novels go, this is one dreadful piece of work.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

It's often called the first modern novel. Or, worse, a post-modern novel written before the modern had been invented. Which ought to turn off anyone looking for a good read. So here's the story of Laurence Sterne's.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

The Vicar of Wakefield is supposed to be a satire, an ever gentle one in which the wide-eyed trust and peiety of the good pastor leave him at the mercy of larcenous rascals, until they have stripped him clean of everything.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Two things keep me from dismissing the drama She Stoops to Conquer as severely overrated. One: I don't recall seeing it performed. Live on stage it may be hilarious for all I know. And two: if it's overrated, it's been long.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Partway through The Sorrows of Young Werther you might wonder if this is actually a parody of romantic writing. Werther's attachment to his beloved Charlotte, Lotte for short, can come across as a ridiculously over-the-top.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

In the dichotomy suggested in the title, Jane Austen in her first published work comes down conclusively on the side of sense over sensibility. It's supposed to be a study of two marriageable sisters with the eldest.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Pride and Prejudice has one of the most skilful beginnings in literature. It opens of course with that famous "truth universally acknowledged" about single men and fortunes—and its equally delicious corollary.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

If you're a Jane Austen aficionado, particularly loving her headstrong heroines picking their plucky but principled way through the constricting marriage plots of the time, Mansfield Park may come as.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

If you're not a Jane Austen admirer, Emma could be her novel you most despise. But if you are a fan, Emma is likely the one you most think shows how adept a writer she was. Austen set out in the last of.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

By several standards Frankenstein is a very poorly written novel. The narrative wanders all over, bogging down in irrelevant subplots and extraneous characters, the characters (except for one) are thinly and.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

Thanks in part to movies based on it, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame calls up images of Gothic horror in the public imagination. The novel is associated with other dark nineteenth-century classics like Frankenstein.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Oliver Twist may be the novel most publicly associated with Dickens, though it's not nearly his best nor his most admired. It may also be the first major novel to feature a child as the central character.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

Everyone knows the story of A Christmas Carol, if not from reading Charles Dickens, then from incessant showings of the many film versions, especially at the holiday season. And everyone thinks they know the.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

Charlotte Brontë's narrator and protagonist, like many a youthful Dickens protagonist, is the epitome of spunk. But Jane Eyre is also female, a young girl to begin with and a young woman for much of.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

I'm somewhat stumped by Wuthering Heights. It's solidly ensconced in the literary canon and inflicted on classes of students. And plenty of people—readers and writers alike—seem to love it. But.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

The first half of David Copperfield, concerning a young boy's struggles against repressive step-parents and draconian schoolmasters, is one of the greatest, most affecting novels ever written. The second half.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

Everyone knows the general story of The Scarlet Letter as referenced in the title. A young, married woman in an early American colony, Hester Prynne, becomes pregnant from an affair with a man she refuses to name, and.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Bleak House has its ardent admirers who declare it among Charles Dickens's masterpieces, as well as its detractors who call it one of his most grotesque potboilers. The author's strengths are.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

You could make a case for every Charles Dickens novel being atypical in some way, but Little Dorrit really is a special case. It's been called his most political novel—the book George Bernard Shaw said converted him.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book

Some critics and writers consider it the greatest novel ever. And most consider it the most influential. Yet, Madame Bovary on first reading may strike the modern reader in English as, well, all right but hardly the best.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

It's the most political of Charles Dickens's novels, it's the least political—even anti-political—of Dickens's novels in some ways. But its positions on politics, revolution, mob rule, democracy and reformism has tended to.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

In the argument about whether The Woman in White or The Moonstone is Wilkie Collins's first great mystery novel—and thus arguably the first great mystery novel ever—a compromise is generally found.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

George Eliot's first great popular novel gives only hints of the depths to be plumbed in the future, yet it has become an enduring favourite for its own virtues. In many ways, The Mill on the Floss is a silly romantic.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

The greatest expectation to be quashed in Great Expectations may be our assumption that the innocent lad at the centre of the story will turn out to be another David Copperfield or.... Critique • Other views • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy the book

Les Misérables is one of the few translated books English speakers know by the original title, in part because we are familiar with the name (or its abbreviation Les Miz) from popular film and stage productions. But.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

After spending a good part of a summer living in and out of War and Peace, I was dismayed to learn Leo Tolstoy disdained the book in his latter years. The novel, whose title has become shorthand for monumentally.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

The Moonstone is sometimes presented as the first great mystery novel. It wasn't the first of its kind though. Wilkie Collins's own The Woman in White eight years earlier featured a mystery and a crime-solving detective.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

All fiction—all art or entertainment really—is either disturbing or comforting. Most works both disturb and comfort in varying measures. It's why we read: to experience ups and down of life outside our own. Some works.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

What's incredible about Middlemarch, George Eliot's masterwork, is how engrossing it is. I mean, this is a novel that deals with issues of art, education reform, scholarly research, medical science and provincial British politics.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book

Far from the Madding Crowd was Hardy's first great novel and the one that made his reputation. It also might be the only real crowd-pleaser among his great works. For it not only has tragedy, intrigue, betrayal.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

In our world the escapades of young Tom Sawyer are recounted in the shadow cast by his more famous friend, Huckleberry Finn. Yet, during author Mark Twain's life, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was his most.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book

Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina are usually both among the books competing for the title of "greatest of all time". They often take turns at the top spot. A Tolstoy fan though.... Critique • Quotes • Translations • At the movies • Buy the book

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of those modern classics you should re-read every ten years or so. Partly because, like most classics, it keeps giving, offering up more and different aspects each time. Read in youth.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book

When Tess of the D'Urbervilles first came out in book form in late 1891, it was in equal parts hailed as Thomas Hardy's masterpiece and condemned as a moral outrage. The latter opinion was due mainly to the novel's.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Everyone knows the central conceit of The Picture of Dorian Gray: a beautiful young man remains unblemished by age, while his painted portrait, hidden from public sight, grows older and corrupted by moral.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Jude the Obscure is the novel whose reception, coming five years after the similar scandal of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, is famous for leading Hardy to quit writing novels. The book was widely denounced as "Jude the Obscene".... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Lord Jim is one of the Joseph Conrad novels that has me thinking at times "This may be the best writing I've ever read" and at other times "Come on, get on with it, would you?" Part of this ambivalence can be put down to... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

If Rudyard Kipling were to publish his most acclaimed novel today, he would likely face more than the usual charges of colonialism and imperialism that have been levelled at him through much of the twentieth century.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book

If we have to pick one aspect that might make Buddenbrooks the first important novel of the twentieth century, it could be its moral ambiguity. The story of the Buddenbrook family is told over four generations.... Critique • Quotes • Translations • Buy the book

You think you know Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness even if you haven't read it in years, or ever. It's been widely taught in school, so its most famous lines ring with musty familiarity. Its plot has been adapted for.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Samuel Butler never published The Way of All Flesh in his lifetime, being unsatisfied with it. I can understand why he might have wanted to rework it. The story is skimpy, again being sandwiched among pages and chapters.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book

It is difficult to separate The Forsyte Saga from the justly acclaimed films and television series based on it. The adaptations have enchanted everyone who followed them, most of whom have likely never read the books. But.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Joseph Conrad's novel of a century earlier was apparently widely read again, especially in Western intelligence circles. I'm not sure, though, what those new readers.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

At least one reprint edition of Under Western Eyes is decorated with nautical graphics, as someone must have thought befitting a Joseph Conrad yarn. Not realizing, of course, this is a Conrad story unlike almost any other.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Dubliners is a wonderful collection of stories you can go back to at different times in your life and appreciate on different levels each time. They were written and published before James Joyce got sidetracked by his.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

I love the way this novel starts. If you're doing a biographical story, why not start at the very beginning with the perceptions of an infant? Well, baby tuckoo grows up quickly in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and becomes.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

It doesn't sound promising. Like one of those dreary, early Canadian novels some of us had to read in school about settlers in rural North America. Immigrants set up house and farm in the new land, discover the country is.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Life in smalltown America has long been celebrated or satirized in fiction, but seldom as comprehensively or as pointedly as in Sinclair Lewis's first great novel, some would argue his greatest work. The impact of Main Street.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book

I've read Ulysses five times. It's not that I love it so much. It may be because I've heard so often this is the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Or perhaps because it's so difficult, I figured I had to keep.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

A century after its first publication, the story of George Babbitt can elicit reactions of both "This is so dated!" and "Just like today!" And often from the same readers. Sinclair Lewis's most influential novel, Babbitt, deftly satirizes.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy the book

Partway though a rereading of Mrs Dalloway a sudden idea threatened to upset everything I had ever thought about the author. Was it possible Virginia Woolf was really making fun of her insufferably effete lead.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Unbelievably, few people read The Great Gatsby when it was first published. In the roaring Twenties, its questioning of the American Dream may not have been welcome. Other American writers, like Sinclair Lewis.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

It's an irony that the first successful novel by the writer often accused of being mindlessly ballsy features a hero without a penis. Jake Barnes had it shot off in the war, a tragedy that prevents him and the woman who.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

This novel hasn't a single character one is likely to care about. Normally this would be the death knell for a piece of fiction. But somehow To the Lighthouse won immediate acclaim upon publication in 1925 and has ever since.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Death Comes for the Archbishop is often considered Willa Cather's masterpiece and is on several lists as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century—which may be surprising if you read it alongside other.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

All Quiet on the Western Front is the kind of book you've heard about forever as a Great Book, one you've always meant to read some day, and yet it sounds so heavy and depressing and so...so worthwhile... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

A Farewell to Arms has been called the best American novel to come out of World War I. That could be accurate. I can think of few other American novels that are even contenders, though I can also.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Pearl S. Buck has sometimes been accused of stereotyping the Chinese peasants as noble, simple creatures. But this was hardly the reaction to The Good Earth in the early 1930s when it became a sensation in.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Some writers are not really good novelists—don't seem to have the artistic talents to shape words, sentences and paragraphs into conventional novelistic form—and yet can recognize a great story and marshal the.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

A tip for reading Tender Is the Night. Don't try it right after The Great Gatsby, even though it was Scott Fitzgerald's next novel. If you do, you'll be disappointed. The tight writing of Gatsby—with its.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Appointment in Samarra is about as perfectly structured and written a novel of American social critique as you could find in the first half of the twentieth century—up there with Babbitt and The Great Gatsby. True.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

It has always seemed like the perfect American novella. A poignant and disturbing story told effortlessly, of simple folks on the fringe of society who turn out to be quite complex. But read Of Mice and Men a second.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

"Science split the atom and Joyce split the word." This summary of progress in the first half of the twentieth century has often been stated in reference to Finnegans Wake. James Joyce chops up words and fuses syllables.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

The Grapes of Wrath is John Steinbeck's most controversial work, seeming to advocate a socialist revolution to end the misery of the dispossessed folks during the dirty nineteen-thirties. It can only be this apparent.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

The Day of the Locust was so underrated in 1939 when it came out and in the years immediately following author Nathanael West's death in 1940, that when critics eventually rediscovered the man's works they.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Darkness at Noon was not quite what I had expected, based on what I had heard. Fans and critics had described it as presenting the ordeal of an innocent man charged during the Moscow show trials of the 1930s. Torture.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

For me this is the big Hemingway book—his greatest work and one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century. And it is a big book, his longest. But For Whom the Bell Tolls does not read as long. Partly.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Why do we still read Brideshead Revisited? An account of aimless, upper-class, young men wasting their time at Oxford University in hedonism. Until the story is swallowed by the larger theme of an intensely.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

By rights, there should be little interest remaining in Graham Greene's 1948 story of a white colonialist policeman, wracked with guilt over his lapsed Catholicism, corruption, career failures and duplicitous relationships.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

This was hailed by Time as the best novel about the Second World War. And for once, Time might have had it right. If we add the qualifier "American" between "best" and "novel". I was surprised in reading.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Few novels divide readers as The Catcher in the Rye does. This may sound like a bizarre thing to say, since J.D. Salinger's novel has been wildly popular since it came out in 1951. It's been lauded as changing the course of.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

A lot has been said about Hemingway's ideals of courage, grace under pressure, and all that. My own feeling is that what he really wanted was to be considered wise. His lead characters usually have a stillness... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Is it all timshel? Steinbeck has his main character drop the word at the end of the novel. Earlier it had been explained that the Hebrew word from the Bible meant that humankind may or may not triumph over evil.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

The biggest obstacle to properly appreciating The Quiet American as a novel may be Graham Greene's uncanny political prescience. In the 1950s, when Vietnam wasn't yet on the radar for most Western readers, when U.S.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Lolita is the kind of book that grows thicker each time you read it. The first time you may race through the novel to take in the plot of the man who loves and loses a preadolescent girl, what he calls a "nymphet". More.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

On the Road is the easiest novel to find "great lines" in. Open to any page. Jack Kerouac's writing is at such a consistent intensity that important, poetic, rhythmic, quotable sentences typical of the book's overall tone.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Anyone reading Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time may be surprised to find it is not entirely about racism. The trial of a black man, Tom Robinson, on a spurious charge of rape, for which the novel.... Critique • Quotes • Quotes • Buy the book

John Updike is most known for Rabbit, Run but it's not his best or best-reviewed novel. It's not even his best or best-reviewed novel in the book series it kicks off. That would be the sequel, Rabbit Redux, the one critics.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Whenever he was told he's never written anything else as good as Catch-22, Joseph Heller was tempted to reply, "Who has?" A bit of hyperbole. There are plenty of modern novels as good as, or better than, Catch-22.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

I can see how this novel's liberal use of crude, four-letter words—presented not with shocking effect but as mundane, even romantic, language—might have appealed in the striving-to-be-liberated 1960s and 1970s. But.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Sometimes it seems the English-speaking world spent the entire twentieth century trying to shake off the repressions of the Victorian era. The rebellious 1960s, for example, may have prided themselves on rejecting.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

It was one of the naughtier books—but not the naughtiest—in a long line of books that scandalized some and enticed many more in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even if you never read Portnoy's Complaint then, you'd heard.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Write what you know, they tell beginning writers. And even veteran, successful authors tend to stick to this guideline. Which is why we get so many novels about people trying to write novels. It's also one of the.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Two kinds of people are apt to hate Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: advanced philosophy majors and advanced novel readers. As a novel, Zen is terrible. Virtually no narrative, cardboard characters, and generally.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

You may find online a video of John Irving discussing how both he and Stephen King have striven not to please, but to appall. Once you get over the shock of discovering literary icon Irving and horrormeister King are mutual.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

The story behind the discovery of this novel has become such an inspiring and sad modern legend that I want to be able to say the novel itself is brilliant. Either that, or be able to call it a disaster—to spite misguided.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

The English title of José Saramago's most acclaimed novel, Baltasar and Blimunda, gives the impression it's a love story, about the love between the soldier who has lost a hand in battle and the girl who has been orphaned by.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

After his post-apocalyptic tales of psychological horror, after his scandalous work on human mangling and perverse sexuality, J.G. Ballard turned to producing his most conventional, biographical and realistic.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

If you're well-versed in science fiction—or speculative fiction as it's often called—and you approach The Handmaid's Tale as an example of that genre, you may be disappointed. The world of Margaret.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Love in the Time of Cholera is a favourite novel for lovers who take from it something like "Love conquers all" or "Follow your heart". Yet, Gabriel García Márquez's story also appeals to cynics who see the yearning.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

From those wonderful, shocking opening lines to the end, Ellen Foster is a completely absorbing novel, and the incredible thing is that Kaye Gibbons seems not to work at it. It all just flows straight from Ellen's strange young.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

So many people, whose opinions I otherwise value, have told me how incredibly impressed they were by The Bonfire of the Vanities that I wonder what I'm missing, as I have only a middling appreciation for.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

It may seem odd an acclaimed series of novels near the end of the twentieth century should feature characters from the period of the First World War. Or that issues from that war time should continue to resonate with.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Blindness may be the most popular of José Saramago's novels, possibly because it is one of his easiest to get into. From the beginning the plot reads like a science fiction story—one of those tales in which a virus or.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Alias Grace may be Margaret Atwood's best novel. It may not be her most popular (guessing that's The Handmaid's Tale). Nor her most complex or elaborate (probably The Blind Assassin). Nor her most.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book

Let's see. Margaret Atwood writes her prize-winning novel The Blind Assassin about an elderly woman writing her memoirs about her sisters, one of whom has written a novel called The Blind Assassin, which recounts her trysts.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

Of all Philip Roth's novels, The Human Stain comes closest to being a masterwork comparable to classic literature. Compared to most of his other works, which offer discrete slices of American life, the 2000 novel.... Critique • Quotes • Buy the book

It's hard not to think "classic" as you're reading Atonement. Especially in the first half with its scenes of country estate life, reminiscent of Jane Austen or the Brontë novels, as experienced through the.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy the book