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Recommendations based on Eleven Kinds of Lonelinessby Richard Yates
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Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
An American couple's struggle to stay afloat in suburban conventions and expectations.
Set in 1955, the novel focuses on the hopes and aspirations of Frank and April Wheeler, self-assured Connecticut suburbanites who see themselves as very different from their neighbors in the ... (Wikipedia)
Stoner
by John Williams
An academic's life of quiet desperation, finding solace in literature.
William Stoner is born on a small farm in 1891. After high school, the county agent advises he go to agriculture school. Stoner enrolls in the University of Missouri , where all agriculture students ... (Wikipedia)
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
by Raymond Carver
An exploration of mundane moments and everyday lives of ordinary people.
With this, his first collection, Carver breathed new life into the short story. In the pared-down style that has since become his hallmark, Carver showed us how humour and tragedy dwelt in the hearts ... (Goodreads)
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
by Raymond Carver
Exploration of relationships, revealing the complexities of love and its many forms.
Alternate-cover edition can be found, here, In his second collection, Carver establishes his reputation as one of the most celebrated and beloved short-story writers in American literature—a haunting ... (Goodreads)
Let the Great World Spin
by Colum McCann
Interconnected stories of ordinary lives in 1970s New York, inspired by a high-wire artist's death-defying feat.
The events of the story are told in a largely non-linear fashion, with several different narrators telling the story from different perspectives. The story is interspersed with fictionalized accounts ... (Wikipedia)
The Sense of an Ending
by Julian Barnes
An exploration of memory and its impact on the present, looking at the choices we make in life.
By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be ... (Goodreads)
Augustus
by John Williams
Epic historical novel about the life and reign of the first Roman Emperor Augustus.
Told through various letters and fragments, Augustus begins when Gaius Octavius Thurinus is 17 and is called away from his mother by his great-uncle, Julius Caesar , who reveals he intends to groom ... (Wikipedia)
Austerlitz
by W.G. Sebald
A man discovers his past and identity through the story of a Jewish boy who escaped Nazi Germany.
Jacques Austerlitz, the main character in the book, is an architectural historian who encounters and befriends the solitary narrator in Antwerp during the 1960s. Gradually we come to understand his ... (Wikipedia)
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories
by Flannery O'Connor
A collection of short stories exploring the human condition, from the comic to the grotesque.
This now classic book revealed Flannery O'Connor as one of the most original and provocative writers to emerge from the South. Her apocalyptic vision of life is expressed through grotesque, often ... (Goodreads)
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Díaz
An exploration of love, identity, and the power of fate in a family's struggles and triumphs.
Oscar de León (nicknamed Oscar Wao, a bastardization of Oscar Wilde ) is an overweight Dominican growing up in Paterson, New Jersey. Oscar desperately wants to be successful with women but, from a ... (Wikipedia)
No Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy
A gripping tale of violence and pursuit in Texas' desolate landscape.
The plot follows the interweaving paths of the three central characters (Llewelyn Moss, Anton Chigurh , and Ed Tom Bell) set in motion by events related to a drug deal gone bad near the ... (Wikipedia)
Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A portrait of the struggles of a troubled man, exploring his inner turmoil.
The novel is divided into two parts. Serving as an introduction into the mind of the narrator, the first part of Notes from Underground is split into nine chapters: The narrator observes that utopian ... (Wikipedia)
The Book of Disquiet
by Fernando Pessoa
A collection of philosophical reflections on life, love and fate.
Fernando Pessoa was many writers in one. He attributed his prolific writings to a wide range of alternate selves, each of which had a distinct biography, ideology, and horoscope. When he died in ... (Goodreads)
Song of Solomon
by Toni Morrison
A tale of family, heritage, and identity, exploring the power of memory and its impact on the present.
Song of Solomon opens with the death of Robert Smith, an insurance agent and member of The Seven Days, an organization that kills white people in retaliation for the racial killing of black people. ... (Wikipedia)
The End of the Affair
by Graham Greene
A man's obsession and journey of love, struggling with faith, hatred and forgiveness.
"A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses a moment of experience from which to look ahead..." "This is a record of hate far more than of love," writes Maurice Bendrix in the opening ... (Goodreads)
The Rings of Saturn
by W.G. Sebald
An exploration of the physical and metaphysical landscapes of the English coast.
The Rings of Saturn — with its curious archive of photographs — records a walking tour along the east coast of England. A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is ... (Goodreads)
The Secret History
by Donna Tartt
A small group of misfit college students uncover a sinister secret and their lives become entangled with dangerous consequences.
Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the ... (Goodreads)
We
by Yevgeny Zamyatin
A dystopian tale of a totalitarian state and its citizens' struggle for freedom.
A few hundred years after the One State's conquest of the entire world, the spaceship Integral is being built in order to invade and conquer extraterrestrial planets. Meanwhile, the project's chief ... (Wikipedia)
Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
A fantastical exploration of the cities of the imagination and the possibilities of life.
"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young ... (Goodreads)
Play It As It Lays
by Joan Didion
A woman's search for identity amidst the glamour and emptiness of 1960s Hollywood.
The novel begins with an internal monologue by the 31-year-old Maria Wyeth, followed by short reminiscences of her friend Helene, and ex-husband, film producer Carter Lang. The further narration is ... (Wikipedia)
Serena
by Ron Rash
Newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton build a timber empire in 1929 North Carolina, but their ruthless ambition leads to tragedy.
The year is 1929, and newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton travel from Boston to the North Carolina mountains where they plan to create a timber empire. George has already lived in the camp long ... (Wikipedia)
Kiss of the Spider Woman
by Manuel Puig
An unlikely friendship between two prisoners, exploring themes of sexuality, fantasy and politics.
Two prisoners, Luis Molina and Valentín Arregui, share a cell in a Buenos Aires prison. The story takes place between September 9, 1975 and October 8, 1975. , Molina, a transgender woman, is in jail ... (Wikipedia)
A Happy Death
by Albert Camus
A young man seeks to escape the monotony of his life and find meaning in death.
Is it possible to die a happy death? This is the central question of Camus's astonishing early novel, published posthumously and greeted as a major literary event. It tells the story of a young ... (Goodreads)
The New York Trilogy
by Paul Auster
A series of interconnected stories exploring the hidden mysteries of New York City.
A 2006 reissue by Penguin Books is fronted by new pulp magazine -style covers by comic book illustrator Art Spiegelman . The first story, City of Glass , features an author of detective fiction who ... (Wikipedia)
The Broom of the System
by David Foster Wallace
A humorous exploration of modern life as a young woman struggles to make sense of the world.
Published when Wallace was just twenty-four years old, The Broom of the System stunned critics and marked the emergence of an extraordinary new talent. At the center of this outlandishly funny, ... (Goodreads)
The Fall
by Albert Camus
A man's journey into alienation and despair, driven by a sense of absurdity in life.
The Fall, ( French :, La Chute, ) is a philosophical novel by Albert Camus . First published in 1956, it is his last complete work of fiction. Set in Amsterdam , The Fall consists of a series of ... (Wikipedia)
The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
Tragic story of the decline of a southern family, exploring the human condition.
The first section of the novel is narrated by Benjamin "Benjy" Compson, a source of shame to the family due to his diminished mental capacity; the only characters who show genuine care for him are ... (Wikipedia)
Self-Help
by Lorrie Moore
Collection of humorous short stories exploring the lives of characters facing disappointments and heartbreaks.
In these tales of loss and pleasure, lovers and family, a woman learns to conduct an affair, a child of divorce dances with her mother, and a woman with a terminal illness contemplates her exit. ... (Goodreads)
The Thing Around Your Neck
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Collection of stories about the struggles and triumphs of Nigerian immigrants in America.
Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck map, with Adichie's signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply ... (Goodreads)
A Strangeness in My Mind
by Orhan Pamuk
A story of a street vendor's life in Istanbul, exploring his dreams, disappointments and daily encounters.
A Strangeness In My Mind is a novel Orhan Pamuk has worked on for six years. It is the story of boza seller Mevlut, the woman to whom he wrote three years' worth of love letters, and their life in ... (Goodreads)
