At Swim-Two-Birds 1938
Author: Flann O'Brien[/left] 
O'Brien—in real life Irishman Brian O'Nolan—would have been disappointed if anybody could come up with a coherent summary of this brilliant, beer-soaked miniature masterpiece. One of the best-kept secrets of 20th-century literature,
At Swim-Two-Birds is ostensibly a novel about a lazy, impoverished college student who's writing a novel ("One beginning and one ending for a book is a thing I did not agree with," he opines), but his characters won't stay put, and they get mixed up with all kinds of local Dublin types and figures out of Gaelic myth—it's like Ulysses played out in a comic mode, on a more human scale. Dylan Thomas said of it, "This is just the book to give your sister if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl." Even better to keep it for yourself.—L.G
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Atonement 2002
Author: Ian McEwan
A magnificent deception. Briony Tallis, the intricate English girl at the center of
Atonement, is a budding writer. At the age of 13 she believes that through her powers of invention and language, "an unruly world could be made just so." In a complicated way, she turns out to be right, but only after she turns out to be catastrophically wrong. In the first half of the book, she passionately misunderstands a series of events she witnesses on a summer day in 1935, which leads her to formulate a lie that ruins the lives of her older sister Cecilia and Cecilia's lover Robbie. So much for the virtues of the imagination. But McEwan is crafty. Even as he shows us the deadly force of storytelling, he demonstrates its beguilements on every page. Then he leads us to a surprise ending in which the power of fiction, which has been used to undo lives, is used again to make heartbroken amends.—R.L.
From the TIME Archive:
It's McEwan's subtle game to show fiction working its worst kind of curse, then leading us unawares to give it our blessing
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Beloved 1987
Author: Toni Morrison
Sethe is an escaped slave in post-Civil War Ohio. Her body is scarred from the atrocities of her white owners, but it's her memories that really torture her: she killed her 2-year-old daughter, Beloved, so the child would never know the sufferings of a life of servitude. But in Morrison's novels the present is never safe from the past, and Beloved returns as an angry, hungry ghost. Sethe must come to terms with her, exorcise her, if she ever wants to move forward and find peace. Rich with historical, political and above all personal resonances, written in prose that melts and runs with the heat of the emotion it carries,
Beloved is a deeply American, urgently important novel that searches for that final balance between grief, anger and acceptance.—L.G.
From the TIME Archive:
Beloved is full of vivid images, freshly rendered
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The Berlin Stories 1946
Author: Christopher Isherwood
"I am a camera with its shutter open." There is something unmistakably 20th Century about this, the opening line to
Goodbye to Berlin. In their coolness and clarity and melancholy detachment these words express more about a moment in time than most entire novels do.
Berlin Stories is not quite a novel; it's actually two short ones stuck together,
The Last of Mr. Norris and
Goodbye to Berlin. But they form one coherent snapshot of a lost world, the antic, cosmopolitan Berlin of the 1930's, where jolly expatriates dance faster and faster, as if that would save them from the creeping rise of Nazism. One of Isherwood's greatest characters, the racy, doomed Sally Bowles, took center stage in the book's musical adaptation,
Cabaret, but the theatrical version can't match the power and richness of the original.—L.G.
From the TIME Archive:
This portrait of an old rapscallion is satire too cold to be amusing; it is written with the analytic distaste of one who watches without pity the dwindling of a pathologically older generation
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The Big Sleep 1939
Author: Raymond Chandler
"I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be." This sentence, from the first paragraph of
The Big Sleep, marks the last time you can be fully confident that you know what's going on. The first novel by Raymond Chandler, who at the time was a 51-year-old former oil company executive, is a mosaic of shadows, a dark tracery of forking paths. Along them wanders Philip Marlowe, a cynical, perfectly hard-boiled private investigator hired by an old millionaire to find the husband of his beautiful, bitchy wildcat daughter. Marlowe is tough and determined, and he does his best to be a good guy, but there are no true heroes in Chandler's sun-baked, godforsaken Los Angeles, and every plot turn reveals how truly twisted the human heart is.—L.G.
From the TIME Archive:
Detective Marlowe is plunged into a mess of murderers, thugs and psychopaths
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The Blind Assassin 2000
Author: Margaret Atwood
Frosty, reserved Iris and her hot-blooded sister Laura grow up wealthy and privileged in a chilly Canadian town. But when the family fortune falters in the Depression, Iris is married off to a cruel industrialist, and Laura drives her car off a bridge, leaving behind a pulpy science fiction novel (presented in parallel to the primary plot) that seems to contain a coded, masked guide to the secrets that ruled her life and brought about her early death. Told in the brittle, acerbic voice of the elderly Iris, who is left behind to decode Laura's legacy,
The Blind Assassin is a tour-de-force of nested narratives, subtle reveals and buried memories.—L.G..
From the TIME Archive:
Iris Chase is a brilliant addition to Atwood's roster of fascinating fictional narrators. Not only is her story sinuously complex, but she is entertaining company
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Blood Meridian 1986
Author: Cormac McCarthy
"The floor of the playa lay smooth and unbroken by any track and the mountains in their blue islands stood footless in the void like floating temples." McCarthy's prose has the character of the landscape it describes: Harsh and pure, as if it had been sculpted by wind and sand, like a naturally occurring phenomenon. In
Blood Meridian McCarthy uses it to spin a yarn of gothic violence: In the 1840's a young boy joins a band of cutthroats who hunt Indians on the border between Texas and Mexico, under the leadership of an amoral, albino arch-monster known as the Judge. Rarely has literature presented spectacles of violence more extreme or less gratuitous.
Blood Meridian summons up shadows of Dante and Melville, and demands of every reader that they reexamine why and how they cling to morality in a fallen world.—L.G
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Brideshead Revisited 1946
Author: Evelyn Waugh
Once and only once in his career the bitter, urbane, howlingly funny satirist Evelyn Waugh screwed up all his nerve and his talent and produced a genuine literary masterpiece. Though it's saddled with a faded doily of a title,
Brideshead Revisited is actually a wildly entertaining, swooningly funny-sad story about an impressionable young man, Charles Ryder, who goes to Oxford in the 1930's and falls in love with a family: the wealthy, eccentric, aristocratic Flytes, owners of a grand old country house called Brideshead. In the first half of the book the exquisite, hilariously fey Sebastian Flyte, who is Charles's classmate, teaches the young man about beauty, booze and witty conversation. In the second half every one grows up and everything goes spectacularly to smash. Told in flashbacks from the dark days of WWII,
Brideshead is aglimmer with the guttering-candle glow of an elegant age that was already passing away.—L.G.
From the TIME Archive:
To many U.S. readers this book will be their first exposure to one of the wittiest, most corrosively mocking and violently serious minds now writing English prose
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The Bridge of San Luis Rey 1927
Author: Thornton Wilder
Whatever happened to Wilder? He was a lion in his day, prized—Pulitzer-prized, as this book was—a star of stage and page. Today, notwithstanding the occasional production of
Our Town or
The Skin of Our Teeth, he's ever in danger of falling out of fashion. He seems too courtly, too composed. For proof of how powerful those qualities can be, there's this book. In 1714, "the finest bridge in all Peru" collapses and five people plunge to their deaths. Brother Juniper, a Franciscan missionary, decides to track down their individual stories to prove that even what seem to be random misfortunes are consistent with God's plan. That his discoveries turn out to be more complex will come as no surprise. What may surprise are the beguilements of Wilder's teasing, ironic, beautifully written tale, unlike anything else in American fiction.— R.L.
From the TIME Archive:
The delicacies of Author Wilder's prose cannot be intimated in so rude a summary of the material of his book
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