Notes About the Books

INTRODUCTION

  1. “For us, books have turned into fast food”: Jeanette Winterson, preface in Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York: New Directions, 2006), x.
  2. “languishing,” a term coined by sociologist Corey Keyes: Adam Grant, “There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling,” New York Times, April 19, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/well/mind/covid-mental-health-languishing.html.
  3. what psychologist Adam Grant called “Zoom fatigue”: Adam Grant, “There’s a Specific Kind of Joy We’ve Been Missing,” New York Times, July 10, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/10/opinion/sunday/covid-group-emotions-happiness.html?searchResultPosition=54.
  4. sniffed at as a mere novella: Julia White, “Too Short for the Booker Shortlist?” Express, September 6, 2007, https://www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/18485/Too-short-for-the-Booker-shortlist.
  5. “the novella is the supreme literary form”: Katy Guest, “Novella Award Organisers Have Defined a Novel as Being a Piece of Fiction Between 20,000 and 40,000 Words,” Independent, July 18, 2015, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/novella-award-organisers-have-defined-a-novel-as-being-a-piece-of-fiction-between-20-000-and-40-000-words-10399161.html.
  6. “The classics are books that exert a peculiar influence”: Italo Calvino, “Why Read the Classics?,” New York Review of Books, October 9, 1986, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1986/10/09/why-read-the-classics/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=The%20new%20nybookscom&utm_content=The%20new%20nybookscom+CID_8d6854dc831566e65daa890de3fe88df&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=Why%20Read%20the%20Classics.
  7. “He is worse educated”: Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925), 11.

AGOSTINO

  1. “… as if he were a man rather than a thirteen-year-old boy”: Alberto Moravia, Agostino, trans. Michael F. Moore (New York: New York Review Books, 2014), 3.
  2. “All the bathers on the beach”: Ibid., 3.
  3. At his death in 1990: Clyde Haberman, “Alberto Moravia, Novelist, Is Dead at 82,” New York Times, September 27, 1990, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/27/obituaries/alberto-moravia-novelist-is-dead-at-82.html.
  4. “My education, my formal education that is, is practically nil”: Alberto Moravia, “The Art of Fiction No. 6,” interview by Ben Johnson and Anna Maria de Dominicis, Paris Review, no. 6 (Summer 1954), https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5093/the-art-of-fiction-no-6-alberto-moravia.
  5. he wrote Agostino in the space of a month: Michael F. Moore, “Translator’s Note” in Moravia, Agostino, 105.
  6. Nominated for the Nobel Prize fifteen times: “Nomination Archive,” NobelPrize.org, November 24, 2021, https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/show_people.php?id=6403.
  7. he was found dead, at age eighty-two: Haberman, “Alberto Moravia, Novelist, Is Dead at 82.”
  8. “Like many a forlorn poet”: Moore, “Translator’s Note,” 108.

ANIMAL FARM: A FAIRY STORY

  1. Number 31 on the Modern Library list of 100 Best Novels: Modern Library, “100 Best Novels,” https://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/.
  2. Time:“All-TIME 100 Novels”: Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo, “All-Time 100 Novels,” Time, January 6, 2010, https://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novels/slide/all/.
  3. “Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night”: George Orwell, Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (New York: Berkley, 2020), 3.
  4. “Is it not crystal clear, then, comrades”: Ibid., 7.
  5. “lower-upper-middle class”: George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Left Books Club, 1937), 1.
  6. “a hard-won conviction, born of his experience with Stalinism”: Timothy Naftali, “George Orwell’s List,” New York Times, July 29, 1998.
  7. “… no intention of damaging the ‘socialist’ cause”: Russell Baker, afterword to Orwell, Animal Farm, 102.
  8. “A fairy story, if you will”: Téa Obreht, introduction to Orwell, Animal Farm, xx.
  9. Modern Library list of the 100 Best Novels of the twentieth century: Modern Library, “100 Best Novels.”

ANOTHER BROOKLYN

  1. “what is tragic isn’t the moment”: Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn (New York: Amistad, 2017), 1.
  2. “the music felt like it had always been playing”: Ibid., 2.
  3. a position created in 2008 by the Library of Congress: Alexandra Alter, “Jacqueline Woodson Is Named National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature,” New York Times, January 4, 2018.
  4. a MacArthur Fellow—the so-called genius award: MacArthur Foundation, “Jacqueline Woodson: Class of 2020,” https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2020/jacqueline-woodson.
  5. “whose complete works have made an important, lasting contribution to children’s literature”: International Board on Books for Young People, “Presentation of Hans Christian Anderson Award for 2020,” https://www.ibby.org/subnavigation/archives/hans-christian-andersen-awards/2020.
  6. “folded my hands on the desks”: Jacqueline Woodson, “My Biography” on personal website, https://www.jacquelinewoodson.com/all-about-me/my-biography/.
  7. “That kind of choice was not an option”: Jacqueline Woodson, interview by Code Switch, Fresh Air, National Public Radio, December 10, 2014, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/12/10/369736205/jacqueline-woodson-on-growing-up-coming-out-and-saying-hi-to-strangers.
  8. “This is a book full of poems”: Veronica Chambers, “Where We Enter,” New York Times, August 22, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/books/review/jacqueline-woodsons-brown-girl-dreaming.html.

THE AWAKENING

  1. “A green and yellow parrot”: Kate Chopin, The Awakening, in The Awakening and Selected Stories of Kate Chopin, ed. Barbara H. Solomon (New York: Signet Classics, 1976), 1.
  2. “Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman”: Ibid., 9.
  3. “where no woman had swum before”: Ibid., 32.
  4. “the touch of the sea is sensuous”: Ibid., 15.
  5. “treating them as no one else had in American fiction”: Barbara H. Solomon, introduction to Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Stories of Kate Chopin, xxix.
  6. “the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Awakening”: “Kate Chopin: A Re-Awakening,” Public Broadcasting Service, June 23, 1999, https://www.pbs.org/katechopin/.
  7. one of her most widely read pieces: Editors of KateChopin.org, “Kate Chopin’s Short Stories,” Kate Chopin International Society, https://www.katechopin.org/kate-chopins-short-stories-composition-publication-dates/.

THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFÉ

  1. “The town itself is dreary”: Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories (New York: Mariner Books, 2005), 3.
  2. “for the sake of pleasure”: Ibid., 22.
  3. “I was sure that I was born a man”: Sarah Schulman, “McCullers: Canon Fodder,” The Nation, June 8, 2000, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/mccullers-canon-fodder/.
  4. “an overly self-aware adolescent girl”: Ibid.
  5. “the marriage was plagued by alcoholism”: Carlos Dews, “Carson McCullers,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, last modified October 6, 2019, https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/carson-mccullers-1917-1967/.
  6. McCullers was inspired by a dwarf she had seen: Sherill Tippins, “Genius and High Jinks at 7 Middagh Street,” New York Times, February 6, 2005, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/nyregion/thecity/genius-and-high-jinks-at-7-middagh-street.html.
  7. a personal drama partly expressed: Dews, “Carson McCullers.”
  8. Reeves McCullers committed suicide: Ibid.
  9. she died in Nyack, New York: Ibid.
  10. “There are the lover and the beloved”: McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café, 25.
  11. “This opening has the power of music”: Hilton Als, “Unhappy Endings,” New Yorker, November 25, 2001.
  12. “Outsiderness was McCullers’s great theme”: Megan O’Grady, “She Found Carson McCullers’s Love Letters. They Taught Her Something About Herself,” New York Times, February 4, 2020.
  13. on the Modern Library list of 100 Best Novels: Modern Library, “100 Best Novels,” https://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/.
  14. “embrace white and black humanity in one sweep”: Richard Wright, cited in Schulman, “McCullers.”

BIG BOY LEAVES HOME

  1. “beating tangled vines and bushes with long sticks”: Richard Wright, Big Boy Leaves Home, in Uncle Tom’s Children (New York: HarperCollins/Olive Editions, 2021), 21.
  2. “low-down politicians, prehensile town boomers, ignorant hedge preachers”: “About H. L. Mencken,” the Mencken House website, https://menckenhouse.org/aboutmencken/.
  3. “He was using words as a weapon”: Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 293.
  4. attacked Native Son as confirming racist stereotypes: Ayana Mathis and Pankaj Mishra, “James Baldwin Denounced Richard Wright’s ‘Native Son’ as a ‘Protest Novel.’ Was He Right?,” New York Times, February 24, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/books/review/james-baldwin-denounced-richard-wrights-native-son-as-a-protest-novel-was-he-right.html.
  5. “propelled by a fierce determination to break the silence”: Richard Yarborough, “Introduction to the Perennial Edition” in Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children, xxxiii.
  6. “It was this that made me get to work in dead earnest”: Richard Wright, “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” in Native Son (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940), 531.
  7. “Wright wanted his words to be weapons”: Hazel Rowley, “Richard Wright” entry in Harlem Renaissance Lives, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 556.

BONJOUR TRISTESSE

  1. “A strange melancholy pervades me”: Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse, trans. Irene Ash (New York: HarperPerennial Modern Classics, 2008), 5.
  2. the youngest author to achieve that distinction: Eric Pace, “Françoise Sagan, Who Had a Best Seller at 19 with ‘Bonjour Tristesse,’ Dies at 69,” New York Times, September 25, 2004.
  3. “It was inconceivable”: Ibid.
  4. “Sagan is far more of a classicist”: Rachel Cusk, “Françoise Sagan, the Great Interrogator of Morality,” New Yorker, August 21, 2019.
  5. “Many found it to be the superior book”: Diane Johnson, foreword to Françoise Sagan, A Certain Smile (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 3.

CANDIDE, OR OPTIMISM

  1. “Once upon a time in Westphalia”: Voltaire, Candide, trans. and ed. Theo Cuffe (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005), 3.
  2. “with great kicks to his backside”: Ibid., 5.
  3. “It is the price we pay for the sugar”: Ibid., 52.
  4. “and goes on making us laugh”: Charles Styles, “The Best Voltaire Books,” Five Books, https://fivebooks.com/best-books/voltaire-nicholas-cronk/.
  5. “charged with atheism by fanatics and scoundrels”: Voltaire, A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 31.

CHARLOTTE’S WEB

  1. “ ‘Where’s Papa going with that ax?’ ”: E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 1.
  2. “ ‘But just call me Charlotte’ ”: Ibid., 37.
  3. “Charlotte was both”: Ibid., 184.
  4. “100 Most Important Nonfiction Books”: Erin Skarda, “All-TIME 100 Nonfiction Books,” Time, August 16, 2011.
  5. “E. B. White was a great essayist”: William Shawn, quoted in Herbert Mitgang, “E.B. White, Essayist and Stylist, Dies,” New York Times, October 2, 1985, https://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/02/books/eb-white-essayist-and-stylist-dies.html.
  6. “As a piece of work”: Eudora Welty, “Along Came a Spider,” New York Times, October 19, 1952, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/22/specials/welty-charlotte.html.
  7. sixth on the list of books most checked out: New York Public Library, “Top 10 Checkouts of All Time,” New York Public Library, 2021, https://www.nypl.org/125/topcheckouts.
  8. “Omit needless words”: William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, The Elements of Style (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), 39.

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

  1. Number 65 on the Modern Library list of 100 Best Novels: Modern Library, “100 Best Novels,” https://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/.
  2. Time: “All-TIME 100 Novels”: Richard Lacayo, “All-TIME 100 Novels: A Clockwork Orange,” Time, January 7, 2010, https://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novels/slide/a-clockwork-orange-1963-by-anthony-burgess/.
  3. “ ‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’ ”: Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), 3.
  4. could be Leningrad or New York: Anthony Burgess, “The Clockwork Condition,” New Yorker, May 28, 2012.
  5. “Does God want goodness”: Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, 106.
  6. the brutality he depicted in A Clockwork Orange: Herbert Mitgang, “Anthony Burgess, 76, Dies; Man of Letters and Music,” New York Times, November 26, 1993, https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/26/obituaries/anthony-burgess-76-dies-man-of-letters-and-music.html?searchResultPosition=2.
  7. he had been misdiagnosed: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, “Anthony Burgess, 1917–1993, Biographical Sketch,” http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/research/fa/burgess.bio.html.
  8. “I first heard the expression”: Burgess, “The Clockwork Condition,” New Yorker.
  9. “I needed money back in 1961”: Anthony Burgess, “A Clockwork Orange Resucked,” in A Clockwork Orange, xi.
  10. extolled by a New York Times reviewer as “brilliant”: Brian O’Doherty, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, March 19, 1963, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1963/03/19/96968044.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0.
  11. with Mick Jagger as Alex: American Film Institute, “A Clockwork Orange (1971),” American Film Institute Catalog, https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/54041.
  12. “The film has just been a damned nuisance”: Anna Edwards, “The Clockwork Collection: Burgess on Kubrick’s ‘Damned Nuisance’ Movie,” blogpost on The International Antony Burgess Foundation, May 27, 2021, https://www.anthonyburgess.org/blog-posts/the-clockwork-collection-burgess-and-kubricks-damned-nuisance-movie/.
  13. “It is not the novelist’s job to preach”: Burgess, “A Clockwork Orange Resucked,” xiv.
  14. “Like 1984, this is a book”: Richard Lacayo, “All-TIME 100 Novels: A Clockwork Orange,” Time, January 7, 2010.
  15. “Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out.”: Burgess, “A Clockwork Orange Resucked,” xv.

THE COUNTRY GIRLS

  1. “100 Novels That Shaped Our World”: BBC Arts, “Explore the List of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World,” British Broadcasting Company, November 5, 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/494P41NCbVYHlY319VwGbxp/explore-the-list-of-100-novels-that-shaped-our-world.
  2. “I wakened quickly and sat up in bed abruptly”: Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls: Three Novels and an Epilogue (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 3.
  3. “We’re eighteen and we’re bored to death”: Ibid., 145.
  4. burned by the parish priest in Tuamgraney: Rachel Cooke, “Edna O’Brien: ‘A Writer’s Imaginative Life Commences in Childhood,’ ” The Observer, February 5, 2011.
  5. “She was a glory, with her pale white skin”: Roslyn Sulcas, “Edna O’Brien Is Still Gripped by Dark Moral Questions,” New York Times, March 25, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/books/edna-obrien-is-still-gripped-by-dark-moral-questions.html.
  6. “For her powerful voice and the absolute perfection of her prose”: PEN America website, “2018 PEN America Lifetime and Career Achievement Honorees,” February 20, 2018, https://pen.org/2018-lifetime-career-achievement-honorees/#.
  7. “era-defining symbols of the struggle for Irish women’s voices”: Eimear McBride, introduction to O’Brien, The Country Girls, ix.
  8. “among the handful of most accomplished living writers”: Philip Roth, cited in Sulcas, “Edna O’Brien Is Still Gripped by Dark Moral Questions.”

DEATH IN VENICE

  1. “hoping that fresh air and exercise would restore him”: Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, trans. and ed. Clayton Koelb (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 3.
  2. “a measure he had to take for his health”: Ibid., 5.
  3. “that coquettish, dubious beauty of a city”: Ibid., 47.
  4. “a face reminiscent of Greek statues”: Ibid., 21.
  5. joined the Library of Congress as a Consultant in German Literature: Taru Spiegel, “Thomas Mann and the Library of Congress,” 4 Corners of the World, Library of Congress, December 18, 2020, https://blogs.loc.gov/international-collections/2020/12/thomas-mann-and-the-library-of-congress/.
  6. Mann’s diaries later revealed his own: Mark Harman, “Mann to Mann: Thomas Mann’s ‘furious passion for his own ego,’ ” Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1995, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-06-18-bk-14252-story.html.
  7. “The description of the young boy Tadzio”: Elizabeth Hardwick, “Thomas Mann at 100,” New York Times, July 20, 1975, https://www.nytimes.com/1975/07/20/archives/thomas-mann-at-100.html?searchResultPosition=5.
  8. It features the music of composer Gustav Mahler: Thomas Mann, letter cited in Death in Venice, 99.
  9. this book alone secured his 1929 Nobel Prize: NobelPrize.org, “The Nobel Prize in Literature 1929,” https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1929/summary/.

DEPT. OF SPECULATION

  1. “Antelopes have 10x vision, you said”: Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2014), 3.
  2. “The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness”: Ibid., 11.
  3. “Women almost never become art monsters”: Ibid., 8.
  4. “There are many autobiographical things in the book”: Jenny Offill, interview by NPR Staff, Weekend Edition Sunday, January 26, 2014, https://www.npr.org/2014/01/26/265674275/in-fragments-of-a-marriage-familiar-themes-get-experimental.
  5. “ ‘Dept. of Speculation’ is all the more powerful”: James Wood, “Mother Courage,” New Yorker, March 24, 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/31/mother-courage-3.
  6. “Part elegy and part primal scream”: Editors of The New York Times Book Review, “The 10 Best Books of 2014,” New York Times, December 4, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/books/review/the-10-best-books-of-2014.html?ref=review&_r=1.
  7. “soscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscared”: Offill, Dept. of Speculation, 94.
  8. “In both novels, Offill’s fragmentary structure”: Leslie Jamison, “Jenny Offill’s ‘Weather’ Is Emotional, Planetary and Very Turbulent,” February 7, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/books/review/weather-jenny-offill.html?searchResultPosition=4.

THE DRY HEART

  1. “ ‘Tell me the truth,’ I said”: Natalia Ginzburg, The Dry Heart, trans. Frances Frenaye (New York; New Directions, 2019), 3.
  2. “a tiresome and monotonous existence, with worn gloves and very little spending money”: Ibid., 7.
  3. “a very rich but batty old woman who spent her time smoking cigarettes”: Ibid., 9.
  4. Giuseppe Levi was a nonpracticing Jew: Patrizia Acobas, “Natalia Ginzburg,” in The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, Jewish Women’s Archive (Brookline, MA: 2021), https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/ginzburg-natalia, updated July 1, 2021.
  5. Natalia did not attend elementary school: Joan Acocella, “Rediscovering Natalia Ginzburg,” New Yorker, July 22, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/29/rediscovering-natalia-ginzburg.
  6. Jews were forbidden to publish under Italian racial laws: Acobas, “Natalia Ginzburg.”
  7. “Ms. Ginzburg never raises her voice”: Michiko Kakutani, “Books of the Times: 2 Italian Heroines Torn by Loyalties,” New York Times, April 17, 1990, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/17/books/books-of-the-times-2-italian-heroines-torn-by-loyalties.html?searchResultPosition=3.
  8. “Everything that mattered had happened already”: Ginzburg, The Dry Heart, 39.
  9. “I haven’t invented a thing”: Natalia Ginzburg, Family Lexicon, trans. Jenny McPhee (New York: New York Review Books, 2017), 3.

ETHAN FROME

  1. “I had the story, bit by bit”: Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 1.
  2. “one of those lonely New England farm-houses”: Ibid., 9.
  3. “a black art and a form of manual labor”: Unsigned, “Edith Wharton, 75, Is Dead in France,” New York Times, August 13, 1937, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0124.html.
  4. “cruel, compelling haunting story”: Unsigned, “Three Lives in Supreme Torture,” New York Times, October 8, 1911, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1911/10/08/104878602.pdf.
  5. “sublime eloquence”: Harold Bloom, The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon (New York: Library of America, 2019), 148.
  6. “They had never before avowed their inclination”: Wharton, Ethan Frome, 85.

EVIL UNDER THE SUN

  1. “When Captain Roger Angmering built himself a house”: Agatha Christie, Evil Under the Sun (New York: William Morrow, 2011), 1.
  2. “resplendent in a white duck suit”: Ibid., 2.
  3. “Was it revenge, depression or amnesia?”: Tina Jordan, “When the World’s Most Famous Mystery Writer Vanished,” New York Times, June 11, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/books/agatha-christie-vanished-11-days-1926.html.
  4. “Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective who became internationally famous”: Thomas Lask, “Hercule Poirot Is Dead; Famed Belgian Detective,” New York Times, August 6, 1975, https://www.nytimes.com/1975/08/06/archives/hercule-poirot-is-dead-famed-belgian-detective-hercule-poirot-the.html?searchResultPosition=1.
  5. “They’re comfort books”: Tina Jordan, “The Essential Agatha Christie,” New York Times, October 25, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/books/best-agatha-christie-books-murder-mystery.html?searchResultPosition=2.

THE FIFTH CHILD

  1. “Harriet and David met each other”: Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 3.
  2. “Harriet indeed became pregnant”: Ibid., 11.
  3. “That Christmas, Harriet was again enormous”: Ibid., 19.
  4. They had one son, Peter: Helen T. Verongos, “Doris Lessing, Author Who Swept Aside Convention, Is Dead at 94,” New York Times, November 17, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/18/books/doris-lessing-novelist-who-won-2007-nobel-is-dead-at-94.html?_r=0.
  5. Disillusioned with party politics—and having an affair: Alison Flood, “Doris Lessing Donates Revelatory Letters to University,” The Guardian, October 22, 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/22/doris-lessing-letters.
  6. “For a long time I felt I had done a very brave thing”: Julia Baird, “Why Mothers Should Lower the Bar,” Newsweek, May 5, 2010, https://www.newsweek.com/baird-why-mothers-should-lower-bar-72657.
  7. “It was before widespread birth control”: Margaret Atwood, “Doris Lessing: A Model for Every Writer Coming from Back of Beyond,” The Guardian, November 18, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/17/doris-lessing-death-margaret-atwood-tribute.
  8. “with scepticism, fire and visionary power”: “Doris Lessing: Facts,” NobelPrize.org, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2007/lessing/facts/.
  9. “Oh, Christ! I couldn’t care less”: Verongos, “Doris Lessing, Author Who Swept Aside Convention.”
  10. “It’s an absolutely horrible book”: Carolyn Kizer, “Bad News for the Nice and Well-Meaning,” New York Times, April 3, 1988, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/01/10/specials/lessing-fifth.html.
  11. “a gutting examination of the crucible of motherhood”: Emily Harnett, “Doris Lessing’s ‘The Fifth Child’ and the Spectre of the Ambivalent Mother,” New Yorker, May 11, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/doris-lessings-the-fifth-child-and-the-spectre-of-the-ambivalent-mother.
  12. “At times, Lessing’s spare, sharp prose lets you see things”: Michael Pye, “The Creature Walks Among Us,” New York Times, August 6, 2000, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/08/06/reviews/000806.06pye.html.

THE GHOST WRITER

  1. “It was the last daylight hour of a December afternoon”: Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (New York: Vintage International, 1995), 3.
  2. “I loved him! Yes, nothing less than love”: Ibid., 56.
  3. “Hadn’t Joyce, hadn’t Flaubert, hadn’t Thomas Wolfe”: Ibid., 110.
  4. “In the course of a very long career”: Charles McGrath, “Philip Roth, Towering Novelist Who Explored Lust, Jewish Life and America, Dies at 85,” New York Times, May 22, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/obituaries/philip-roth-dead.html.
  5. “When Roth learned, in 1968”: David Remnick, “The Secrets Philip Roth Didn’t Keep,” New Yorker, March 22, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/29/the-secrets-philip-roth-didnt-keep.
  6. his unhappy marriage to Williams: McGrath, “Philip Roth, Towering Novelist Who Explored Lust, Jewish Life and America.”
  7. “filthy and hilarious”: Ibid.
  8. “made him wealthy, celebrated, and notorious”: Remnick, “The Secrets Philip Roth Didn’t Keep.”
  9. “Oh, if only I could have imagined the scene”: Roth, The Ghost Writer, 121.
  10. “The Essential Philip Roth”: Taffy Brodesser-Akner, “The Essential Philip Roth,” New York Times, April 19, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/books/best-philip-roth-books.html.
  11. “a tragicomedy, and its Shakespearean reverberations”: Harold Bloom, The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon (New York: Library of America, 2019), 396.
  12. number 52 on the Modern Library list of 100 Best Novels: Modern Library, “100 Best Novels,” https://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/.
  13. “a deliciously funny book”: Josh Greenfield, “Portnoy’s Complaint,” New York Times, February 23, 1969, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1969/02/23/90674895.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0.

THE GREAT GATSBY

  1. Number 2 on the Modern Library list of 100 Best Novels: Modern Library, “100 Best Novels,” https://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/.
  2. “In my younger and more vulnerable years”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 2018), 1.
  3. “Let me tell you about the very rich”: Unsigned Letter to the Editor, “The Rich Are Different,” New York Times, November 13, 1988, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/13/books/l-the-rich-are-different-907188.html.
  4. “Fitzgerald received good reviews”: James L. W. West III, “Note on the Text,” in Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 182.
  5. “Whenever he was drunk”: Arthur Mizener, “Gatsby, 35 Years Later,” New York Times, April 24, 1960, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/24/specials/fitzgerald-gatsby60.html.
  6. “Roughly, his own career began and ended with the Nineteen Twenties”: Unsigned, “Scott Fitzgerald, Author, Dies at 44,” New York Times, December 23, 1940, https://web.archive.org/web/20200622003513/http:/movies2.nytimes.com/books/00/12/24/specials/fitzgerald-obit.html.
  7. “a period piece that had almost entirely disappeared”: Ibid.
  8. helping create a postwar surge: Danna Bell, Kathleen McGuigan, and Abby Yochelson, “Challenging Students to Consider the Roles Books Played in Wartime,” Teaching with the Library of Congress (blog), July 1, 2020, https://blogs.loc.gov/teachers/2020/07/challenging-students-to-consider-the-roles-books-played-during-wartime/.
  9. “With ‘The Great Gatsby,’ the question is simpler and stranger”: Parul Seghal, “Nearly a Century Later, We’re Still Reading—and Changing Our Minds About—Gatsby,” New York Times, December 303, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/30/books/great-gatsby-fitzgerald-copyright.html?searchResultPosition=3.
  10. with lyrics and music composed by Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine fame: Sarah Bahr, “ ‘Great Gatsby’ Musical Sets Creative Team,” New York Times, April 28, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/theater/great-gatsby-musical.html?searchResultPosition=1.
  11. “This is a book that endures, generation after generation”: Jesmyn Ward, introduction to Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, xi.
  12. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy”: Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 179.

THE HOUR OF THE STAR

  1. “All the world began with a yes”: Clarice Lispector, trans. Benjamin Moser, The Hour of the Star (New York: New Directions, 2011), 3.
  2. “I’ve also had to give up sex and soccer”: Ibid., 14.
  3. “It was a time of chaos, famine”: Benjamin Moser, “The True Glamor of Clarice Lispector,” New Yorker, July 10, 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-true-glamour-of-clarice-lispector.
  4. James Joyce, a writer Lispector had not yet read: Dwight Garner, “Writer’s Myth Looms as Large as the Many Novels She Wrote,” New York Times, August 11, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/books/12garner.html?searchResultPosition=8.
  5. “I think she’s a ‘self-taught’ writer”: Elizabeth Bishop, cited in Colm Tóibín, “A Passion for the Void,” in Lispector, The Hour of the Star, viii.
  6. a New York Times Notable Book of 2009: New York Times Book Review, “100 Notable Books,” New York Times, December 6, 2009, http://web.archive.org/web/20180113213738/http://www.nytimes.com/gift-guide/holiday-2009/100-notable-books-of-2009-gift-guide/list.html?ref=review.
  7. The Times corrected its oversight in 2020: Lucas Iberico Lozada, “Overlooked No More: Clarice Lispector, Novelist Who Captivated Brazil,” New York Times, December 18, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/obituaries/clarice-lispector-overlooked.html?searchResultPosition=1.
  8. “moves from a deep awareness about the tragedy of being alive”: Tóibín, “A Passion for the Void,” xi.
  9. what one Brazilian colleague at the time called “Hurricane Clarice”: Lozada, “Overlooked No More.”

THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET

  1. “We didn’t always live on Mango Street”: Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2009), 3.
  2. “it made me feel like nothing”: Ibid., 4–5.
  3. “Your little lemon shoes are so beautiful”: Ibid., 41.
  4. “In English my name means hope”: Ibid., 10.
  5. named a MacArthur Fellow in 1995: Unsigned, “MacArthur Fellows Program: Sandra Cisneros,” MacArthur Foundation, https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-1995/sandra-cisneros, updated January 1, 2005.
  6. “a self-educated woman who got library cards”: Bebe Moore Campbell, “Keeping It Short: A Season of Stories; Crossing Borders,” New York Times, May 26, 1991, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/26/books/keeping-it-short-a-season-of-stories-crossing-borders.html.
  7. issued by Arte Público, a nonprofit imprint of the University of Houston: Arte Público Press, “About Us,” https://artepublicopress.com/about/.
  8. “After I published The House on Mango Street with a small press”: Mike Thomas, “Sandra Cisneros,” Chicago, February 20, 2019, https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/March-2019/Sandra-Cisneros/.
  9. the book was challenged by parents and school boards: ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom, “Frequently Challenged Books with Diverse Content,” Banned & Challenged Books, undated, https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/diverse.
  10. “Everybody in our family has different hair”: Cisneros, The House on Mango Street, 6.
  11. “Sandra Cisneros has said that she writes”: PEN America, “PEN America to Honor Sandra Cisneros for Achievement in International Literature at February 26 Ceremony in New York,” PEN America, February 5, 2019, https://pen.org/press-release/sandra-cisneros-achievement-international-literature-nabokov-award/.
  12. at a time when Tucson schools banned Mexican-American studies: Unsigned editorial, “Books Without Borders,” New York Times, March 15, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/opinion/books-without-borders.html?searchResultPosition=14.
  13. “Bloom where you’re planted—and be brave”: Tina Jordan and Elisabeth Egan, “Books You Can Read in a Day,” New York Times, April 22, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/books/books-you-can-read-in-a-day.html?searchResultPosition=8, updated May 1, 2020.
  14. “These stories about women struggling”: Campbell, “Keeping It Short.”
  15. “Cisneros writes poetry”: Valerie Sayers, “Traveling with Cousin Elvis,” New York Times, September 29, 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/29/books/traveling-with-cousin-elvis.html.

IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK

  1. “Today, I went to see Fonny”: James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk (New York: Vintage International, 2006), 3.
  2. “When two people love each other”: Ibid., 143.
  3. “They been killing our children long enough”: Ibid., 189.
  4. “black, impoverished, gifted, and gay”: “James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket,” American Masters, August 14, 1989, https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/james-baldwin-film-james-baldwin-the-price-of-the-ticket/2632/.
  5. “What I saw around me that summer”: James Baldwin, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” New Yorker, November 9, 1962, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/11/17/letter-from-a-region-in-my-mind.
  6. “I got to Paris with forty dollars”: James Baldwin, “The Art of Fiction No. 78,” interview by Jordan Elgrably, Paris Review, no. 91 (Spring 1984), https://theparisreview.org/interviews/2994/the-art-of-fiction-no-78-james-baldwin.
  7. “You cannot afford to alienate”: Colm Tóibín, “The Unsparing Confessions of ‘Giovanni’s Room,’ ” New Yorker, February 26, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-unsparing-confessions-of-giovannis-room.
  8. “He willed himself into becoming one of the world’s most important writers”: Eddie S. Glaude Jr., “Where to Start with James Baldwin,” Department of African American Studies, Princeton University, January 15, 2021, https://aas.princeton.edu/news/where-start-james-baldwin.
  9. “ ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ is a quite moving”: Joyce Carol Oates, “If Beale Street Could Talk,” New York Times, May 19, 1974, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-beale.html.
  10. “Baldwin… made clear that he could work wonders”: Tóibín, “The Unsparing Confessions of ‘Giovanni’s Room.’ ”

IF THIS IS A MAN [SURVIVAL IN AUSCHWITZ]

  1. “I was captured by the Fascist Militia on December 13, 1943”: Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf, in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, vol. 1 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015), 9.
  2. “In less than ten minutes all the able-bodied men”: Ibid., 16.
  3. “The camp was silent”: Ibid., 154.
  4. though some who knew him have argued his death was an accident: Diego Gambetta, “Primo Levi’s Plunge: A Case Against Suicide,” New York Times, August 7, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/08/07/arts/primo-levis-plunge-a-case-against-suicide.html.
  5. “The story of the death camps”: Levi, If This Is a Man, 5.
  6. “The need to tell our story”: Ibid., 6.
  7. “But only after many months”: Primo Levi, The Truce, trans. Ann Goldstein, in Levi, The Complete Works of Primo Levi, 1:397.
  8. “For this articulate survivor”: Toni Morrison, introduction to Levi, The Complete Works of Primo Levi, 1:xii.

JULY’S PEOPLE

  1. “You like to have some cup of tea?”: Nadine Gordimer, July’s People (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 1.
  2. “The vehicle was bought for pleasure”: Ibid., 6.
  3. She helped edit the “I am prepared to die” speech: Scott Simon, “In Writing, Nadine Gordimer Explored Why We’re All Here,” Simon Says, July 19, 2014, National Public Radio, https://www.npr.org/2014/07/19/332634847/in-writing-nadine-gordimer-explored-why-were-all-here.
  4. Mandela was spared: Glenn Frankel, “When Mandela’s, and the World’s, Fate Changed at Historic Rivonia trial,” Washington Post, December 5, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/when-mandelas-and-the-worlds-fate-changed-at-historic-rivonia-trial/2013/12/05/22033836-5e10-11e3-be07-006c776266ed_story.html.
  5. “For fifty years, Gordimer has been the Geiger counter”: Per Wästberg, “Nadine Gordimer and the South African Experience,” NobelPrize.org., February 3, 2021, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1991/gordimer/article/.
  6. “For myself, I have said that nothing factual that I write or say”: Nadine Gordimer, “Nobel Lecture,” NobelPrize.org., December 7, 1991, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1991/gordimer/lecture/.
  7. Nadine Gordimer died, aged ninety, in Johannesburg: The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Nadine Gordimer: South African Author,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, updated November 16, 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nadine-Gordimer.
  8. “In 1979, I wrote a novel, ‘Burger’s Daughter’ ”: Nadine Gordimer, “Nelson Mandela,” New Yorker, December 8, 2013, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/16/nelson-mandela-2.

THE LATHE OF HEAVEN

  1. “Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean”: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (New York: Scribner, 2008), 1.
  2. As a child, Ursula was immersed in legends and mythology: Julie Phillips, “The Fantastic Ursula K. Le Guin,” New Yorker, October 10, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/the-fantastic-ursula-k-le-guin.
  3. “anarchist utopian allegory”: Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Art of Fiction No. 221,” interview by John Wray, Paris Review, no. 206 (Fall 2013), https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6253/the-art-of-fiction-no-221-ursula-k-le-guin.
  4. “I don’t think science fiction is a very good name for it”: Ibid.
  5. “excluded from literature for so long”: Gerald Jonas, “Ursula K. Le Guin, Acclaimed for Her Fantasy Fiction, Is Dead at 88,” New York Times, January 23, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/obituaries/ursula-k-le-guin-acclaimed-for-her-fantasy-fiction-is-dead-at-88.html.
  6. usually reserved for “classics” by dead writers: David Streitfeld, “Ursula Le Guin Has Earned a Rare Honor. Just Don’t Call Her a Sci-Fi Writer,” New York Times, August 28, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/books/ursula-le-guin-has-earned-a-rare-honor-just-dont-call-her-a-sci-fi-writer.html?_r=0.
  7. “By breaking down the walls of genre”: Phillips, “The Fantastic Ursula K. Le Guin.”
  8. public television featured her life, work, and influence: “Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin,” American Masters, August 2, 2019, https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/worlds-of-ursula-k-le-guin-about/11575/.
  9. “Ursula was a seer and what she called a Foreteller”: Harold Bloom, “Fellow Writers Remember Ursula K. Le Guin, 1929–2018,” Library of America, January 26, 2018, https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1375-fellow-writers-remember-ursula-k-le-guin-1929-2018#bloom.
  10. “No single work did more to upend the genre’s conventions”: Le Guin, “The Art of Fiction.”
  11. “I needed to understand my own passionate opposition”: Ursula K. Le Guin, introduction to Ursula K. Le Guin, The Hainish Novels & Stories, vol. 1, Tor.Com, August 30, 2017, https://www.tor.com/2017/08/30/introduction-from-ursula-k-le-guin-the-hainish-novels-stories-volume-one/.
  12. “In all her work, Le Guin was always asking”: Margaret Atwood, “Ursula K Le Guin, by Margaret Atwood: ‘One of the Literary Greats of the 20th Century,’ ” The Guardian, January 24, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/24/ursula-k-le-guin-margaret-atwood-tribute.

LORD OF THE FLIES

  1. Number 41 on the Modern Library list of 100 Best Novels: Modern Library, “100 Best Novels,” https://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/.
  2. “100 Novels That Shaped Our World”: BBC Arts, “Explore the List of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World,” British Broadcasting Company, November 5, 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/494P41NCbVYHlY319VwGbxp/explore-the-list-of-100-novels-that-shaped-our-world.
  3. Time:“All-TIME 100 Novels”: Lev Grossman, “All-TIME 100 Novels: Lord of the Flies,” Time, January 8, 2010, https://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novels/slide/lord-of-the-flies-1955-by-william-golding/.
  4. “The boy with fair hair lowered himself down”: William Golding, Lord of the Flies (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), 7.
  5. “ ‘Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!’ ”: Ibid., 152.
  6. “World War II was the turning point”: Bruce Lambert, “William Golding Is Dead at 81; the Author of ‘Lord of the Flies,’ ” New York Times, June 20, 1993, https://www.nytimes.com/1993/06/20/obituaries/william-golding-is-dead-at-81-the-author-of-lord-of-the-flies.html?searchResultPosition=2.
  7. with translations in every major language: “Lord of the Flies,” William Golding, undated, https://william-golding.co.uk/books/lord-of-the-flies.
  8. his life had become “unendurable”: John Carey, William Golding (New York: Free Press, 2009), 335.
  9. “William Golding’s novels and stories are not only somber moralities”: Lars Gyllensten, “Award Ceremony Speech,” NobelPrize.org., 1983, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1983/ceremony-speech/.
  10. “To me, Lord of the Flies has always represented”: Stephen King, introduction to William Golding, Lord of the Flies (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), xvii.
  11. “Cruelty and lust” writes A. S. Byatt: A. S. Byatt, introduction to William Golding, Darkness Visible (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), xi.

THE LOST DAUGHTER

  1. “I had been driving for less than an hour when I began to feel ill”: Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa Editions, 2008), 9.
  2. “For the first time in almost twenty-five years”: Ibid., 10–11.
  3. “She has a classics degree; she has referred to being a mother”: James Wood, “Women on the Verge,” New Yorker, January 13, 2013, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/21/women-on-the-verge.
  4. “More than these occasional and fairly trivial”: Ibid.
  5. “Always, Ferrante’s fiction reminds us”: Merve Emre, “Elena Ferrante’s Master Class on Deceit,” Atlantic, September 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/elena-ferrante-lying-life-of-adults/614209/.

THE LOVER

  1. “One day, I was already old”: Marguerite Duras, The Lover, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Pantheon, 1997), 7.
  2. “Bargains, final reductions bought for me”: Ibid., 11–12.
  3. “Later, Duras said the depiction in ‘The Lover’ was her actual childhood”: Rachel Kushner, “ ‘A Man and a Woman, Say What You Like, They’re Different’: On Marguerite Duras,” New Yorker, November 10, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-man-and-a-woman-say-what-you-like-theyre-different-on-marguerite-duras.
  4. After Robert recovered, they ended up in a ménage à trois: Beverly Fields, “Overstepping Boundaries: A Life of Marguerite Duras,” Chicago Tribune, March 19, 1995, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1995-03-19-9503190038-story.html.
  5. “I write about love, yes, but not about tenderness”: Alan Riding, “Marguerite Duras, 81, Author Who Explored Love and Sex,” New York Times, March 4, 1996, https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/04/nyregion/marguerite-duras-81-author-who-explored-love-and-sex.html.
  6. “There wasn’t a breath of wind”: Duras, The Lover, 113–114.
  7. “Name a current literary trend”: Parul Seghal, “Marguerite Duras’s ‘The Lover,’ and Notebooks That Enrich It,” New York Times, November 21, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/books/review-marguerite-duras-lover-wartime-notebooks-practicalities.html?searchResultPosition=1.
  8. “Duras became a huge star”: Kushner, “ ‘A Man and a Woman.’ ”

LUCY

  1. “It was my first day. I had come the night before”: Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 3.
  2. “In photographs of themselves”: Ibid., 12.
  3. “When I was a child I liked to read”: Leslie Garis, “Through West Indian Eyes,” New York Times, October 7, 1990, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/07/magazine/through-west-indian-eyes.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm.
  4. Jamaica Kincaid is, at this writing, also Professor: “Jamaica Kinkaid,” Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University, undated, https://aaas.fas.harvard.edu/people/jamaica-kincaid.
  5. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”: William Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” Poetry Foundation, undated, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45521/i-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud.
  6. “What a surprise this was to me”: Kincaid, Lucy, 6.

MAUS I: A SURVIVOR’S TALE: MY FATHER BLEEDS HISTORY

  1. “Rego Park, N.Y. c. 1958”: Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 5–6.
  2. “His only response was, ‘From this you make a living?’”: Mel Gussow, “Dark Nights, Sharp Pens; Art Spiegelman Addresses Children and His Own Fears,” New York Times, October 15, 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/15/arts/dark-nights-sharp-pens-art-spiegelman-addresses-children-and-his-own-fears.html?searchResultPosition=5.
  3. accorded a prestigious front-page review in the New York Times Book Review: Lawrence Langer, “A Fable of the Holocaust,” New York Times, November 3, 1991, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/03/books/a-fable-of-the-holocaust.html.
  4. Spiegelman’s art for Maus was also given an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art: “Projects 32: Art Spiegelman,” MoMA, undated, https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/355.
  5. one of the “100 Notable Books of the Year” in 2004: “100 Notable Books of the Year,” New York Times, December 5, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/05/books/review/100-notable-books-of-the-year-html.
  6. “Perhaps no Holocaust narrative”: Langer, “A Fable of the Holocaust.”
  7. “No, I thought Auschwitz was in bad taste”: Dan Kois, “The Making of ‘Maus,’ ” New York Times, December 2, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/books/review/the-making-of-maus.html.
  8. “In recounting the tales of both the father’ ”: Michiko Kakutani, “Books of the Times; Rethinking the Holocaust with a Comic Book,” New York Times, October 29, 1991, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/29/books/books-of-the-times-rethinking-the-holocaust-with-a-comic-book.html?searchResultPosition=7.
  9. “It’s hard to explain why these drawings”: Gussow, “Dark Nights, Sharp Pens.”

MIDDLE PASSAGE

  1. “Of all the things that drive men to sea”: Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (New York: Scribner, 2015), 3.
  2. “He paid for my art lessons”: Christopher Borrelli, “Pioneering Black Cartoonist Started Out in Chicago, Switched Careers and Won a National Book Award—the Many Sides of Charles Johnson,” Chicago Tribune, July 12, 2021, https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/books/ct-ent-black-cartoonists-chicago-book-charles-johnson-20210711-ouutntgpqfapfnplqj4iimtbwa-story.html.
  3. “a many-splendored and ennobling weaving-together”: Annie Gottlieb, “Search for the Good Thing in Hatten County, Georgia,” New York Times, January 12, 1975, https://www.nytimes.com/1975/01/12/archives/search-for-the-good-thing-in-hatten-county-georgia-faith-and-the.html?searchResultPosition=1.
  4. where Jewish and Black people would never be admitted as members: Charles Johnson, The Way of the Writer (New York: Scribner, 2016), 4.
  5. Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery: Unsigned, “Introduction,” Africans in America (1998), https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/introduction.html.
  6. “I have been opposed to being put into boxes my whole life”: Borrelli, “Pioneering Black Cartoonist.”
  7. “combines the physical realities with the internal mysteries”: Stanley Crouch, introduction to Johnson, Middle Passage, vii.
  8. “Mr. Johnson has used his generous storytelling gifts”: Michiko Kakutani, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” New York Times, February 5, 1986, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/04/05/specials/johnson-apprentice.html.

MRS. DALLOWAY

  1. Time: “All-TIME 100 Novels”: Lev Grossman, “All-TIME 100 Novels: Mrs. Dalloway,” Time, January 8, 2010, https://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novels/slide/mrs-dalloway-1925-by-virginia-woolf/.
  2. “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”: Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harvest, 1981), 3.
  3. “Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ is a revolutionary novel”: Michael Cunningham, “Michael Cunningham on Virginia Woolf’s Literary Revolution,” New York Times, December 23, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/books/review/michael-cunningham-on-virginia-woolfs-literary-revolution.html?searchResultPosition=3.
  4. Her diaries would reveal that she was also the victim: Julia Epstein, “Virginia Woolf and Her Family’s Secret Life,” Washington Post, May 14, 1989, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1989/05/14/virginia-woolf-and-her-familys-secret-life/be2932af-3db9-4274-bf4a-7ad0f20e9b59/.
  5. “Even if the books have remained the same”: Italo Calvino, “Why Read the Classics?,” New York Review of Books, October 9, 1986, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1986/10/09/why-read-the-classics/.
  6. “Each time, I have found shocks of recognition on the page”: Jenny Offill, “A Lifetime of Lessons in ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ ” New Yorker, December 29, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-lifetime-of-lessons-in-mrs-dalloway.
  7. “The War had taught him. It was sublime”: Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 86–87.
  8. “The book encompasses, as well, almost infinite shades and degrees”: Cunningham, “Michael Cunningham on Virginia Woolf’s Literary Revolution.”
  9. ranked number 15 on the Modern Library list of 100 Best Novels: Modern Library, “100 Best Novels,” https://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/.
  10. “He—for there could be no doubt of his sex”: Virginia Woolf, Orlando (New York: Harvest, 1956), 13.
  11. Orlando is on the BBC list of “100 Novels That Shaped Our World”: BBC Arts, “Explore the List of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World,” British Broadcasting Corporation, November 5, 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/494P41NCbVYHlY319VwGbxp/explore-the-list-of-100-novels-that-shaped-our-world.

THE HOURS

  1. “She hurries from the house”: Michael Cunningham, The Hours (New York: Picador USA, 1998), 3.
  2. Cunningham was teaching creative writing at Yale University: Unsigned, “Michael Cunningham,” Yale University, undated, https://english.yale.edu/people/adjunct-professors-and-senior-lecturers-full-part-time-lecturers-creative-writers/michael.
  3. “In Mrs Dalloway, Woolf asserts”: Michael Cunningham, “Virginia Woolf, My Mother and Me,” The Guardian, June 3, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/04/virginia-woolf-the-hours-michael-cunningham.
  4. “She is going to produce a birthday cake”: Cunningham, The Hours, 76.
  5. “Grand themes of love, death and loyalty are all played out”: Meg Wolitzer, “Suburban Spawl,” New York Times, April 16, 1995, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/11/specials/cunningham-flesh.html.
  6. “Cunningham writes so well”: Jeanette Winterson, “Sibling Rivalry,” New York Times, October 1, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/books/review/Winterson-t.html?scp=1&sq=sibling%20rivalry&st=cse/.

THE NICKEL BOYS

  1. “Even in death the boys were trouble”: Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys (New York: Anchor Books, 2020), 1.
  2. When a Time magazine cover declares that you are “America’s Storyteller”: Mitchell S. Jackson, “ ‘I Carry It Within Me.’ Novelist Colson Whitehead Reminds Us How America’s Racist History Lives On,” Time, June 27, 2019, https://time.com/5615610/colson-whitehead-the-nickel-boys-interview/.
  3. he dropped “Arch” in favor of “Colson” at age twenty-one: Ibid.
  4. “The book about the Dozier school seemed relevant”: Alexandra Alter, “Colson Whitehead’s Next Novel Tackles Life Under Jim Crow,” New York Times, October 1, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/books/colson-whitehead-new-novel-will-tackle-life-under-jim-crow.html.
  5. “The strap was three feet long with a wooden handle”: Whitehead, The Nickel Boys, 67.
  6. “Whitehead brilliantly reformulates an old-hat genre”: Tom Chiarella, “How It Ends,” Esquire, September 19, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20150130061814/http:/www.esquire.com/fiction/book-review/zone-one-review-1011.
  7. “The result… is a potent, almost hallucinatory novel”: Michiko Kakutani, “Review: ‘Underground Railroad’ Lays Bare Horrors of Slavery and Its Toxic Legacy,” August 2, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/03/books/review-the-underground-railroad-colson-whitehead.html.

NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL

  1. “The colonel took the top off the coffee can”: Gabriel García Márquez, No One Writes to the Colonel, trans. J. S. Bernstein, in Collected Novellas (New York: HarperPerennial Modern Classics, 1999), 119.
  2. “The colonel saw it dock”: Márquez, No One Writes to the Colonel, 128.
  3. “I feel that all my writing has been about the experiences of the time”: Unsigned, “About Gabriel García Márquez,” in García Márquez, Collected Novellas, 278.
  4. “When you went home at dawn”: Jonathan Kandell, “Gabriel García Márquez, Conjurer of Literary Magic, Dies at 87,” New York Times, April 17, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/books/gabriel-garcia-marquez-literary-pioneer-dies-at-87.html.
  5. “The whole notion that I am an intuitive is a myth”: Gabriel García Márquez, interview by Marlise Simons, New York Times, December 5, 1982, archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/reviews/marquez-talk.html.
  6. “For 18 months, he had holed up in his office”: Penelope Green, “Mercedes Barcha, Gabriel García Márquez’s Wife and Muse, Dies at 87,” New York Times, August 23, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/23/books/mercedes-barcha-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1.
  7. It would eventually go on to sell more than 50 million copies: Green, “Mercedes Barcha, Gabriel García Márquez’s Wife and Muse.”
  8. “With his stories, Gabriel García Márquez has created a world of his own”: The Permanent Secretary, “Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel Prize in Literature 1982,” NobelPrize.org, undated press release, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1982/press-release/.
  9. “A tragic sense of life characterizes García Márquez’s books”: Ibid.
  10. “When it gets hot in Macondo, it gets so hot”: Robert Kiely, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” New York Times, March 8, 1970, https://www.nytimes.com/1970/03/08/archives/one-hundred-years-of-solitude-memory-and-prophecy-illusion-and.html?searchResultPosition=3.
  11. “the most popular and perhaps the best writer”: Unsigned, “About Gabriel García Márquez,” 281.

THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

  1. “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff”: Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (New York: Scribner, 2003), 9.
  2. “Think of the great DiMaggio”: Ibid., 17.
  3. “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs”: Unsigned, “Star Style and Rules for Writing,” KansasCity.Com, June 26, 1999, http://www.kcstar.com/hemingway/ehstarstyle.shtml.
  4. He was bedridden, drinking heavily: Mary V. Dearborn, Ernest Hemingway: A Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 2018), 618–619.
  5. “for his mastery of the art of narrative”: Unsigned, “The Nobel Prize in Literature 1954,” NobelPrize.org, undated, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1954/summary/.
  6. dismissed The Old Man and the Sea as “schoolboy writing”: James Poniewozik, “Review: ‘Hemingway’ Is a Big Two-Hearted Reconsideration,” New York Times, April 2, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/arts/television/review-hemingway-ken-burns.html?searchResultPosition=2.
  7. “ ‘I went out too far’”: Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, 120.
  8. “the best short story writer in the English language from Joyce’s Dubliners until the present”: Harold Bloom, The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon (New York: Library of America, 2019), 268.
  9. “There’s ugliness in Hemingway”: Hilton Als, “A New Hemingway Documentary Peeks Behind the Myth,” New Yorker, April 5, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/12/a-new-hemingway-documentary-peeks-behind-the-myth.
  10. Number 74 on the Modern Library list of 100 Best Novels: Modern Library, “100 Best Novels,” https://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels.
  11. “No amount of analysis can convey the quality”: Unsigned review, “Marital Tragedy,” New York Times, October 31, 1926, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/04/specials/hemingway-rises.html.

ON CHESIL BEACH

  1. “They were young, educated, and both virgins”: Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach (New York: Anchor Books, 2008), 3.
  2. “How this was to be achieved without absurdity”: Ibid., 8.
  3. “In a modern, forward-looking handbook”: Ibid., 9.
  4. “a connoisseur of dread, performing the literary equivalent”: Daniel Zalewski, “The Background Hum,” New Yorker, February 23, 2009, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/02/23/the-background-hum.
  5. “We stood at the kitchen counter making toast”: Ibid.
  6. “When Edward drew Florence”: McEwan, On Chesil Beach, 100–101.
  7. “Although his novels headily explore ideas”: Zalewski, “The Background Hum.”

ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH

  1. “The hammer banged reveille”: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, trans. H. T. Willets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 3.
  2. “He heard the orderlies trudging heavily”: Ibid., 5.
  3. “Shukhov felt pleased with life”: Ibid., 181.
  4. “Such are the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn”: Karl Ragnar Gierow, “Award Ceremony Speech,” Nobel Prize.org, December 10, 1970, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1970/ceremony-speech/.
  5. “Many in the West did not know what to make of the man”: Michael Kaufman, “Solzhenitsyn, 20th-Century Oracle, Dies,” New York Times, August 4, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/arts/04iht-04solzhenitsynB.14974360.html?searchResultPosition=2.
  6. “In the final years of his life”: Ibid.
  7. “Solzhenitsyn should be remembered for his role as a truth-teller”: Michael Scammell, “The Writer Who Destroyed an Empire,” New York Times, December 11, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/opinion/solzhenitsyn-soviet-union-putin.html?searchResultPosition=3.
  8. “They compel the human imagination to participate”: Patricia Blake, “A Diseased Body Politic,” New York Times, October 27, 1968, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/01/home/solz-cancer.html.

ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT

  1. “Like most people I lived”: Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 1.
  2. “Enemies were: The Devil (in his many forms)”: Ibid., 1.
  3. “She looked up, and I noticed her eyes”: Ibid., 82.
  4. Nell Gwyn, who started life in the theater as a scantily-clad “orange girl”: The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Nell Gwyn,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, undated, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nell-Gwyn-English-actress.
  5. “I was born in Manchester, England”: Jeanette Winterson, “Jeanette Winterson,” https://www.jeanettewinterson.com/author.
  6. “During the 90s it became commonplace”: Stuart Jeffries, “Jeanette Winterson: ‘I Thought of Suicide,’ ” The Guardian, February 21, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/22/jeanette-winterson-thought-of-suicide.
  7. Following the end of a long-term relationship: Ibid.
  8. “The memoir’s title is the question Ms. Winterson’s adoptive mother asked”: Dwight Garner, “On a Path to Salvation, Jane Austen as a Guide,” New York Times, March 8, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/09/books/jeanette-wintersons-why-be-happy-when-you-could-be-normal.html?_r=0.
  9. “We had no Wise Men because she didn’t believe”: Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, 2.
  10. “Do you stay safe or do you follow your heart”: Jeanette Winterson, “Jeanette Winterson,” https://www.jeanettewinterson.com/book/oranges-are-not-the-only-fruit/.
  11. The Passion, named to the BBC’s list of “100 Novels That Shaped Our World”: BBC Arts, “Explore the List of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World,” British Broadcasting Corporation, November 5, 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/494P41NCbVYHlY319VwGbxp/explore-the-list-of-100-novels-that-shaped-our-world.
  12. “This novel is talky, smart, anarchic and quite sexy”: Dwight Garner, “Jeanette Winterson’s Playful New Novel Offers Thoughts on Mad Science and Sexbots,” New York Times, October 1, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/books/review-frankissstein-jeanette-winterson.html?searchResultPosition=10.
  13. “The purpose of art changes as society changes”: Jeanette Winterson, interviewer unidentified, New York Times, September 26, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/books/review/jeanette-winterson-by-the-book-interview.html?searchResultPosition=1.

PALE HORSE, PALE RIDER

  1. “In sleep she knew she was in her bed”: Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, in Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels (New York: Harcourt Brace Modern Classic, 1967), 141.
  2. She was featured in “Katherine Anne Porter: The Eye of Memory” in the PBS series American Masters: Unsigned, “About Katherine Anne Porter,” September 28, 2002, https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/katherine-anne-porter-about-katherine-anne-porter/686/.
  3. “Bells screamed all off key, wrangling together”: Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, 201–202.
  4. Harold Bloom called the novel “an interesting failure”: Harold Bloom, The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon (New York: Library of America, 2019), 226.
  5. “There is something a little musty, like old yellowing notes”: Elizabeth Hardwick, “What She was and What She Felt Like,” New York Times, November 7, 1982, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/07/26/specials/hardwick-porter.html.

A PALE VIEW OF HILLS

  1. “Niki, the name we finally gave my younger daughter”: Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 9.
  2. “The worst days were over by then”: Ibid., 11.
  3. “I was trying to be the singer-songwriter”: Kazuo Ishiguro, interview by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, National Public Radio, March 17, 2021, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/978138547.
  4. Ishiguro wrote a master’s thesis in creative writing: Unsigned, “Kazuo Ishiguro: Nobel Literature Prize Is ‘a Magnificent Honour,’ ” British Broadcasting Corporation, October 5, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-41513246.
  5. “Firstly, we must widen our common literary world”: Kazuo Ishiguro, “Banquet Speech,” NobelPrize.org, December 10, 2017, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2017/ishiguro/speech/.
  6. “Its characters, whose bursts of self-knowledge and honesty”: Edith Milton, “In a Japan like Limbo,” New York Times, May 9, 1982, https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/09/books/in-a-japan-like-limbo.html?searchResultPosition=1.

PASSING

  1. “It was the last letter in Irene Redfield’s little pile”: Nella Larsen, Passing (New York: Modern Library, 2019), 3.
  2. “Nearly every State in the union”: Thadious M. Davis, “Explanatory Notes: Chapter Two, Note 2,” in Larsen, Passing, 150.
  3. “a strange capacity of transforming warmth and passion”: Larsen, Passing, 5.
  4. While her birth certificate classified her as “colored”: Carla Kaplan, “A ‘Queer Dark Creature,’ ” in Nella Larsen, Quicksand (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020), ix.
  5. she worked as superintendent of nurses: Bonnie Wertheim, “Overlooked: Nella Larsen,” New York Times, undated, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/obituaries/overlooked-nella-larsen.html.
  6. a wedding widely described as Harlem’s social event of the decade: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Countee_Cullen/WavXDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0.
  7. its first female graduate identified as Black: Wertheim, “Overlooked: Nella Larsen.”
  8. “You will be amused that I who have never tried this”: Nella Larsen letter to Carl Van Vechten, in Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 175.
  9. “the first African American woman” to receive the honor: Wertheim, “Overlooked: Nella Larsen.”
  10. Larsen never published again: Kelli A. Larson, “Surviving the Taint of Plagiarism: Nella Larsen’s ‘Sanctuary’ and Sheila Kaye-Smith’s ‘Mrs. Adis,’ ” Journal of Modern Literature 30, no. 4 (2007): 82–104, muse.jhu.edu/article/222941.
  11. The oversight was corrected in 2018 in the series “Overlooked No More”: Wertheim, “Overlooked: Nella Larsen.”
  12. Larsen was among four writers of the Harlem Renaissance honored: Unsigned, “Honoring Four of Harlem’s Historic Voices,” U.S. Postal Service, May 20, 2020, https://about.usps.com/newsroom/local-releases/nc/2020/0520-honoring-four-harlem-historic-voices.htm.
  13. “Once one circumvented the law, fooled coworkers”: Hobbs, A Chosen Exile, 5.
  14. “an original and hugely insightful writer whose literary talent developed no further”: Richard Bernstein, “Books of the Times: Anguish Behind the Harlem Renaissance,” New York Times, January 15, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/15/books/books-of-the-times-anguish-behind-the-harlem-renaissance.html.

THE PERFECT NANNY

  1. “The baby is dead”: Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny, trans. Sam Taylor (New York: Penguin Books, 2018), 1.
  2. “The winter days seemed endless”: Ibid., 8.
  3. “My nanny is a miracle-worker”: Ibid., 25.
  4. “The Killer-Nanny Novel”: Lauren Collins, “The Killer-Nanny Novel That Conquered France,” New Yorker, December 25, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/01/the-killer-nanny-novel-that-conquered-france.
  5. “Best Books of 2018”: Unsigned, “The 10 Best Books of 2018,” New York Times, November 29, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/books/review/best-books.html.
  6. “The subject came from the fact that I myself had nannies growing up in Morocco”: Benoît Morenne, “Leïla Slimani Wins Prix Goncourt, France’s Top Literary Award,” New York Times, November 3, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/04/books/prix-goncourt-leila-slimani.html.
  7. French president Emmanuel Macron appointed Slimani: Unsigned, “Leïla Slimani,” Institut français, updated March 16, 2021, https://www.institutfrancais.com/en/interview/leila-slimani.
  8. based on interviews with Moroccan women: Sylvie Kauffmann, “A Toxic Mix: Sex, Religion and Hypocrisy,” New York Times, November 13, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/opinion/france-sex-islam-hypocrisy.html.
  9. Based on the life of Slimani’s maternal grandmother: Laura Cappelle, “Leïla Slimani Has Written About a Sex Addict and a Murderous Nanny. Next Up: Her Own Family,” New York Times, August 8, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/08/books/leila-slimani-in-the-country-of-others.html.
  10. “It is hard to think of a more primal sentence”: Collins, “The Killer-Nanny Novel.”
  11. “Actually, when I began to write”: Leïla Slimani, interviewed in “A Conversation with Leïla Slimani,” in “A Penguin Reader’s Guide to Adèle,” in Leïla Slimani, Adèle (New York: Penguin Books, 2019), 6–7.
  12. In the first installment of a planned trilogy: Meena Kandasamy, “Leïla Slimani Tells the Story of Her Interracial Grandparents in Post-WWII Morocco,” New York Times, August 10, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/books/review/in-the-country-of-others-leila-slimani.html.

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

  1. Number 3 on the Modern Library list of 100 Best Novels: Modern Library, “100 Best Novels,” https://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/.
  2. “Once upon a time and a very good time it was”: James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Vintage International, 1993), 3.
  3. “Welcome, O life!”: Ibid., 244.
  4. “They did not leave a forwarding address”: Louis Menand, “Silence, Exile, Punning,” New Yorker, June 25, 2012, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/02/silence-exile-punning.
  5. attacking an Irish politician his father disliked: Richard Ellman, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 33.
  6. “When people celebrate Bloomsday”: Louis Menand, “Silence, Exile, Punning.”
  7. he underwent twenty-five operations for a variety of eye ailments: James Stephen Atherton, “James Joyce: Irish Author,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, undated, https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Joyce.
  8. “the swish of the sleeve of the soutane”: Joyce, Portrait of the Artist, 45.
  9. “A girl stood before him in midstream”: Ibid., 164.
  10. Bloomsday (June 16) is celebrated: Unsigned, “Bloomsday,” James Joyce Centre, undated, https://jamesjoyce.ie/bloomsday/.
  11. “It is a work that… compels attention”: Terence Brown, introduction to James Joyce, Dubliners (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), xiv.

THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE

  1. Number 98 on the Modern Library list of 100 Best Novels: Modern Library, “100 Best Novels,” https://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/.
  2. “They threw me off the hay truck about noon”: James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice (New York: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1992), 3.
  3. “From now on, it would be business between her and me”: Ibid., 7.
  4. “Rip me! Rip me!”: Ibid., 46.
  5. “it was sensational enough to help earn the book an obscenity trial”: John Leonard, “James M. Cain, 85, the Author of ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice,’ ” New York Times, October 29, 1977, https://www.nytimes.com/1977/10/29/archives/james-m-cain-85-the-author-of-postman-always-rings-twice-novelist.html.
  6. “It was like being in church”: Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice, 17.
  7. “She was right, but she could have kept her flap shut”: Leonard, “James M. Cain, 85.”
  8. He would eventually work under three legendary editors: Ibid.
  9. “and writing the four novels on which his reputation rests”: Ibid.
  10. “There’s more violence in ‘Hamlet’ than in all my books”: Ibid.
  11. “I make no conscious effort to be tough”: James M. Cain, quoted on back jacket of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE

  1. Number 76 on the Modern Library list of 100 Best Novels: “100 Best Novels,” https://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/.
  2. Time: “All-TIME 100 Novels”: Richard Lacayo, “All-TIME 100 Novels: How We Picked the List,” Time, January 6, 2010, https://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novels/slide/how-we-picked-the-list/.
  3. “The boys, as they talked to the girls”: Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (New York: HarperPerennial Modern Classics, 2018), 1.
  4. “Give me a girl at an impressionable age”: Ibid., 119.
  5. where one of her teachers would become the model: Helen T. Verongos and Alan Cowell, “Muriel Spark, Novelist Who Wrote ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,’ Dies at 88,” New York Times, April 16, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/world/16spark.html?pagewanted=all.
  6. “I was attracted to a man who brought me bunches”: Jenny Turner, “Dame Muriel Spark,” The Guardian, April 17, 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/apr/17/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries.
  7. “He became a borderline case”: Verongos and Cowell, “Muriel Spark, Novelist Who Wrote ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.’ ”
  8. “The words she had once manipulated”: Ibid.
  9. “The archly, tartly narrated adventures of these young girls”: Lev Grossman, “All-TIME 100 Novels: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” Time, January 8, 2010, https://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novels/slide/the-prime-of-miss-jean-brodie-1961-by-muriel-spark/.
  10. “I always think of The Girls of Slender Means”: Alan Taylor, interview by Cal Flyn, “The Best Books by Muriel Spark,” Five Books, undated, https://fivebooks.com/best-books/muriel-spark-alan-taylor/.
  11. “Muriel Spark is the first writer”: George Stade, “The Abbess of Crewe,” New York Times, October 20, 1974, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/11/reviews/spark-morality.html.

THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE

  1. “The cold passed reluctantly from the earth”: Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (New York: Bantam Classics, 2004), 1.
  2. “It had suddenly appeared to him that perhaps”: Ibid., 8.
  3. “Henry, don’t think of anything ’cept what’s right”: Ibid., 5.
  4. “the first great ‘modern’ novel of war”: Alfred Kazin, introduction to Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, vii.
  5. “He proves that any authentic war novel”: Herbert Mitgang, “Books of the Times: Making Real a War He Never Fought,” New York Times, August 18, 1998, https://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/18/books/books-of-the-times-stephen-crane-making-real-a-war-he-never-fought.html?searchResultPosition=8.

RITA HAYWORTH AND SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION

  1. “There’s a guy like me”: Stephen King, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (New York: Scribner, 2020), 1.
  2. “In all my years at Shawshank”: Ibid., 4–5.
  3. “Not yet”: Stephen King, “Frequently Asked Questions,” StephenKing.com, undated, https://stephenking.com/faq/.
  4. “They asked me if I could pay cash”: Stephen King, “The Art of Fiction No. 189,” interview by Nathaniel Rich and Christopher Lehman-Haupt, Paris Review, no. 178 (Fall 2006), https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5653/the-art-of-fiction-no-189-stephen-king.
  5. “So where is the tragedy”: Ibid.
  6. but his publisher balked at the risk of saturating the market: King, “Frequently Asked Questions.”
  7. “So whether you talk about ghosts or vampires”: King, “The Art of Fiction No. 189.”

THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA

  1. “ ‘Sleep well, dear’ ”: Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, trans. John Nathan (New York: Vintage International, 1994), 3.
  2. “Certain he had watched a tangle of thread”: Ibid., 13.
  3. “A sickly, scholarly schoolboy”: Philip Shabecoff, “A Man Torn Between Two Worlds,” New York Times, November 26, 1970, https://www.nytimes.com/1970/11/26/archives/mishima-a-man-torn-between-two-worlds-the-writer-of-the-following-a.html?searchResultPosition=39.
  4. “Fusako was wearing a black-lace kimono”: Mishima, Sailor Who Fell from Grace, 42.
  5. “Mishima is far superior to me”: Philip Shabecoff, “Everyone in Japan Has Heard of Him,” New York Times, August 2, 1970, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/25/specials/mishima-mag.html.

THE STRANGER

  1. “Maman died today”: Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Matthew Ward (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 3.
  2. “She was right”: Ibid., 17.
  3. “It occurred to me that anyway”: Ibid., 24.
  4. “for his important literary production”: Unsigned, “The Nobel Prize in Literature 1957,” NobelPrize.org, undated, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1957/summary/.
  5. “By the same token, the writer’s role”: Albert Camus, “Banquet Speech,” December 10, 1957, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1957/camus/speech/.
  6. “the exemplary existentialist novel”: Claire Messud, “A New ‘L’Étranger,” New York Review of Books, June 5, 2014, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/06/05/camus-new-letranger/.
  7. “Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why”: Camus, The Stranger, 121.
  8. “Camus admitted using an ‘American method’ ”: Herbert Mitgang, “Classic French Novel is ‘Americanized,’ ” New York Times, April 18, 1988, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/18/books/classic-french-novel-is-americanized.html.
  9. “Judging whether life is or is not worth living”: Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage International, 2018), 3.
  10. “The plague is, of course, the virus of Fascism”: Jill Lepore, “What Our Contagion Fables Are Really About,” New Yorker, March 23, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/30/what-our-contagion-fables-are-really-about?intcid=inline_amp.

SULA

  1. “In that place, where they tore the nightshade”: Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Vintage International, 2004), 3.
  2. “So when they met, first in those chocolate halls”: Ibid., 52.
  3. “Young Chloe grew up in a house suffused with”: Margalit Fox, “Toni Morrison, Towering Novelist of the Black Experience, Dies at 88,” New York Times, August 6, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/books/toni-morrison-dead.html.
  4. “characterized by visionary force and poetic import”: Unsigned, “Toni Morrison Facts,” NobelPrize.org, undated, 1993, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/facts/.
  5. Toni Morrison died of pneumonia: Fox, “Toni Morrison, Towering Novelist of the Black Experience.”
  6. “Her flirting was sweet, low and guileless”: Morrison, Sula, 42.
  7. “Outlaw women are fascinating”: Toni Morrison, foreword to Sula, xvi–xvii.
  8. Beloved was selected: “What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?,” New York Times, May 21, 2006, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/ref/books/fiction-25-years.html.
  9. “With remarkable speed, ‘Beloved’ has”: A. O. Scott, “In Search of the Best,” New York Times, May 21, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/books/review/scott-essay.html.

SURFACING

  1. “I can’t believe I’m on this road again”: Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (New York: Anchor Books, 1998), 3.
  2. “But then I realized it wasn’t the men”: Ibid., 155.
  3. Margaret Atwood has written more than fifty books of poetry: “Margaret Atwood: Biography,” undated, https://margaretatwood.ca/biography/.
  4. “I grew up in and out of the bush”: Margaret Atwood, interview by Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times, May 21, 1978, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/21/reviews/oates-poet.html.
  5. “Atwood’s best novels”: Jia Tolentino, “Margaret Atwood Expands the World of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ ” New Yorker, September 5, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/16/margaret-atwood-expands-the-world-of-the-handmaids-tale.
  6. “Madame sold khaki-colored penny candies”: Atwood, Surfacing, 23.
  7. on the BBC list of “100 Novels That Shaped Our World”: “100 Novels That Shaped Our World,” BBC Arts, “Explore the List of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World,” British Broadcasting Corporation, November 5, 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/494P41NCbVYHlY319VwGbxp/explore-the-list-of-100-novels-that-shaped-our-world.

THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD

  1. “100 Novels That Shaped Our World”: BBC Arts, “Explore the List of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World,” British Broadcasting Corporation, November 5, 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/494P41NCbVYHlY319VwGbxp/explore-the-list-of-100-novels-that-shaped-our-world.
  2. “Ships at a distance”: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: HarperPerennial Modern Classics, 2013), 1.
  3. “a cityfied, stylish dressed man with his hat set an angle that didn’t belong in these parts”: Ibid., 27.
  4. “She looked him over and got little thrills”: Ibid., 96.
  5. “Tea Cake wasn’t strange”: Ibid., 99.
  6. “Although the case was eventually thrown out”: Claudia Roth Pierpont, “A Society of One,” New Yorker, February 9, 1997, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/02/17/a-society-of-one.
  7. “Hurston herself was refreshingly free”: Harold Bloom, The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon (New York: Library of America, 2019), 234.
  8. “In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston ransacked the language”: Valerie Boyd, “About the Book: A Protofeminist Postcard from Haiti,” in Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 12–13.
  9. “offering a people their own language freshly caught on paper and raised to the heights of poetry”: Pierpont, “A Society of One.”

THINGS FALL APART

  1. “100 Novels That Shaped Our World”: BBC Arts, “Explore the List of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World,” British Broadcasting Corporation, November 5, 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/494P41NCbVYHlY319VwGbxp/explore-the-list-of-100-novels-that-shaped-our-world.
  2. Time: “All-TIME 100 Novels”: Richard Lacayo, “All-TIME 100 Novels: Things Fall Apart,” Time, January 11, 2010, https://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novels/slide/things-fall-apart-1959-by-chinua-achebe/.
  3. “Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages”: Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (New York: Penguin, 2017), 3.
  4. “The white man is very clever”: Ibid., 177.
  5. “father of modern African literature”: Associated Press, “Achebe Wins Booker Prize for Fiction,” New York Times, June 13, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/arts/AP-Booker-International.html.
  6. “The best first novel since the war”: Chinua Achebe, “The Art of Fiction No. 139,” interview by Jerome Brooks, Paris Review, no. 133 (Winter 1994), https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1720/the-art-of-fiction-no-139-chinua-achebe.
  7. “So it was a very small beginning, but it caught fire”: Ibid.
  8. “It would be like asking how Shakespeare influenced English”: Jonathan Kandell, “Chinua Achebe, African Literary Titan, Dies at 82,” New York Times, March 22, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/23/world/africa/chinua-achebe-nigerian-writer-dies-at-82.html?searchResultPosition=2.
  9. with more than 20 million copies sold: “Things Fall Apart,” PenguinRandomHouse.com, undated, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/565351/things-fall-apart-by-chinua-achebe/9780385474542/.
  10. “The point of my observations should be quite clear by now”: Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness,’ ” Massachusetts Review 18 (1977), reprinted in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Background and Sources, Criticism, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3rd ed. (London: W. W Norton, 1988), 251–261, http://kirbyk.net/hod/image.of.africa.html.
  11. “For more than 20 years a case of writer’s block”: Kandell, “Chinua Achebe, African Literary Titan.”
  12. “It is a work in which 22 years of harsh experience”: Nadine Gordimer, A Tyranny of Clowns,” New York Times, February 21, 1988, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/21/books/a-tyranny-of-clowns.html?pagewanted=all.
  13. “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable”: Toni Morrison, in “The African Trilogy,” PenguinRandomHouse.com, undated, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/553284/the-african-trilogy-by-chinua-achebe/9780143131342/.
  14. “Achebe guides us through the intricacies of Igbo culture”: Lacayo, “All-TIME 100 Novels.”

TOKYO UENO STATION

  1. “There’s that sound again”: Yu Miri, Tokyo Ueno Station, trans. Morgan Giles (New York: Riverhead Books, 2020), 1.
  2. “The pair gave us a look”: Ibid., 168–169.
  3. “My father fixed pachinko machines”: Jonathan Napack, “A Rebel in Japan Clings to Her Freedom,” International Herald Tribune, April 6, 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/06/style/IHT-a-rebel-in-japan-clings-to-her-freedom.html.
  4. “Books were the escape room”: Motoko Rich, “Her Antenna Is Tuned to the Quietest Voices,” New York Times, November 27, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/books/yu-miri-tokyo-ueno-station.html.
  5. At this writing, she resides there: Ibid.
  6. “That day the sky was as blue as a strip of cloth”: Miri, Tokyo Ueno Station, 13.
  7. “It is a passionate ‘J’accuse’ ”: Napack, “A Rebel in Japan.”

WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS

  1. “I have never seen anything like it”: J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 1.
  2. “First I get lies, you see”: Ibid., 6.
  3. “J. M. Coetzee’s novels are characterised by their”: Press release, “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2003,” NobelPrize.org, October 12, 2003, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2003/press-release/.
  4. “100 Novels That Shaped Our World”: BBC Arts, “Explore the List of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World,” British Broadcasting Corporation, November 5, 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/494P41NCbVYHlY319VwGbxp/explore-the-list-of-100-novels-that-shaped-our-world.

WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE

  1. “My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood”: Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 1.
  2. “the most mail the magazine had ever received”: Ruth Franklin, “ ‘The Lottery’ Letters,” New Yorker, June 25, 2013, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-lottery-letters.
  3. Jackson’s mother told her she was the product of a failed abortion: Charles McGrath, “The Case for Shirley Jackson,” New York Times, September 30, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/books/review/shirley-jackson-ruth-franklin.html?searchResultPosition=1.
  4. “Reading her work today”: Heather Havrilesky, “Haunted Womanhood,” Atlantic, October 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/10/the-possessed/497513/.
  5. “ ‘The Lottery’ came out in the June 26, 1948, issue”: Judy Oppenheimer, Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson, excerpted in “The Haunting of Shirley Jackson,” New York Times, July 3, 1988, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/03/books/the-haunting-of-shirley-jackson.html?searchResultPosition=2.

WIDE SARGASSO SEA

  1. Number 94 on the Modern Library list of 100 Best Novels: Modern Library, “100 Best Novels,” https://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/.
  2. BBC: “100 Novels That Shaped Our World”: BBC Arts, “Explore the List of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World,” British Broadcasting Corporation, November 5, 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/494P49NCbVyH1Y319VwGbxp/explore-the-list-of-100-novels-that-shaped-our-world.
  3. Time: All-Time 100 Novels: Richard Lacayo, “All-TIME 100 Novels: Wide Sargasso Sea,” Time, January 11, 2010, https://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novels/slide/wide-sargasso-sea-1966-by-jean-rhys/.
  4. “They say when trouble comes”: Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), 15.
  5. “the best living English novelist”: A. Alvarez, “The Best Living English Novelist,” New York Times, March 17, 1974, https://www.nytimes.com/1974/03/17/archives/the-best-living-english-novelist.html.
  6. Vaz Dias advertised for news of her: Letter of Jean Rhys to Maryvonne Moerman, November 9, 1949, in Wide Sargasso Sea, 133, 260.
  7. “It is its own jewel of a novel”: Edwidge Danticat, introduction to Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 7–8.
  8. “It is a hallucinatory novel”: Alvarez, “The Best Living English Novelist.”
  9. “She shows how power works”: Olivia Laing, “ ‘Every Hour a Glass of Wine’—the Female Writers Who Drank,” The Guardian, June 13, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/13/alcoholic-female-women-writers-marguerite-duras-jean-rhys.
  10. “The elegant surface and the paranoid content”: Francis Wyndham, introduction to Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (London: Andre Deutsch, 1966).
  11. “peculiarly timeless”: Alvarez, “The Best Living English Novelist.”

AFTERWORD

  1. “The writer cannot expect to be excused”: Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 44–45.
  2. “Book readers averaged a two-year longer life span”: Rhea Hirshman, “Bookworms Live Longer,” Yale Alumni Magazine, November/December 2016, https://yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/4377-bookworms-live-longer.
  3. “My task which I am trying to achieve”: Joseph Conrad, “Conrad’s Preface,” in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), xlix.