Here are 48 books that Jesus Trilogy fans have personally recommended once you finish the Jesus Trilogy series.
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I worked for the last 25 years teaching literature classes and creative writing workshops—most of that time at the University of California at Davis. The students in my classes were mainly English majors and/or young writers. They tended to be serious about the potential of a text. To be serious, today, in America, about the potential of a text is to dwell in an inherently counter-cultural position. It is to conceive of the value of a text as something surpassing entertainment, i.e., use. Such a surpassing is a blasphemous notion… still tolerated in the context of the University. Its proliferation beyond those boundaries seems unworkable.
What one expects to happen, in the context of a story, is a wholly unacceptable outcome… save one does not feel the story is obligated to resound with consciousness of mortality. Consciousness of mortality is not cruel in and of itself; the one who causes it to resound in the form of a story, however, might be. Cruel, that is.
This, I think, is a very cruel book. But its cruelty is the cruelty of an honest physician met with a diseased patient. His unflinching diagnosis of the disease and the difficult (painful) operations it necessitates… are simply what remaining alive calls for. The alternative, that is, is always the same thing: brief (however apparently eternal) dementia.
From the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018.
"Compulsively readable... A novel that not only works its spell but makes it impossible for us to lay it aside once we've finished reading it." -The New Yorker
At fifty-two, Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire, but lacking in passion. When an affair with a student leaves him jobless, shunned by friends, and ridiculed by his ex-wife, he retreats to his daughter Lucy's smallholding. David's visit becomes an…
Like the character of Wala Kitu in Dr No, I consider myself an expert on nothing. Heroes have to be flawed, right? And you don’t always have to like and admire them. They don’t have to be perfect. With perfect hair and teeth. Because I’m not. And I need someone to identify with. Someone to walk the roads I might or might not walk. A list of Nick Hornby, Michael K, Miles Jupp, Billy Liar, and Wala Kitu shouldn’t belong together. But they do. Right here. It’s absurd, right? The connection of different roads? Different stories? Different hurdles to jump? Different act of heroism I say.
It's not an easy read, but I read this one and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road back-to-back. These are two books about lost souls walking away from something, not knowing where they’re going.
Michael K is another character who invokes more sympathy/pity than admiration. Sometimes, I didn’t overly care about Michael K’s suffering, feeling he’d brought it on himself. Mostly, though, I wanted him to find his simple peace.
JM Coetzee is such a good writer. His sparse but full sentences always deliver something.
From author of Waiting for the Barbarians and Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee.
J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018.
In a South Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life affirming novel goes to the center of human experience-the need for an…
As much as I enjoy traveling to real places in fiction, I find that authors who ask me to inhabit a world of their own making make me think more deeply, and these are also the novels I dream about when I’m not actually reading them, the pages I cannot wait to return to when I can pick up the book again. By exiting the world we inhabit, and occupying a world very much like our own, I end up reflecting more thoughtfully about the contemporary moment, and in a way, feel more connected. I tried to create such a world in The Stranger Game, and this is something I hope to do again in a future novel.
Anyone who reads one Peter Cameron book will read them all. In his latest novel, a married couple ends up at a grand hotel in a strange European country of fading glory, amid guests who are both eccentric and troubling. At times it’s hard to know whether what is happening is really happening; at times it’s all too acid and real. I hesitate to call this book a comedy, because it’s unsettling. But it’s also magical and memorable, and you won’t want to check out and depart its pages.
A couple find themselves at a fading, grand European hotel full of eccentric and sometimes unsettling patrons in this "faultlessly elegant and quietly menacing" allegorical story that examines the significance of shifting desires and the uncertainty of reality (Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness).
An unnamed American couple travels to a strange, snowy European city to adopt a baby. It’s a difficult journey that leaves the wife, who is struggling with cancer, desperately weak, and her husband worries that her illness will prevent the orphanage from releasing their child.
On arrival, the couple checks into the cavernous and eerily deserted Borgarfjaroasysla…
As much as I enjoy traveling to real places in fiction, I find that authors who ask me to inhabit a world of their own making make me think more deeply, and these are also the novels I dream about when I’m not actually reading them, the pages I cannot wait to return to when I can pick up the book again. By exiting the world we inhabit, and occupying a world very much like our own, I end up reflecting more thoughtfully about the contemporary moment, and in a way, feel more connected. I tried to create such a world in The Stranger Game, and this is something I hope to do again in a future novel.
Doubling as both a political thriller and political satire, and set on an unnamed, maybe South American island, Idra Novey’s novel about a corrupt senator stars powerful women who are determined to uncover a past sexual assault and possible murder, ultimately speaking truth to power.
Named a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR by * NPR * Esquire * O, The Oprah Magazine * Real Simple * BBC * PopSugar * Bustle * Kirkus Reviews * Lit Hub
"A gripping, astute, and deeply humane political thriller." -The Boston Globe
"Mesmerizing [and] uncannily prescient."-Los Angeles Times
A taut, timely novel about what a powerful politician thinks he can get away with and the group of misfits who finally bring him down, from the award-winning author of Ways to Disappear.
On an unnamed island country ten years after the collapse of a U.S.-supported regime, Lena suspects the powerful…
As a creative writer, I think it is important for me to put myself into the bodies and minds of people, unlike myself, and imagine how they move about in the world. In my book, I write about Blind Tom, a person from the nineteenth century who has little in common with me. However, there are some affinities and connections between Tom and myself. Although I am not blind, I suffer from a disability. Also, I like writing about music and musicians. I chose to write about Tom in part because he was a great musician who has never received the proper credit he deserves from musicologists and historians.
I like this disturbing novel written by a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was also adapted into a fine feature film with a stellar cast of actors. The book is a study of darkness as the driving force of human nature. Be prepared: this is not an easy read. I can tell you that you will find many unsettling scenes in the book. I think anyone who enjoys dystopian novels will like this book.
No food, no water, no government, no obligation, no order.
Discover a chillingly powerful and prescient dystopian vision from one of Europe's greatest writers.
A driver waiting at the traffic lights goes blind. An ophthalmologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks. It becomes a contagion, spreading throughout the city. Trying to stem the epidemic, the authorities herd the afflicted into a mental asylum where the wards are terrorised by blind thugs. And when fire destroys the asylum, the inmates burst forth and the last links with a supposedly civilised society…
I grew up in Uganda and Kenya, and when I moved to the United States, I felt separated from myself. Learning how to be American was exhausting and so I disappeared into books. I’m now more settled, but I still travel through fiction. These days, I am reading fiction by African women. You should be, too! There is so much stunning literature out there. These five books are just the beginning, but they are novels I can’t stop thinking about.
What does environmental racism look like? ReadHow Beautiful We Wereby Imobolo Mbue for a vital, searing answer. An American oil company is destroying the land and water of the fictional village of Kosawa. Children are dying. The company does this because they can, spouting only empty words about restitution. The novel narrates the village’s fight back, using alternating points of view to electric, pulsing effect.
'Sweeping and quietly devastating' New York Times 'A David and Goliath story for our times' O, the Oprah Magazine
Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, this is the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean-up and financial reparations are made - and broken. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. But it will come at a steep price - one which generation after generation…
I worked for the last 25 years teaching literature classes and creative writing workshops—most of that time at the University of California at Davis. The students in my classes were mainly English majors and/or young writers. They tended to be serious about the potential of a text. To be serious, today, in America, about the potential of a text is to dwell in an inherently counter-cultural position. It is to conceive of the value of a text as something surpassing entertainment, i.e., use. Such a surpassing is a blasphemous notion… still tolerated in the context of the University. Its proliferation beyond those boundaries seems unworkable.
In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe's wife, Violet, attacks the girl's corpse. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life.
I worked for the last 25 years teaching literature classes and creative writing workshops—most of that time at the University of California at Davis. The students in my classes were mainly English majors and/or young writers. They tended to be serious about the potential of a text. To be serious, today, in America, about the potential of a text is to dwell in an inherently counter-cultural position. It is to conceive of the value of a text as something surpassing entertainment, i.e., use. Such a surpassing is a blasphemous notion… still tolerated in the context of the University. Its proliferation beyond those boundaries seems unworkable.
The goodness of a person has always seemed inexplicable to me. Where does it come from? How is it able to persist? What is it that threatens to destroy it if it is indeed destructible? How can it possibly be maintained in the midst of an absurdly cruel, delusional, and hateful society like ours?
If some guy on the street asked me to explain the goodness of a person, I would recommend he read this book. It is a timely book, moreover, given the bizarrely justified harassment, arrest, imprisonment, and torture the newly elected President has promised his sad, seething, poorly informed, and historically entitled fan base.
I worked for the last 25 years teaching literature classes and creative writing workshops—most of that time at the University of California at Davis. The students in my classes were mainly English majors and/or young writers. They tended to be serious about the potential of a text. To be serious, today, in America, about the potential of a text is to dwell in an inherently counter-cultural position. It is to conceive of the value of a text as something surpassing entertainment, i.e., use. Such a surpassing is a blasphemous notion… still tolerated in the context of the University. Its proliferation beyond those boundaries seems unworkable.
What is it in the life of a person that deserves the light of language? This question is far and away the most important question a writer faces. Very few writers seem to be acutely aware of this fact. Very few writers are rigorous enough to remain with the challenge of the question; once a writer begins to write, that is, there is so much that asks for it to be forgotten.
I marvel at Murnane’s capacity to resist such forgetfulness.
For more than half a century, I have been writing books and articles about America’s past, with most of my work focusing on 20th-century political history. I believe that, except in the 1850s, which led to a bloody civil war, Americans have never been more divided. Although I have always believed in objectivity in my work, I share Leo Tolstoy’s belief that history is ultimately a form of moral reflection, that a conversation with the past might do more than inform us about what people have said and done; it might help make decisions about how we should live.
In 2004 I gave a presentation to a University of Adelaide faculty seminar on the need for historians to reclaim the “narrative” as a way of reaching a larger reading audience without resorting to “flourishes of the imagination.” Several sociologists and historians strongly disagreed, but a soft-spoken participant eloquently came to my defense.
At the reception that followed, my defender introduced himself as “John Coetzee.” Awestruck, I realized this was the 2003 Nobel Prize Winner, J.M. Coetzee, and I felt a bit like a starstruck fan of a rockstar as I told him that, for years, I had assigned this book to my class in African American history.
Set in an unnamed colonial outpost, the story is an allegory narrated by an unnamed “magistrate” who task is to control the darker skinned “barbarians” beyond the gates. Its very mythical nature allows Coetzee to explore the universal: the way in which…
A modern classic by Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee, now a major motion picture starring Robert Pattinson and Johnny Depp
For decades the Magistrate has run the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement, ignoring the impending war between the barbarians and the Empire whose servant he is. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he finds himself jolted into sympathy with their victims—until their barbarous treatment of prisoners of war finally pushes him into a quixotic act of rebellion, and thus into imprisonment as an enemy of the state.
Waiting for the Barbarians, J. M. Coetzee’s third novel, which won the James…
