Here are 15 books that New England Historical Trilogy fans have personally recommended once you finish the New England Historical Trilogy series.
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Well, I’ve devoted my life to literature (to a lesser extent, to music) as a critic, professor, and author of eleven books, from fiction to criticism to collected journalism to memoir and poetry. I’ve won several awards and fellowships for my own work. So, literary history and biography/autobiography are in my territory, so to speak. You can find more about me and my books at my website.
Have you been to Paris? If so, you’ll love this book as I did for the great photography, which is the whole point.
Photographs of the places still surviving where Hemingway himself and the characters in his novels visit. A long time ago in Paris, I tried something of the sort myself, finding and visiting the sites named in The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast, with only moderate success.
Friends of mine last year took this book along on a private tour of Hemingway’s Paris and found the guide followed this book closely. Each powerful photograph (mostly what the book contains) is accompanied by a paragraph or so of the site and its connection to the Hem.
I’d call this a photographic biography of Hemingway in Paris. If you place it in front of you while reading the Paris books, you’ll have a whole new experience, as…
Walk through the Streets of Paris with Ernest Hemingway.
In gorgeous black and white images, Hemingway's Paris depicts a story of remarkable passion for a city, a woman, and a time. No other city in any of his travels was as significant, professionally or emotionally, as was Paris. And it remains there, all of the complexity, beauty, and intrigue that Hemingway described in the pages of so much of his work.
It is all still there for the reader and traveler to experience the history, the streets, and the city. Restaurants, hotels, homes, sites and favorite bars are all detailed…
Well, I’ve devoted my life to literature (to a lesser extent, to music) as a critic, professor, and author of eleven books, from fiction to criticism to collected journalism to memoir and poetry. I’ve won several awards and fellowships for my own work. So, literary history and biography/autobiography are in my territory, so to speak. You can find more about me and my books at my website.
This book is a great companion volume to Adam Begley’s Updike biography of some years ago, but it is more like reading a lively autobiography because we follow Updike in his own words from his school years, through Harvard, his first publishing successes, and his many letters to friends and fellow authors, to the end of his life.
Mary McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates, and Ian McEwan are just the few we witness Updike in fascinating and intimate “conversation” with on every topic imaginable, including theories of fiction, the publishing industry, personal problems and conflicts, good and bad behaviors, you name it.
That the letters are so uncensored is what grabbed me as a reader, especially. The material is raw but presented still through Updike’s high, articulate, often humorous style. I found the reading experience delightful, especially for such a long book from such a prolific author.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • The arc of literary giant John Updike's life emerges in these luminous daily letters to family, friends, editors, and lovers—a remarkable outpouring over six decades, from his earliest consciousness as a writer to his final days.
As James Schiff writes in the introduction to this volume, of the writer who would eventually “express himself in written form as copiously and as elegantly as any American writer” before him, “Updike needed to write the way the rest of us need to breathe or eat.” With his stunning rhetorical gifts—enabling him to thrive…
Well, I’ve devoted my life to literature (to a lesser extent, to music) as a critic, professor, and author of eleven books, from fiction to criticism to collected journalism to memoir and poetry. I’ve won several awards and fellowships for my own work. So, literary history and biography/autobiography are in my territory, so to speak. You can find more about me and my books at my website.
Cowley was at the center of the Lost Generation in Paris and America, but he also was instrumental in championing such post-WWII authors as Kerouac and Kesey, among others.
This biography covers all his roles and interactions with such authors throughout his life. I found the book often felt to me like a fascinating lecture on the literary life of the 1920s-80s from your favorite English professor in college. So much detail is filled in on the lives and works of the writers of the period as they fit into Cowley’s own work and life.
To take one great example, the story of how Cowley was more responsible than anyone else for rejuvenating Faulkner’s career after his books went out of print, in part through Cowley’s The Portable Faulkner. After Cowley’s labors on Faulkner’s behalf, the obscure Faulkner went on to get all his books reprinted, taught in college…
A finalist for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction • Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker
A delightful and majestic reckoning with the ascent of American fiction in the twentieth century through the prism of the under-known man who had an astonishing amount to do with it
Malcolm Cowley is not a household name today, but the American literary canon would look very different without him. A prototypical “man of letters” of his generation—Harvard University, a volunteer in the French ambulance corps in World War I, a rite of passage in Paris…
Well, I’ve devoted my life to literature (to a lesser extent, to music) as a critic, professor, and author of eleven books, from fiction to criticism to collected journalism to memoir and poetry. I’ve won several awards and fellowships for my own work. So, literary history and biography/autobiography are in my territory, so to speak. You can find more about me and my books at my website.
Well, the title and subtitle say it all. Who wouldn’t be interested? I certainly was.
But it’s not just the 50s-the 70s that we see in this history of the newspaper; we are taken right up into the recent 2000s, and all the changes and permutations and personalities involved. The author herself worked for the Voice, so it is an inside story too.
Also, it is not just a biography of the major American voice in alternative journalism covering art, film, music, and literature. It is an autobiography of many of the writers and artists who tell their own stories during their time at the Voice in oral history fashion.
I knew I was getting the real, if sometimes conflicting, skinny on the personalities and evolutions of the paper. I found the whole thing engaging from start to finish because of this direct personal quality in the way the history/biography…
A rollicking history of America's most iconic weekly newspaper told through the voices of its legendary writers, editors, and photographers.
You either were there or you wanted to be. A defining New York City institution co-founded by Norman Mailer, The Village Voice was the first newspaper to cover hip-hop, the avant-garde art scene, and Off-Broadway with gravitas. It reported on the AIDS crisis with urgency and seriousness when other papers dismissed it as a gay disease. In 1979, the Voice’s Wayne Barrett uncovered Donald Trump as a corrupt con artist before anyone else was paying attention. It invented new forms…
Well, I’ve devoted my life to literature (to a lesser extent, to music) as a critic, professor, and author of eleven books, from fiction to criticism to collected journalism to memoir and poetry. I’ve won several awards and fellowships for my own work. So, literary history and biography/autobiography are in my territory, so to speak. You can find more about me and my books at my website.
If you trained to be a jazz musician as I once did, or if you love jazz, you’ll be fascinated by this story (both autobiography and oral history from those who knew Pepper).
It includes also journalistic and critical literary assessments of his music and life that Art and Laurie Pepper include, but mostly, I was fascinated by Art’s own testimony of the struggles of a musician in the 1950s and ‘60s.
By the 70s, Pepper was trying to go straight, off drugs, and his long struggle with that issue is documented by him, his wife, and his colleagues and friends. But he was indeed straight in a different sense—he played beautiful, lyrical, straight-ahead jazz, no free form self-indulgence. So I got a wide view of the man and music through the oral history and through the journalists and critics who wrote essays about him.
Art Pepper (1925-1982) was called the greatest alto saxophonist of the post-Charlie Parker generation. But his autobiography, Straight Life , is much more than a jazz book,it is one of the most explosive, yet one of the most lyrical, of all autobiographies. This edition is updated with an extensive afterword by Laurie Pepper covering Art Pepper's last years, and a complete and up-to-date discography by Todd Selbert.
I’m a Professor of English Emeritus at Southern New Hampshire University and author of ten books, including fiction, criticism, memoir, and collected journalism. I was also an inaugural faculty member in the writing workshops at the Norman Mailer Center in Provincetown, MA. I first got into Mailer in the 1970s after reading The Naked and the Dead and Cannibals and Christians. I ended up writing my doctoral dissertation on Mailer, which became my first book,Acts of Regeneration. My second book,Toward A New Synthesis, examined Mailer along with John Fowles and John Gardner as writers who adopted some of the techniques of post-modernism but kept their work firmly tethered to ethical issues.
Published on the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Naked and the Dead, the book is an overview of Mailer’s entire writing career up to 1998, by way of introductions to and excepts from his decades of fiction and nonfiction.I make this recommendation as a risk because the book is a nearly 1300-page-long anthology. No one is going to sit down and read cover to cover, however, so I offer it as a way of seeing the sweep of a major author’s career; here you can dip in and out as you wish to see what’s up with a given work or topic at any point in Mailer’s publishing life, up to 1998. You can decide then what you want to read in the offered excerpt or in full, either from an included short work of magazine journalism or a short story, or from a whole…
THE TIME OF OUR TIME is a selection of Mailer's best work, chosen by Mailer himself, and ingeniously arranged as a literary retrospective. It is a masterly, boisterous portrait of our times, seen through the fiction and reportage of a great writer. Included are passages from THE NAKED AND THE DEAD, THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT and THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG, as well as many of his other works and his best-known magazine pieces from Marilyn Monroe to Madonna. This giant omnibus is a testament to Mailer's enormous energies, his vast curiosity, and his amazing talent and amounts almost to a…
I’m a Professor of English Emeritus at Southern New Hampshire University and author of ten books, including fiction, criticism, memoir, and collected journalism. I was also an inaugural faculty member in the writing workshops at the Norman Mailer Center in Provincetown, MA. I first got into Mailer in the 1970s after reading The Naked and the Dead and Cannibals and Christians. I ended up writing my doctoral dissertation on Mailer, which became my first book,Acts of Regeneration. My second book,Toward A New Synthesis, examined Mailer along with John Fowles and John Gardner as writers who adopted some of the techniques of post-modernism but kept their work firmly tethered to ethical issues.
Mailer published three nonfiction books near the end of his life to lay out his final take on issues he’d been pursuing his entire writing life and as a highly visible, often notorious, public intellectual: On God, Why Are We at War?—echoing his 1967 novel Why Are We in Vietnam?—and The Big Empty. I chose The Big Empty because the reader comes to understand where Mailer lands finally on so many issues he covered during his decades of political and societal journalism, with a special focus on democracy in America, its potential and its abiding threats.
The book is structured as a series of dialogues with his youngest son, John Buffalo Mailer, who in his introduction argues that such a dialogue with his father represents a necessary conversation among generations. Their topics include, among other pressing intergenerational concerns, the American presidency, endless war, American 21st-century politics,…
Questions are posed, writes Norman Mailer, "in the hope they will open into richer insights, which in turn will bring forth sharper questions. " In this series of conversations, John Buffalo Mailer, 27, poses a series of questions to his father, challenging the reflections and insights of the man who has dominated and defined much of American letters for the past sixty years. Their wide-ranging discussions take place over the course of a year, beginning in July 2004. Set against the backdrop of George W. Bush's re-election campaign and the war in Iraq, each considers what it means to live…
I have always been fascinated by the Regency Period, and because of this fascination, I explored its historical context in full. That includes, of course, the French Revolution and its repercussions in England and globally. I am also obsessed with the literary concept of the heroine, and wanted to create characters who in some ways synthesized Moll Flanders andJane Eyre, bridging the gap between 18th and 19th Century expression.
I was utterly captivated by Meryl Streep’s performance in the film; I had to read the book. Great plot line with its revolutionary intrigue. My heart warmed utterly to Sarah Woodruff, and the mysterious, charismatic qualities she so powerfully radiated. She was a powerful fractional role model for Charity’s character.
As part of Back Bay's ongoing effort to make the works of John Fowles available in uniform trade paperback editions, two major works in the Fowles canon are reissued to coincide with the publication of Wormholes, the author's long-awaited new collection of essays and occasional writings.Perhaps the most beloved of Fowles's internationally bestselling works, The French Lieutenant's Woman is a feat of seductive storytelling that effectively invents anew the Victorian novel. "Filled with enchanting mysteries and magically erotic possibilities" (New York Times), the novel inspired the hugely successful 1981 film starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons and is today universally…
I’m an old guy. I say this with a bit of cheek and a certain amount of incongruity. All the books on my list are old. That’s one area of continuity. Another, and I’ll probably stop at two, is that they all deal with ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances—those curveballs of life we flail at with an unfamiliar bat; the getting stuck on the Interstate behind a semi and some geezer in a golf cap hogging the passing lane in a Buick Le Sabre. No one makes it through this life unscathed. How we cope does more to define us than a thousand smiles when things are rosy. Thus endeth the lesson.
A masterful debut novel, post-WWII, and dealing with characters in the heat of battle, internally and externally.
I was forced to read it in eleventh grade Honors English (what they called AP pre-AP. Like I said, I’m old). I reread it for edification as a young writer and was awed by the craftsmanship. The writing is dense and requires patience. War is never pretty.
Hailed as one of the finest novels to come out of the Second World War, The Naked and the Dead received unprecedented critical acclaim upon its publication and has since enjoyed a long and well-deserved tenure in the American canon. This fiftieth anniversary edition features a new introduction created especially for the occasion by Norman Mailer.
Written in gritty, journalistic detail, the story follows a platoon of Marines who are stationed on the Japanese-held island of Anopopei. Composed in 1948 with the wisdom of a man twice Mailer's age and the raw courage of the young man he was, The…
I’m a Professor of English Emeritus at Southern New Hampshire University and author of ten books, including fiction, criticism, memoir, and collected journalism. I was also an inaugural faculty member in the writing workshops at the Norman Mailer Center in Provincetown, MA. I first got into Mailer in the 1970s after reading The Naked and the Dead and Cannibals and Christians. I ended up writing my doctoral dissertation on Mailer, which became my first book,Acts of Regeneration. My second book,Toward A New Synthesis, examined Mailer along with John Fowles and John Gardner as writers who adopted some of the techniques of post-modernism but kept their work firmly tethered to ethical issues.
One of the best sports books ever written? Judge for yourself, but I think it is certainly among the best. Even if you don’t like boxing or martial arts, you’ll enjoy this eminently readable book about “the rumble in the jungle” in Zaire between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, two heroic athletes in conflict. Although there are moments of self-deprecating humor and Mailer’s usual philosophical concerns, Mailer focuses squarely on the two athletes, their training camps and trainers, the people around them, and the experience of being in Africa. And then of course there is the fight itself, described in vivid and inventive detail that I found is as riveting to other readers as it is to me. The philosophical/metaphysical concerns here are part and parcel of those Mailer developed through his sixty years as a writer, but they are introduced in an easily digestible style and seem to me…
From one of the major innovators of New Journalism, Norman Mailer's The Fight is the real-life story of a clash between two of the world's greatest boxers, both in and out of the ring, published in Penguin Modern Classics.
Norman Mailer's The Fight focuses on the 1974 World Heavyweight Boxing Championship in Kinshasa, Zaire. Muhammad Ali met George Foreman in the ring. Foreman's genius employed silence, serenity and cunning. He had never been defeated. His hands were his instrument, and 'he kept them in his pockets the way a hunter lays his rifle back into its velvet case'. Together the…
