Here are 7 books that The Conformist fans have personally recommended if you like
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“To grasp the reality of Russia,” writes David Satter, “it is necessary to accept that Russian leaders really are capable of blowing up hundreds of their own people to preserve their hold on power. They really are capable of ordering an attack with flamethrowers on a gymnasium full of defenseless parents and children.” The Less You Know the Better You Sleep is an uncompromising account of Russia’s failed democracy and the birth of a criminal state. An American journalist and historian, who had written extensively on Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, Satter witnessed the end of Yeltsin’s era and beginning of Putin’s. Well documented and written with narrative tension, the book raises important issues. Refusal to believe that the Kremlin was capable of murdering their own citizens made western policy towards Russia “naive and ineffectual. From the moment Putin took power, the West maintained an image of Russia that bore no…
Once you accept that the impossible is really possible, what happens in Russia makes perfect sense
"A few pages into David Satter's truly terrifying book, one realizes that his title is smack-on accurate: modern Russia is a frightening member of the world community to an extent of which most persons are blissfully unaware."-Joseph C. Goulden, Washington Times
"Satter . . . persuasively supplies evidence for his claim that a series of residential bombings in 1999 were part of an elaborate conspiracy orchestrated by Vladimir Putin, who used them as a smoke screen to invade Chechnya and catapult himself…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
An enjoyable, well written book by a successful man who, starting in his early 20s, built bustling restaurants in New York (the initial three – jointly with his first wife); he even directed two films. Then came his strokes that left him half-paralyzed… He tells his life story with self-deprecating irony and wisdom.
The entertaining, irreverent, and surprisingly moving memoir by the visionary restaurateur behind such iconic New York institutions as Balthazar and Pastis.
A memoir by the legendary proprietor of Balthazar, Pastis, Minetta Tavern, and Morandi, taking us from his gritty London childhood in the fifties to his serendipitous arrival in New York, where he founded the era-defining establishments the Odeon, Cafe Luxembourg, and Nell’s. Eloquent and opinionated, Keith McNally writes about the angst of being a child actor, his lack of insights from traveling overland to Kathmandu at nineteen,…
I like fiction which makes a character confront what the poet Thom Gunn called ‘the blackmail of his circumstances’: where you are born, the expectations of you. I like to think I am very much a self-created individual, but I can never escape what I was born into; the self is a prison that the will is trying to break out of. I like literature which reflects that challenge.
I first read Lolita when I was 14 and have read it every few decades since, learning something new each time.
I love the first-person immediacy of it and the way it is a crime novel in reverse: the narrator is already imprisoned but not for the crime he describes. It is a love story turned on its head: what the narrator says is love is in fact abuse.
It is a road trip across the vastness of the US, like one I took when I was a student.
'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of my tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.'
Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, frustrated college professor. In love with his landlady's twelve-year-old daughter Lolita, he'll do anything to possess her. Unable and unwilling to stop himself, he is prepared to commit any crime to get what he wants.
Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all…
Katie's Gamble is an unexpected, unique story about a young woman who's trying to support her younger siblings by keeping her family's confectionery shop open.
In order to do that, she has to take on her older brother, who's a notorious gambler in Louisiana. Additionally, she has to outsmart Rowdy…
As someone who has endured great challenges in life, I am fascinated by stories about overcoming obstacles and facing difficult challenges. We do not choose where we are born or to what circumstances ,but we do have the opportunity to rise above those challenges that we face on a daily basis. The human spirit and the desire for a better future is a universal gift we all share.
I don’t think Garcia Marquez needs a review or introduction. Reading any of his books is a pleasure, with easy and delightful writing and striking sentences.
These sentences often describe things or people in a way that feels natural and perfectly captured. For instance, he describes the world as so new that many things lack names. His eloquent descriptions, like that of ice, create vivid images. The characters are relatable, and you feel a happy exhaustion after finishing the book, reminiscent of great works like Steinbeck’s East of Eden.
Those who find the stories too unbelievable should learn about Colombian history, as they provide real context. I simply love the book!
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, and alive with unforgettable men and women -- brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul -- this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.
The Victorians were scandalized by Sterne’s hilarious account of his childhood and his family, retaliated by calling it “satire.” There’s no shortage of humor, from Tristam’s explanation of how he knows when he was conceived to his narrow childhood escape to misundertstandings about the location of his uncle’s war wound. But it’s a brilliant interpretration of Locke’s argument about how the mind works, specifically in the association of ideas. The same deep insight that was the basis of the methodology of psychoanalysis conceptualized Sigmund Freud. The former isn’t an inference: Tristram explains it perfectly in the novel, and the complexity of his account is up there with Proust’s, Every time I re-read it, it gets not just funnier, but more profound.
Endlessly digressive, boundlessly imaginative and unmatched in its absurd and timeless wit, Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is edited with an introduction by Melvin New and Joan New, and includes a critical essay by Christopher Ricks in Penguin Classics.
Laurence Sterne's great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorize it, with a rich metafictional narrative that might classify it as the first 'postmodern' novel. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate 'hero' Tristram Shandy, the eccentric philosophy of his father Walter,…
As a baby, I was fascinated by shadows, how they lengthened and shortened till they disappeared, and how they moved their position around me and objects. I used to play with Barbies; I invented stories that lasted for days, progressively postponing the main events in favor of their preparation. Progressively, I became accustomed to my relatives’s death and their funerals. I realized that time connected these observations and games as much as the novels and films that I loved. In my list, you can find stimulating books where Time shyly shows itself on a stage.
In this novel, time becomes almost a character. It is an empty time, although so heavy and thick, to fill in all the space around the protagonist Dino and to enter into him.
Art and sex, the only Dino’s activities, are not characterized by their distinctive passion and enthusiasm that sometimes destroy and sometimes raise a man. Art and sex become a dead pastime dominated by time alone.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been…
Papyrologist Lisa Emmer's world flips when the Sûreté detains her at her Metro station with news of the savage murder of the esteemed Paris historian Dr. Raimond Foix, her friend and mentor in the study of ancient documents.
Horrified, Lisa finds clues at the crime scene left behind for her…
As a baby, I was fascinated by shadows, how they lengthened and shortened till they disappeared, and how they moved their position around me and objects. I used to play with Barbies; I invented stories that lasted for days, progressively postponing the main events in favor of their preparation. Progressively, I became accustomed to my relatives’s death and their funerals. I realized that time connected these observations and games as much as the novels and films that I loved. In my list, you can find stimulating books where Time shyly shows itself on a stage.
I adore how the scholar Sternberg analyses how some of the greatest authors of all time create and play with time. His work is the example par excellence of how a comprehensive theory about time in literature should be written.
He discusses different epochs and genres, linking them to a coherent history. Sternberg’s brilliance charms me.
.."". this is one of the few books on narrative worth reading and rereading, a study that will make -- or should make -- a difference in the way we read narrative."" -- Nineteenth Century Fiction
""This is a remarkable book: original, clear-sighted, and luminously focused on a subject that has never been explored nearly so systematically or intensively.""A -- Dorrit Cohn, Harvard University
This book, long out of print, is now available in a paperback edition, providing another window into one of the most exciting minds working in the areas of literary and biblical literary criticism.
