100 Books Like The Last Word

Without having to query Google that serves up writers in a single file, this book is a delightful repository of the entire “who’s who” of literature, particularly of little-known factoids, served up as a rich smorgasbord that you want to devour without end. It proves that “the pen is the tongue of the mind,” even though “writing is a dog’s life,” and is a comfort to writers to know that others, more famous than them, have skirted the edges of penury, fame, and madness. You will also laugh a lot, in relief, I think.

An incredible recounting by an author who remained current for over two centuries and in several art forms – plays, films, novels, and short stories. Orphaned at ten, and giving up a promising career in the medical profession to become a writer in his early twenties, Maugham reached the pinnacle of success and wealth in this perilous profession. In this collection of sketches, vignettes, and anecdotes, he looks back on his life at the Biblical age of “three score and ten” and accepts his shortcomings, mistakes, and secrets. His only lament: that there were four more novels left to write – the unreachable star that had been his guiding light throughout life. Five years later, he had finished three…

A comedy that exposes “prize-based meritocracy” in the literary profession, where prizes lead to best-sellers, where sponsors influence outcomes to promote their own image instead of works of artistic merit, and where writers sell their souls, and bodies, for that elusive prize. The literary stereotypes are present: nymphomaniacal ingenues, insomniacal agonizers, paradoxical theorists, opportunistic editors, and self-published authors with money to burn – all weaving and bobbing around each other to gain personal advantage.

St. Aubyn presents this story in elegant prose, moving the plot brilliantly, while exposing the underbelly of the literary establishment, in which the result of all this finagling is mediocrity.

A series of essays and observations by one of literature’s most incendiary writers, written during the decade of his greatest creativity which ended in a life-changing fatwa. Rushdie takes aim at diverse subjects such as racism in Britain, religious fanaticism and literature, the cult of individualism, writers conferences, and trivia about other writers. He holds a candle for the colonial writer who infused the English language with a multitude of thoughts, words, and phrases, and claims that the novel should be subversive, not representative. He also punches back at accusers and justifies his most vilified novel, The Satanic Verses, as a work of dissent not of abuse or insult, and explains its imagery and symbols.

This is a funny and dramatic book and movie in which Grady Tripp is a university writing teacher who makes a mess out of his relationships. He’s having an affair with the chancellor of the college he teaches at, his wife has moved out maybe for good, and one of the students he has in class and who rents a room from him is attracted to him.

Tripp’s life is like a train wreck you can't stop watching, but also somehow funny. This book also became a great movie of the same name, starring Michael Douglas as the professor, Robert Downey Jr. as his agent, Frances McDormand as the chancellor, and Tobey Maguire and Katie Holmes as students. I mean, c’mon, doesn’t that sound great?!!!

This was the first book I’ve seen that re-oriented the United States within a cultural understanding of “the Americas,” a complete resituating of our usually conceived “unique” history. Doing this, Bolaño, a Chilean, puts our own fanatic, right-wing weirdos–religious fanatics, militarists, unhinged hyper-patriotic dictatorial aspirants–into a context where Americans can see ourselves in hemispheric context; these are political pathologies that have historically been seen as much throughout Central and South America as within our own borders.

I found this mind-blowing. This is a collection of fictional biographies, fantastically imagined and yet achingly familiar, and as relevant now as when it was first written more than two decades ago and translated and published in the US in 2009, such that our current politics seem almost pre-scripted by Bolaño’s vision. 

George Orwell is rightly famous for 1984 and Animal Farm. But I heartily recommend this book for its witty, gritty trudge through the social treacle of 1930s Britain. Orwell’s tale of Gordon Comstock, a young writer who embraces poverty in order to defeat the ‘money-god’, also foreshadows key themes of his later work.

Comstock has chucked in a well-paid job as a copywriter so he can write poetry. His disdain for the copywriter’s art allows Orwell to explore the emptiness of words yoked to advertising. ‘Vitamalt’, ‘Truweet’ and ‘Bovex’ are my favourites! Orwell, the journalist-novelist, is reliably strong on those under-the-skin details, from cheap cigarettes to the cost of lodgings in seedier parts of London.

This book taught me that you can surf the line between realism and the incredible (even the ridiculous). The main character, Oedipa Maas, is my favorite heroine because of her openness to every tantalizing possibility (and the possibilities keep ramifying infinitely).

Everything in this book is both fully a symbol and fully itself.

Max Barry’s satirical science-fiction novel, Machine Man, is a dark and funny mediation on contemporary society’s compulsive over-reliance on technology. The narrator, Charles Neumann, is a mechanical engineer who, while obsessively searching for his phone, loses his leg in an industrial accident. After building himself a new machine leg, Charles purposely loses his other leg, so he can replace it with another machine leg. After seeing how great his new legs work, Charles wonders if maybe he should replace more of his body parts with machine parts, begging the question: Where does humanity end and technology begin?

Sam Lipsyte’s sentences are demented and perfect. He’s one of the funniest writers I have ever read.

The story behind this book is one of publishing legend. Here's the way I've always heard it told: Lipsyte’s first book, The Subject Steve, was a brutal satire of contemporary American life that had the deep misfortune of being published on September 11, 2001. (Yes, I know, it wasn’t the worst thing that happened on 9/11, but still.)

He followed it with Home Land, a vitriolic, sleazy, hilarious novel in the form of epic pissy dispatches to a high school alumni newsletter. As narrators go, Lewis Miner is as unimprovable as he is unredeemable. This book was passed around to every publishing house in New York City, read and cherished by dozens of editors who were scared to put their colophon where their heart was.

It’s hard to remember now, but… show more.