But, like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. Its single-mindedness makes it more readable than a novel like Pickwick Papers , where the title character is little more than a human clothesline on which a welter of equally vivid minor characters are hung. And can your own second wife come first for you after her predecessor dies? The best Dickens novel to read? Bleak House. To teach? Oliver Twist. Martin Chuzzlewit really, I have. Little Dorrit. It might be predictable, but for me the later, darker, reflective books often suit this purpose best: Persuasion , Villette , The Wings of the Dove.
Again, for hours. Always Little Dorrit! It enables us to see the fullest possible psychological and artistic spectrum of his work. Our Mutual Friend was my Dickens gateway drug. The opening sequence plays like a Scorsese tracking shot on steroids. A body fished out of the Thames becomes gossip at a nouveau riche banquet, from which two lawyers slip out to a dockside police station, where they meet a mysterious man who runs off to take lodgings with a clerk, whose daughter becomes the ward of a dustman, who hires a peg-legged balladeer to read him The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
The surprise comes from how much fun it is to navigate his corrupt social network. Conventional wisdom asks you to choose Dickens savory or sweet: the ineluctable fog of Bleak House or the bibulous conviviality of The Pickwick Papers. Our Mutual Friend , his last completed novel, gives you both an intricate web of plots and a cast of delightfully scurrilous plotters. Eliot pinched as his working title for the The Waste Land.
Dickens shows us as well that the insights we call post-modern personality as performance, fiction as artifice have Victorian roots. This is the book you want on a desert island.
Kevin Hartnett , a staff writer for The Millions , writes the Brainiac ideas column for the Boston Globe and blogs about fatherhood and family life at growingsideways. You can follow him on Twitter at kshartnett. The history of contemporary letters has, to a very manifest extent, been written in such magazines.
Editors serve an essential role in that process. My years of working with editors as a contributor have taught me that they are passionate, discerning stewards. It is often a thankless job to cull through thousands of submissions and deliver far more rejections than acceptances. Yet editors love the opportunity to make discoveries, to champion work, to shape and finally share an issue with readers. Since they are so devoted to their publications, I asked editors of seven great literary magazines to select their favorite issues.
Here are their choices. Poetry — Don Share , editor — February It was guest-edited for Harriet Monroe by Louis Zukofsky. It became something of an albatross for him later apologies for that metaphor , but the issue was a great success for Poetry. An unfortunate and conspicuous aspect of this is how white and male the table of contents is. Still, it was our most influential issue. She insisted; so, I said, alright, if I can define it in an essay, and I used two words, sincerity and objectification, and I was sorry immediately.
Well, that was pretty bad, so then I spent the next thirty years trying to make it simple. West Branch — G. One issue! So hard, even in the handful of years since I took over West Branch in — all the children are exceptional, and all of them are deeply-loved. That said: for me, one of the joys of putting together an issue of a journal is trying to imagine lines of coherence between, across, and among different works.
I spend hours ordering each issue, thinking about these lines, imagining how different works interact with one another.
In that sense, my current favorite is WB Each is obsessed with the gaps in desire — the dead zones in which desire, through its absence, bides its time. My favorite issue of The Iowa Review is our Fall river-themed issue. We aspire to publishing more international writing, in a more deliberate way, and putting together this issue taught me how to do that; but it also taught me how, despite their obvious similarities, the China-related writings were just as varied and fit just as well often better with their English-language neighbors as with each other.
In Vol. So, yes, Now that was an issue. Brevity — Dinty W. Moore , editor — Fall It is of course excruciatingly difficult to pick out one favorite issue after Tin House — Rob Spillman , editor — Fall How can you possibly have a favorite amongst your children?
In my case, 67 children or issues of Tin House? I enlisted Moody to help us put together an issue completely devoted to these women still the only issue of Tin House that has had a guest co-editor. We were blown away by the contributions. It is still one of our most talked-about issues, and one we have subsequently anthologized and expanded into book form. Since a group of Washington and Lee students, including one T.
Fortunately, we still have 50 or 60 copies for sale. The second-half of is straight-up, stunningly chock-full of amazing books. Scroll down and get started. Controversy has dogged this new book as many have questioned whether the famously silent Lee, now pushing 90 and in poor health, truly wanted publication for this long-abandoned early effort to grapple with the characters and subject matter that would evolve into her beloved coming-of-age novel.
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates : A journalist who learned the ropes from David Carr , Coates is one of our most incisive thinkers and writers on matters of race.
Coates is unflinching when writing of the continued racial injustice in the United States: from growing up in Baltimore and its culture of violence that preceded the Freddie Gray riots, to making the case for reparations while revealing the systematic racism embedded in Chicago real estate, to demanding that South Carolina stop flying the Confederate flag.
Given the current state of affairs, this book should be required reading. Originally slated for September, the book was moved up to July. We started to feel pregnant with this book. We had this book that so many people wanted. Then he meets another woman at a party and begins to question everything anew. A puzzle, a love story, and a tale of illness, memory, and manipulation, A Cure for Suicide promises to be a unique novel from a writer already known for his originality.
The Dying Grass by William T. In his latest, Vollmann depicts the Nez Perce War, a months-long conflict in that saw the eponymous Native American tribe defend their mountain territories from encroachment by the U. According to Vollmann, who spoke with Tom Bissell about the series for a New Republic piece, the text consists of mostly dialogue.
That was 35 years ago, before video games exploded not only in size and complexity, but also in absorptive allure. Recently, things have changed. It sounds impossibly gigantic. And with escalation surely comes a reckoning: Why are people spending more time with games than without? Across the world, a new class of professional gamers are earning lucrative sponsorships and appearing on slickly produced televised tournaments with tuition-sized purses. But surely more than money is at stake.
As increasingly rich worlds draw us in, what are we hoping to gain? Are there practical benefits, or are we just hoping there are? Nick M. Yuknavitch is the author of a gutsy memoir, The Chronology of Water , and Dora: A Headcase , a fictional re-spinning of the Freudian narrative. Her new novel, Small Backs of Children , deals with art, violence, and the very real effects of witnessing violence and conflict through the media.
Nick R. In bringing the first Opium War to crackling life, Ghosh has illuminated the folly of our own failed war on drugs. He seems to have relented. Growing up in 19th-century St. The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector : For readers who worship at the altar of Lispector, the appearance of new work in translation is an event.
Although she died 50 years ago, her family is still mining her archives for undiscovered gems, resulting in this new collection of 56 pieces, more than 40 of which have never been published before. The Daughters by Adrienne Celt : Celt, who is also a comics artist, writes in her bio that she grew up in Seattle, and has both worked for Google and visited a Russian prison.
One to watch. Her narrators have a knack for all kind of bad behavior: like the algebra teacher who imbibes 40s from the corner bodega on school nights, who smokes in bed and drunk dials her ex-husband, or the woman who offers to shoot a flock of birds for her apartment-manager boyfriend.
Second, in documenting Catholic devotion to saintly apocrypha, Iredell carries the reader to his most heartfelt note: his devotion and love for his father and family. September: Purity by Jonathan Franzen : Known for his mastery of the modern domestic drama and his disdain for Internet things, Franzen, with his latest enormous novel, broadens his scope from the tree-lined homes of the Midwest and the Mainline to variously grim and paradisiacal domiciles in Oakland, East Germany, and Bolivia; alters his tableaux from the suburban nuclear family to fractured, lonely little twosomes; and progresses from cat murder to human murder.
The result is something odd and unexpected — a political novel that is somehow less political than his family novels at their coziest, and shot through with new strains of bitterness. Expect thinkpieces. Charmaine and Stan are struggling to make ends meet in the midst of social and economic turmoil. The most recent Positron installment, which was published under the same name as the upcoming novel, came out in With such an intriguing, morally suspect central character as his instrument, Banville should be able to play one of his typically beguiling tunes.
It took the grit, melancholy, and wit of the Western genre and bent it just enough toward the absurd. Our own Emily St. You can read an excerpt at The New Yorker. Sweet Caress by William Boyd : Boyd is one of those Englishmen who changes hats as effortlessly as most people change socks.
Her stories are sometimes difficult, bizarre, upsetting even; and always funny, truthful, and affecting. Read her in doses, perhaps, but read her, for godssakes. At night, he peels off the power suit and becomes a literary author himself, first with two memoirs about his descent into — and back out of — crack addiction, and now a debut novel.
In this sixth, semi-autobiographical novel from Lily Tuck, winner of the National Book Award for The News from Paraguay , the imaginative Liliane uncovers her many ancestors, tracing and combining their histories as she goes. The result is a writerly coming-of-age that spans both World Wars, multiple continents, and all of one very diverse family. This is Your Life, Harriet Chance! Seeking lusher landscape, the pair head east, risking attack by patrolling authorities, roving desperadoes, and the unrelenting sun.
The authorial voice ranges from high to low, from cranky to tender. The Marvels by Brian Selznick : You know a book is eagerly awaited when you witness an actual mob scene full of shoving and elbows for advance copies at BookExpo America. One day Kelly finds an orphaned boy, a discovery that forces Kelly to reexamine his own past and buried traumas.
Above the Waterfall by Ron Rash : For his sixth novel, Ron Rash returns to the beautiful but unforgiving Appalachian hills that have nourished most of his fiction and poetry.
In Above the Waterfall , a sheriff nearing retirement and a young park ranger seeking to escape her past come together in a small Appalachian town bedeviled by poverty and crystal meth. Copyright Shane Sherman Privacy Policy. Fiction Nonfiction. Wikipedia Link Gender Male. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Bleak House by Charles Dickens. The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens.
Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens. Hard Times by Charles Dickens. With Social. Dickens was so fond of chronicling moments of wonder and befuddlement that he often overdid them. But the meeting of David and his aunt is beautifully understated. No boys here! I watched her, with my heart at my lips, as she marched to a corner of her garden, and stooped to dig up some little root there.
Then, without a scrap of courage, but with a great deal of desperation, I went softly in and stood beside her, touching her with my finger.
She started and looked up. And sat flat down in the garden-path. Poor Aunt Betsey has come in one moment to intuit that David, too, is digging at roots. On the other hand, those patient, reproachful, grandpaternal voices continue to mutter on your bookshelf. And they say, Start walking. The bundles turn out to be women, of course. One of his strongest pieces. Or read Lying Awake , the justly famous account of the joint public hanging of the Mannings, a married pair of murderers.
Sketches By Boz Again, journalism, but journalism morphing into the fiction. Published the year before Victoria became queen, and written when he was in his early 20s, it is so vivid, so warm, so comic, so passionate. London Recreations , whose title is self-explanatory, is not merely descriptive. It contains that hatred of busybodydom and evangelical humbug that burst out in a more mature essay for Household Words , The Great Baby — the baby being the public, patronised by Those Who Know Best.
But he could not stick the evangelical Christianity. A Christmas Carol In many ways this, the most famous of all his books, is his best. Christmas was central to his world-vision that simply trying to be a little kinder to one another both as individuals and as a society might be an experiment worth trying. The fact that it is set in the form of a fairytale is a good preparation for the longer fiction all of which, at its most successful, possesses some of the power of such stories.
David Copperfield His own personal favourite among the novels.
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