Searching for something specific? Use the search box below:
Guns, Germs & Steel, Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning overview of the history of the human race.
Sailing Around the Room, new & selected poems by Billy Collins, the 11th Poet Laureate of the United States.
Invisible Monsters, a truly twisted, implosive novel by Chuck Palahniuk.
Black Hawk Down, Mark Bowden's riveting account of the Battle of Mogadishu.
The Emigrants, an imaginative blend of autobiography & fiction by W.G. Sebald.
Disgrace, a brilliant & engaging novel that won J.M. Coetzee his 2nd Booker prize.
Picnic, Lightning, a quirky, accessible, and evocative collection of poems by Billy Collins.
Quarantine, Jim Crace's wondrous and Whitbread-winning re-imagining of the Temptation of Jesus Christ.
Myth, Truth and Literature, Colin Falck's impassioned refutation of post-structuralist literary theory.
A Prayer for the Dying, a haunting and gripping novel by Stewart O'Nan.
Close Range, harrowingly realistic stories of Wyoming by Annie Proulx.
The Tessaract, a multilayered thriller from Alex Garland, author of The Beach.
The Gift of Stones, Jim Crace's imagining of Stone-Age life at the dawn of Bronze.
When We Were Wolves, powerful stories by Jon Billman.
Martin Dressler the tale of an American dreamer which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Anil's Ghost, the new novel by Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient.
Cloudsplitter, the awesome novel by Russell Banks.
Fight Club, the novel by Chuck Palahniuk.
Opened Ground, the collected poems of Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney.
Stephen Michell's pocket translation of Lao-Tzu's Tao Te Ching.
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, the award-winning poetry collection by John Ashbery.
Damascus Gate, the novel by Robert Stone.
Cotton Comes to Harlem, a crime novel by Chester Himes.
The Hours the PEN/Faulkner and Pulitzer Prize winner by Michael Cunningham.
Birds of America a wonderful collection of stories by Lorrie Moore
Lolita the horribly beautiful masterpiece by Vladimir Nabokov
Backwards & Forwards: a technical manual for reading plays a wonderful primer on the mechanics of drama & storytelling
White Noise Don Delillo's winner of the National Book Award
The Crying of Lot 49 Thomas Pynchon's brilliant 2nd novel
Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie's winner of the Booker Prize for best novel of the last 25 years
The Western Canon: the books and school of the ages Harold Bloom's passionate promotion of literary classics
Shakespeare: the invention of the human Harold Bloom's never-boring, sometimes-loony defense of the Bard of Avon
There's No Such Thing As Free Speech a collection of essays by Stanley Fish
The Limits of Interpretation Umberto Eco's brilliant exploration of the limits of literary explication
Galapagos arguably the best novel by Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse-Five
Catch-22 the classic farce by Joseph Heller
Closing Time Heller's hilarious yet poignant sequel to Catch-22
Candy Terry Southern's infamously ribald updating of Voltaire's Candide
Haroun and the Sea of Stories a fabulous fable by Salman Rushdie
What Will Suffice: Contemporary American Poets on the Art of Poetry a provocative and instructive anthology
Crazy Horse a concise and thoughtful biography by Larry McMurtry
The Demon-Haunted World a lucid defense of science by the late Carl Sagan
Comeback a pulp thriller by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake)
Ahmed's Revenge an exotic mystery novel by PEN/Faulkner winner Richard Wiley
Accordion Crimes a GREAT novel by E. Annie Proulx
Night Train a detective novel by Martin Amis
The Collector Collector a comic novel by Tibor Fischer
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead a play by Tom Stoppard
The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1988-1997 an anthology edited by Harold Bloom
Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories an anthology of 750-word tales
Tripmaster Monkey: his fake book a novel by Maxine Hong Kingston
Death Will Have Your Eyes a spy novel by James Sallis
The Cement Garden a horrific little novel by Ian McEwan
Success a comic romp of a novel by Martin Amis
As I Lay Dying the classic novel by William Faulkner
The Collected Stories of Grace Paley, a living master
Oleanna the controversial play by David Mamet
Solo Hand the inaugural Evan Horne mystery written by Bill Moody
Death of a Tenor Man the 2nd Evan Horne jazz mystery by Bill Moody
The Mezzanine the brilliant little novel by Nicholson Baker
Domesticity the gastronomic interpretation of love by Bob Shacochis
The Garden of Eden the dark, posthumously-published novel by Papa Hemingway
100 Poems by 100 Poets an anthology edited by Harold Pinter
Voices From Silence a novel of Argentina by Douglas Unger
The Black Echo the Edgar-winning mystery by Michael Connelly
Glengarry Glen Ross the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by David Mamet
The Thought Gang the hilarious novel by Tibor Fischer mixing philosophy and felonies
Understanding Science the brilliant exploration of the scientific method by Arthur N. Strahler
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale HurstonNOTE from JJ: Where I have reviewed a book on the list above or the one below, you may click on the book's title to jump to my review.
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
My Antonia by Willa Cather
Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote
Three Lives by Gertrude Stein
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
The Bone People by Keri Hulme
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
White Noise by Don Delillo
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya
Zami, a New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick
London Fields by Martin Amis
AUTHOR,TITLE, YEAR OF PUBLICATION
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1918
James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941
Dorothy Allison, Bastard out of Carolina, 1992
Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me Ultima, 1972
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio, 1919
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1970
Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 1987
James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1953
James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1985
Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family, 1998
Saul Bellow, Herzog, 1964
Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, 1948
William Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 1959
Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, 1966
Raymond Carver, Cathedral, 1983
Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, 1913
Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1927
John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever, 1978
Sandra Cisneros, House on Mango Street, 1984
Don DeLillo, White Noise, 1985
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968
Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins, 1983
John Dos Passos, U.S.A., 1930
Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy, 1925
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952
Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine, 1984
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 1926
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, 1930
William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses, 1940
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925
M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating, 1954
Francisco Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman, 1997
Alex Haley, Roots, 1976
Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1961
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 1926
Ernest Hemingway, The Short Stories, 1938
Michael Herr, Dispatches, 1984
Chester Himes, My Life of Absurdity: The Autobiography, 1976
Linda Hogan, Mean Spirit, 1990
bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, 1982
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937
Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, 1902
LeRoi Jones (Amira Baraka), Blues People: Negro Music in White America, 1963
Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957
Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 1962
Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John, 1983
Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior, 1976
Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird, 1976
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960
Li-Young Lee, The Winged Seed, 1995
Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt, 1922
Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing, 1994
Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, 1940
Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead, 1948
Bernard Malamud, The Magic Barrel, 1958
Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1965
Rollo May, Love and Will, 1969
Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, 1948
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 1934
N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn, 1968
Wright Morris, Field of Vision, 1956
Toni Morrison, Sula, 1973
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, 1977
Toni Morrison, Beloved, 1987
Toni Morrison, Jazz, 1992
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, 1958
John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks, 1932
Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find, 1955
Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael, 1947
Tillie Olson, Tell Me a Riddle, 1961
Jon Okada, No-No Boy, 1977
Grace Paley, Collected Stories, 1994
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer, 1961
Katherine Anne Porter, Flowering Judas and Other Stories, 1930
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, 1973
Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence, 1979
Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint, 1969
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1951
May Sarton, At Seventy, 1984
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, 1977
Isaac B. Singer, The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1982
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1993
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1937
William Styron, Sophie's Choice, 1979
James Thurber, A Thurber Carnival, 1945
Jean Toomer, Cane, 1923
Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth, 1962*
John Updike, Rabbit, Run, 1960
Gore Vidal, The United States: Essays 1952-1992, 1993
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five, 1969
Alice Walker, The Color Purple, 1982
Robert Penn Warren, All the Kings Men, 1946
Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust, 1939
John Edgar Wideman, Philadelphia Fire, 1990
William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain, 1925
Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station, 1940
Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again, 1941
Richard Wright, Native Son, 1940
Wakako Yamauchi, Songs My Mother Taught Me, 1994* First date of publication
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