2023-24

Our books this year (with one exception) come from a list of “Short Perfect Novels” in Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, The Sentence. As the main character says, these are “books that knock you sideways in around 200 pages. Between the covers there exists a complete world. The story is unforgettably peopled and nothing is extraneous. Reading one of these books takes only an hour or two but leaves a lifetime imprint…”

Too Loud a Solitude, Bohumil Hrabel

Train Dreams, Denis Johnson

The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

The Shadow-Line, Joseph Conrad

The All of It, Jeannette Haien

Swimmer in the Secret Sea, William Kotzwinkle

Winter in the Blood, James Welch

The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald

First Love, Ivan Turgenev

Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee

Fire on the Mountain, Anita Desai