American Pastoral
1997 · 423 pages
Seymour Levov has a glove factory, a beauty queen wife, and the whole postwar American promise, until his stuttering daughter plants a bomb in 1968. Roth takes a decent man apart.
★ 7.7
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
1968 · 256 pages
Didion went into Haight-Ashbury in 1967 and came back with a five-year-old on acid and children improvising a society in a vacuum. She rebuilt American nonfiction prose around the sound of her sentences.
★ 7.0
Chronicles
Volume One
2004 · 293 pages
Dylan refuses the story everyone wants. He writes instead about borrowed couches in Greenwich Village in 1961 and a New Orleans studio in 1989, in prose as good as his songs.
★ 6.7
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
1971 · 204 pages
Raoul Duke and his attorney drive to Las Vegas with a trunk of narcotics to cover a desert motorcycle race and a drug enforcement conference. The bender becomes Thompson's autopsy of the sixties.
★ 6.4
The White Album
1979 · 222 pages
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live," the title essay begins, then takes the story apart: the Manson trial, a Doors session going nowhere, and a psychiatric report on Didion herself.
★ 5.9
Norwegian Wood
1987 · 298 pages
Hearing the Beatles song years later, a man returns to 1969 Tokyo, where his best friend's suicide left him loving two women at once. Murakami dropped the fantastic entirely, and Japan devoured it.
★ 5.3