
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Janie comes home to a Black town in Florida and tells a friend about her three marriages and how she found her own voice. Hurston writes porch talk exactly as it sounded.

Janie comes home to a Black town in Florida and tells a friend about her three marriages and how she found her own voice. Hurston writes porch talk exactly as it sounded.

Thirteen dwarves turn up at a comfortable hobbit's door and talk him into helping them rob a dragon. The comedy is real, and the riddle game in the dark still frightens children.

George looks after Lennie, huge and slow-witted, across the California ranches, and the two of them keep describing a farm they mean to buy. Steinbeck presses the Depression into that dream.

Byron crossed Persia and Afghanistan in the 1930s hunting domes and minarets, and the diary he kept is funny, rapturous, and cruel about everyone he meets. Paul Fussell called it travel writing's Ulysses.

Cheap grace forgives without changing anyone, Bonhoeffer wrote from an outlawed seminary in Nazi Germany. Real grace costs a life: Christ calls a man to come and die. He was hanged in 1945.

"I had a farm in Africa," Dinesen begins. Seventeen years below the Ngong Hills end in ruined coffee and a forced sale, and she tells it in prose that never asks for sympathy.

Xiangzi pulls a rented rickshaw through 1920s Beijing and wants a cart of his own. Soldiers seize the first he buys, a policeman takes his savings, and Lao She grinds him to nothing.

Persian fiction's darkest book: an opium-addicted painter of pen cases draws the same scene, an old man and a girl in black offering a lily, then finds it living behind his wall.