
The Stranger
Meursault buries his mother without crying, takes a lover, and shoots a man on a hot Algiers beach. At his trial the tears he never shed matter more than the killing.

Meursault buries his mother without crying, takes a lover, and shoots a man on a hot Algiers beach. At his trial the tears he never shed matter more than the killing.

The only serious philosophical question, Camus opens, is whether to kill yourself. His answer: the universe will never explain itself, so you live anyway, unreconciled, like Sisyphus happy pushing his rock uphill forever.

Zweig grew up in a Vienna that believed in security, art, and progress, and lived to watch it burn twice. He mailed this memoir to his publisher the day before he killed himself.

Two officers who trained together meet for dinner after forty-one years. The general has questions about a morning hunt and his dead wife, and the candles burn down while he circles them.

Paris empties in June 1940 and Nemirovsky follows it south, into a village where a woman is drawn to the German officer billeted in her house. She died at Auschwitz in 1942.

Raised barefoot in Kenya, Markham hunted with Nandi boys, trained racehorses, and scouted elephants from the air before flying the Atlantic alone. Hemingway said she made him ashamed as a writer.