Things Fall Apart
1958 · 209 pages
Okonkwo is a wrestler and a hard man in an Igbo village, terrified of resembling his gentle, indebted father, when the missionaries arrive. Achebe builds a whole world before letting it come apart.
★ 8.9
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1958
Showing 10 books from 1958
The Leopard
1958 · 336 pages
Everything must change so that everything can stay the same, says the prince's nephew as Garibaldi's rebels land in Sicily. Lampedusa writes a class watching itself end with autumnal calm and beauty.
★ 8.4
The Americans
1958 · 180 pages
Frank drove ten thousand miles across America in 1955 and 1956, then cut the trip to eighty-three photographs of jukeboxes, funerals, and flags. American photography has not left their shadow since.
★ 7.1
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
1958 · 384 pages
Beauvoir rebuilds the pious Paris girlhood she fought her way out of, and sets against her own escape the fate of Zaza, the friend whose family refused her the man she loved.
★ 6.5
Breakfast at Tiffany's
1958 · 178 pages
Holly Golightly, born Lulamae Barnes in rural Texas, charms money out of men in wartime New York and belongs to nobody. Norman Mailer said he would not have changed two words in it.
★ 6.4
The Affluent Society
1958 · 276 pages
Galbraith looked at postwar America and saw private opulence beside public squalor, with production manufacturing the wants it satisfies. Two generations of arguments over taxes and public spending have run in his channel.
★ 6.3
The Dharma Bums
1958 · 244 pages
Ray Smith takes up Zen and mountaineering under Japhy Ryder, drawn from the poet Gary Snyder, who foresees a rucksack revolution. Young Americans read it and went to the mountains by the thousand.
★ 6.0
The Pledge
1958 · 192 pages
An inspector swears to a murdered girl's mother he will find her killer, then quits, buys a filling station, and waits with a child as bait. Durrenmatt wrote it against the detective genre.
★ 5.2
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
1958 · 260 pages
Quitting the London fashion trade with almost no climbing behind him, Newby set out for an unclimbed Afghan peak. The funniest travel book in English comes out of that mismatch.
★ 5.0
Tokyo Express
1958 · 160 pages
Two bodies lie on a Kyushu beach, arranged as lovers who died together, and the case turns on four minutes at Tokyo Station. Matsumoto pointed Japanese crime fiction straight at government corruption.
★ 4.5