Herzog
1964 · 371 pages
Moses Herzog, a professor whose wife left him for his closest friend, comes apart and writes furious unsent letters to philosophers, ex-wives, and the dead. Bellow makes a breakdown enormous fun.
★ 7.8
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1964
Showing 12 books from 1964
One-Dimensional Man
1964 · 260 pages
Marcuse argues that rich societies control people by satisfying them. The needs advertising invents get met, dissent gets absorbed and sold back, and the capacity to imagine a different arrangement quietly withers away.
★ 6.8
A Moveable Feast
1964 · 256 pages
Paris in the 1920s, where a young writer works in cafes, borrows books from the bookseller Sylvia Beach, and takes the measure of Gertrude Stein and Scott Fitzgerald. Hunger sharpens everything he sees.
★ 6.8
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
1964 · 146 pages
Five golden tickets get five children inside Willy Wonka's factory, and only Charlie Bucket, half starved and poor, is neither glutton nor brat. Dahl trusted children to relish the punishments.
★ 6.4
Understanding Media
The Extensions of Man
1964 · 365 pages
The medium is the message, McLuhan wrote in 1964: a technology reshapes perception regardless of what it carries. Everyone arguing about what screens do to us is working inside the frame he built.
★ 6.3
Lunch Poems
1964 · 76 pages
O'Hara wrote these on lunch breaks from the museum, turning an ordinary Manhattan hour into art. "The Day Lady Died" runs through his errands until Billie Holiday's face on a newspaper stops everything.
★ 5.5
Suicide of the West
1964 · 364 pages
Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide, Burnham argues: not the cause of the retreat but the creed that lets elites feel virtuous while surrendering ground. American conservatism took its diagnosis from him.
★ 5.4
Pop. 1280
1964 · 256 pages
Nick Corey, sheriff of a dirt-poor Southern county, plays the harmless fool while killing people, and his cheerful drawl carries you far before you see what you are laughing at.
★ 5.1
The Honored Society
1964 · 265 pages
Lewis walked postwar Sicily and found monks running extortion from the confessional and Mafia bosses installed as mayors by American liberators, whose invasion, he argues, restored what Mussolini had nearly destroyed.
★ 4.7
The Chill
1964 · 279 pages
A husband hires Lew Archer to find the bride who fled their honeymoon, and the trail runs back decades into two families' history. In Macdonald's California, crimes are inherited rather than committed.
★ 4.6
The Giving Tree
1964 · 57 pages
A tree loves a boy. She gives him her apples, then her branches, then her trunk, until she is a stump he sits on. Readers still cannot agree whether that is love.
★ 4.4
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung
The Little Red Book
1964 · 146 pages
Printed by the billion and waved by Red Guards, Mao's pocket handbook compresses his politics into 427 quotations on struggle, self-criticism, and war. During the Cultural Revolution, not carrying one was dangerous.
★ 4.2