Recommendations based on "Breath of Life (Penguin Modern Classics)"

A second volume of collected short fiction—from the bestselling author and winner of the 2015 Rea Award for the Short StoryFew authors write with such sheer love of story and language as T.C. Boyle, and that is nowhere more evident than in his inventive, wickedly funny, and always entertaining short stories. In 1998, T.C. Boyle Stories brought together the author’s first four collections to critical acclaim. Now, T.C. Boyle Stories II gathers the work from his three most recent collections along with fourteen new tales previously unpublished in book form as well as a preface in which Boyle looks back on his career as a writer of stories and the art of making them.By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, Boyle’s stories have mapped a wide range of human emotions. The fifty-eight stories in this new volume, written over the last eighteen years, reflect his maturing themes. Along with the satires and tall tales that established his reputation, readers will find stories speaking to contemporary social issues, from air rage to abortion doctors, and character-driven tales of quiet power and passion. Others capture timeless themes, from first love and its consequences to confrontations with mortality, or explore the conflict between civilization and wildness. The new stories find Boyle engagingly testing his characters’ emotional and physical endurance, whether it’s a group of giants being bred as weapons of war in a fictional Latin American country, a Russian woman who ignores dire warnings in returning to her radiation-contaminated home, a hermetic writer who gets more than a break in his routine when he travels to receive a minor award, or a man in a California mountain town who goes a little too far in his concern for a widow.Mordant wit, emotional power, exquisite prose: it is all here in abundance. T.C. Boyle Stories II is a grand career statement from a writer whose imagination knows no bounds.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s transcendent novels have become part of the world literary canon, but it is his short fiction that originally made him famous. The first full-size collection of his short stories to appear in English, All That Is Gone draws from the author’s own experiences in Indonesia to depict characters trying to make sense of a war-torn culture haunted by colonialism, among them an eight-year-old girl soon to be married off by her parents for money and an idealistic young soldier who witnesses the savage beating of a man accused of being a spy. Though violence and brutality pervade these tales, there is present throughout a profound sense of compassion—an extraordinary combination of despair and hope that gives All That Is Gone rare power and beauty.

It took Vonnegut more than 20 years to put his Dresden experiences into words. He explained, "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again." Slaughterhouse Five is a powerful novel incorporating a number of genres. Only those who have fought in wars can say whether it represents the experience well. However, what the novel does do is invite the reader to look at the absurdity of war. Human versus human, hedonist politicians pressing buttons and ordering millions to their deaths all for ideologies many cannot even comprehend. Flicking between the US, 1940's Germany and Tralfamadore, Vonnegut's semi- autobiographical protagonist Billy Pilgrim finds himself very lost. One minute he is being viewed as a specimen in a Tralfamadorian Zoo, the next he is wandering a post-apocalyptic city looking for corpses. Slaughterhouse Five-Or The Children's Crusade A Duty-Dance with Death is a remarkable blend of black humour, irony, the truth and the absurd. The author regards his work a "failure", millions of readers do not. Released the same time bombs were falling on South East Asia, this title caused controversy and awakening. Essential reading for all. So it goes. --Jon Smith

Open this wordless book and take off on mind-bending visual journeys full of twists, turns, and surprises. Zoom from an Egyptian pyramid to an exotic jungle to a sandy beach. But if you think you know where you are, guess again. For in Istvan Banyai's mysterious landscapes of pictures within pictures, nothing is ever as it seems.

The contemporary and the mythic collide in this hard-boiled tale of computers and conspiracy theories, unicorns and ancient lands.

An unparalleled work of historical conjecture, ranging imaginatively over huge tracts of the American popular consciousness, Don DeLillo's Libra contains an introduction by the author in Penguin Modern Classics. In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of JFK will galvanize the nation against Communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped. Don DeLillo (b.1936) was born and raised in New York City. Americana (1971), his first novel, announced the arrival of a major literary talent, and the novels that followed confirmed his reputation as one of the most distinctive and compelling voices in late-twentieth-century American fiction. DeLillo's comic gifts come to the fore in White Noise (1985), which won the National Book Award, Underworld (1997), hailed by Martin Amis as 'the ascension of a great writer', Cosmopolis (2003), adapted into a film by David Cronenberg, due to be released later this year, and Falling Man (2007), a novel about the aftereffects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York. If you enjoyed Libra, you might like DeLillo's Americana, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Don DeLillo's apocalyptic imagination takes on the assassination of John F. Kennedy... Breathtaking' Newsday

Twenty of the finest science fiction short stories from one of the genre's greatest writers, Isaac Asimov. Isaac Asimov was the Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America, the founder of robot ethics, and one of the world's most prolific authors of fiction and non-fiction. Asimov's short fiction has been enjoyed by millions for more than half a century. Many of the stories in this collection are classics of the genre, including 'Ring Around the Sun', which follows two self-declared best pilots on their journey from Earth to Venus, passing within twenty-two million miles of the Sun. The ever-expanding popularity of Asimov's stories with young and old readers alike is explained by their wit, zest and human interest.

Vineland is hardly anyone’s favorite Thomas Pynchon novel. Marking Pynchon’s return after vanishing for nearly two decades following his epic Gravity’s Rainbow, it was initially regarded as slight, a middling curiosity. However, for Peter Coviello, the oft-overlooked Vineland opens up new ways of thinking about Pynchon’s writing and about how we read and how we live in the rough currents of history. Beginning with his early besotted encounters with Vineland, Coviello reads Pynchon’s offbeat novel of sixties insurgents stranded in the Reaganite summer of 1984 as a delirious stoner comedy that is simultaneously a work of heartsick fury and political grief: a portrait of the hard afterlives of failed revolution in a period of stifling reaction. Offering a roving meditation on the uses of criticism and the practice of friendship, the fashioning of publics and counterpublics, the sentence and the police, Coviello argues that Vineland is among the most abundant and far-sighted of late-century American excursions into novelistic possibility. Departing from visions of Pynchon as the arch-postmodernist, erudite and obscure, he discloses an author far more companionable and humane. In Pynchon’s harmonizing of joyousness and outrage, comedy and sorrow, Coviello finds a model for thinking through our catastrophic present.

From the Author of The Basketball Diaries   Originally released in 1973, Living at the Movies was the first aboveground publication of the work of Jim Carroll, a singer-songwriter Newsweek called “contender for the title of rock’s new poet laureate.” In these poems, all written before the age of twenty-two, Carroll shows an uncanny virtuosity. His power and poisoned purity of vision are reminiscent of Arthur Rimbaud, and, like the strongest poets of the New York School, Carroll transforms the everyday details of city life into poetry. In language at once delicate, hallucinatory, and menacing, his major themes—love, friendship, the exquisite pains and pleasures of drugs, and above all, the ever-present city—emerge in an atmosphere where dream and reality mingle on equal terms. It is an astonishing debut by an important American writer and artist.   “Jim Carroll has the sure confidence of a true artist. . . . He is steeped in his craft. He has worked as only a man of inspiration is capable of working. . . . His beginning is a triumph.”—Gerard Malanga, Poetry

Kurt Vonnegut has surpassed even his own giddy heights of hilariously bitter irony in Bluebeard. It is a novel so funny and yet so terribly serious that you will read it - then reconsider your own life.