USA: Fiction
General Americana*Raymond Carver Will You Please Be Quiet Please ? Stories of the American working class, written in a distinctive sparse, almost deadpan style that perhaps owes something to Hemingway and certainly influenced untold numbers of contemporary American writers. The stories served as the basis for Robert Altman's film Short Cuts .
Don DeLillo White Noise and Underworld . The former is his best, a funny and penetrating pop culture exploration, while the latter is one of those typically flawed attempts to pack the twentieth-century American experience into a great big novel. Worthwhile, though.
John Dos Passos USA . Hugely ambitious novel (originally a trilogy) that grapples with the US in the early decades of the twentieth century from every possible angle. Gripping human stories with a strong political and historical point of view.
Dennis Johnson Jesus' Son . Junkies and thieves and all the usual trappings of a beat-era collection of stories, but from 1990s urban America.
William Kennedy Ironweed . Terse, affecting tale of a couple of down-on-their-luck drunks haunted by ghosts from a checkered past; excellent evocation of 1930s America, specifically working-class Albany, New York.
*Herman Melville Moby Dick . Compendious and compelling account of nineteenth-century whaling, packed with details on American life from New England to the Pacific.
E. Annie Proulx Accordion Crimes . Proulx's masterly book comes as close to being the fabled "Great American Novel" as anyone could reasonably ask, tracing a fascinating history of immigrants in all parts of North America through the fortunes of a battered old Sicilian accordion.
More about Fiction:
New York City
New England
Florida, The South
Louisiana
The Great Lakes, The Great Plains
The Rockies, The Southwest
California
The Pacific Northwest
Alaska
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