USA: New York City
Paul Auster New York Trilogy . Three Borgesian investigations into the mystery and madness of contemporary New York. Using the conventions of the detective novel, Auster unfolds a disturbed and disturbing picture of the city.Truman Capote Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood . The first story is about a fictional social climber in New York called Holly Go-Lightly; the second concerns the true-life stories of two serial killers in the heartland. The subject matter of these two stories could hardly be more different, but the degree of insight drawn from two uniquely American stories is equally high in both accounts.
Michael Chabon The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay . Pulitzer-prize winning novel charting the rise and fall of comic book-writing cousins in New York City - one a refugee from World War II Prague, the other a closeted Brooklynite.
Jonathan Franzen The Corrections . While it never quite lived up to the hype - what possibly could? - this ambitious saga, about a classically dysfunctional American family, manages to capture all that late twentieth-century navel searching in a nutshell. And it's very funny in places, too.
*Chester Himes Cotton Comes to Harlem, Blind Man with a Pistol , and many others. Action-packed and uproariously violent novels set in New York's Harlem, starring the much-feared detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones.
Jonathan Lethem Motherless Brooklyn . A hilarious crime caper starring Lionel Essrog, a Prince-loving private detective with Tourette's syndrome, on the trail of a killer in Brooklyn's characterful neighborhoods.
Grace Paley Collected Stories . Shrewd love-hate stories written over a lifetime by the daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants, who published dead-on accounts of New York life in three installments: her first book of stories came out in the 1950s, her second in the early 1970s and her third in the late 1980s.
J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye . Classic novel of adolescence, tracing Holden Caulfield's sardonic journey through the streets of New York.
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