USA: California
*Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep and Farewell My Lovely . The original incarnations of archetypal tough guy and iconic private eye Philip Marlowe are far more complex and beautifully written than the related movies would lead you to expect. This is pulp fiction at its finest - written by an American raised in London.Armistead Maupin Tales of the City . Long-running saga comprising sympathetic and entertaining tales of life in San Francisco, that also work surprisingly well as suspenseful stand-alone novels. That many of its key characters are gay meant that over the years the series became a chronicle of the impact of AIDS on the city. Maupin's Maybe the Moon is the poignant true-life story of his friend, the short person who played ET in the movie but was never allowed to reveal her true identity.
Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49 . Shorter, funnier and more accessible than Gravity's Rainbow , this novel of techno-freaks and potheads in Sixties California reveals, among other things, the sexy side of stamp collecting.
John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath . The classic account of a migrant family forsaking the Midwest for the Promised Land. Steinbeck's lighthearted but crisply observed novella Cannery Row captures daily life on the prewar Monterey waterfront, and the epic East of Eden updates and resets the Bible in the Salinas Valley and details three generations of familial feuding.
Nathanael West The Day of the Locust . West wrote dark novels wholly vested in the American experience; this one, set in LA, is an apocalyptic story of fringe characters at the edge of the film industry.
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