Marjorie's Picks
At fourteen I fell deeply, painfully, in love with the Glass family; I’ve never gotten over it. I meet them from time to time and the flame still burns.
Every time I make this journey I find new lands, rare treasures I missed before, and Fagles’s translation brings these worlds into thrilling, immediate life.
Reading these poems opened some hidden door in my psyche through which the winds of Tartarus now blow. Mitchell’s translation feels inspired, and the result is something haunting, disturbing, and extraordinarily beautiful.
Dickens at his darkest, least sentimental, and most wonderful. The Thames, in all its teeming, sordid, thriving life, is one’s of his most engaging characters.
Everything happens, with James, in the spaces between what his characters say and do, and here he is at his most enigmatic and sublime. One of the most deeply moving novels I have ever read.
The rewards, in Nabokov, are directly proportional to the effort you expend to meet him. This is no passive reading adventure, but if you see it through, you will be lavishly repaid: a masterpiece.
At once a coming of age memoir, a travelogue through worlds now vanished, and a history of middle Europe to the cusp of the second world war, this trilogy defies definition, and Leigh Fermor’s erudite, utterly charming style makes you believe you travelled with him.
DeLillo’s writing is so exquisitely good it makes me happy, and here he is at the top of his game. I savored all 827 pages of this novel, and I will read it again if only for the pleasure of Marvin Lundy’s company.
A fantasy like no other, this extraordinary novel opens up worlds within worlds in ways that continually surprise and challenge and enchant. I got lost here, and I’ve never fully returned.
Many, many years ago this collection taught me the difference between a good and a great short story, and I eternally return to this well for inspiration and delight.