THE BOOK

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  A Wrinkle in Time

  Madeleine L'Engle

  2012 | Unabridged

  The first installment in Madeleine L'Engle's Time quintet, A Wrinkle in Time nearly went unpublished. Now an undisputed classic of fantasy, sci-fi and young adult literature, the book was rejected by more than 20 publishers before Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which has always focused primarily on books for adult readers, made an exception for L'Engle. Though the publisher's predictions for the book sales were modest, they were also wrong: 50 years later,... there are 10 million copies in print in the U.S. alone. The book's success surprised many who had wondered whether A Wrinkle in Time might be too difficult for children, a misconception that led L'Engle to define children's literature as books too challenging for adults. A Wrinkle in Time centers on Meg and Charles Wallace Murry, the misfit children of two brilliant scientists. Meg is a poor student and social outcast with a hidden talent for math. Charles Wallace is widely believed to be slow, but he's affected this appearance to conceal his extraordinary intelligence. The Murrys' father, a scientist engaged in top-secret government work, has been missing for more than a year, long enough for the rest of the town to become convinced that he's run off with another woman. Just when his absence is becoming too much, encounters with a curious woman named Mrs. Whatsit and a gifted peer named Calvin give the Murry children hope that their father is alive, if not quite well. Rescuing him requires folding time and space - and facing a dark force that threatens the universe itself.
  In honor of the book's 50th anniversary, we've selected five titles to read in tandem with the Time quintet.

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THE CHILDHOOD FAVORITE

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  Emily of New Moon

  L.M. Montgomery

  2009 | Unabridged

  When asked what first inspired her to write, L'Engle frequently cited this L.M. Montgomery novel as a childhood favorite, claiming that Emily was a childhood hero who encouraged her to be an individual. In her book Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, L'Engle wrote that, while she also enjoyed Montgomery's more well-known Anne of Green Gables series, she especially adored Emily for her desire to be a writer, her rejection... of conformity, and because she had "a touch of second sight, that gift which allows us to peek for a moment at the world beyond ordinary space and time." A Wrinkle in Time's Charles Wallace shares this second sight with Emily, allowing him to understand concepts that seem just out of human reach, and causing his parents to believe he is an example of something new, a higher order of being.

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THE INSPIRATION

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  Flatland

  Edwin A. Abbott

  2010 | Unabridged

  In A Wrinkle in Time, the children travel from planet to planet by "tessering," folding time and space in order to lessen the leap between worlds. One of their first journeys brings them through a two-dimensional planet, a harrowing experience for the children that infuriates them while sending their otherworldly guides into peals of laughter. In an interview with Scholastic Press, L'Engle herself described what a flat planet might be like by... referencing Edwin Abbott Abbott's Flatland, a social satire from the late 19th century in which a literal square describes the difficulties of living in a two-dimensional world. In its enforced conformity - irregular shapes are essentially enslaved - Flatland also shares some of the dystopian elements of Camazotz, the planet where the Murrys' father is trapped in A Wrinkle in Time. The book is also considered prescient in its exploration of multiple dimensions, an idea central to the Time quintet.

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THE SUBVERSIVE FANTASY SERIES

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  The Subtle Knife

  Philip Pullman

  2008 | Unabridged

  The entire His Dark Materials trilogy complements the Time quintet in its combined use of fantasy and sci-fi as lenses for exploring humanist and religious themes, but The Subtle Knife is particularly parallel example. Just as Meg, Charles Wallace and Calvin must rescue the Murrys' scientist father from a failed government mission, Lyra and Will Parry must find Will's father, a physicist who vanished while studying dark matter. Both fathers figure into... a larger battle between good and evil, which both authors envision as an actual form of matter. The similarities don't end there, though: As is the unfortunate case with most books featuring fantastical creatures (with the notable exception of the Bible itself), both series have also been challenged for being "anti-Christian," a label Pullman might be more comfortable with than L'Engle - a lifelong Christian - was.

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THE HOMAGE

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  When You Reach Me

  Rebecca Stead

  2009 | Unabridged

  Both A Wrinkle in Time and When You Reach Me won Newberry Awards, but that's not all they have in common. As a child, Stead read and reread A Wrinkle in Time and once met Madeleine L'Engle in a bookstore. When You Reach Me's main character, 12-year-old Miranda, shares the author's fixation with the novel to the extent that her teacher is constantly leaving new books on her desk in an effort... to make her stop reading it. Stead was careful not to make Miranda's obsession with A Wrinkle in Time as a mere character trait, but rather to draw parallels between its plot and her own story. What begins as a realist novel about childhood in 1970s New York transforms into a science fictional mystery that owes a debt to L'Engle without mimicking her.

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THE REALITY CHECK

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  Physics of the Impossible

  Michio Kaku

  2008 | Unabridged

  Though L'Engle was fascinated with math and science - especially particle physics - and often sought to borrow concepts for her books, she wasn't overly concerned with scientific accuracy. There may not be factual basis for the winged half-horse Mrs. Whatsit morphs into to ferry the children around, but L'Engle did base many of A Wrinkle in Time's concepts on real-life ideas. For instance, a Brown mathematics professor named Dr. Tom Banchoff... introduced L'Engle to the idea of the tesseract, a fictionalized version of which figures heavily into time travel in L'Engle's quintet. In Physics of the Impossible, string theory cofounder Michio Kaku discusses what fantastical future concepts are scientifically feasible. For instance, he argues that time travel is theoretically consistent the laws of quantum mechanics - but that, for the foreseeable future, we'll be experiencing it only in fiction.

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THE BOOK

A murder of crows plucks a baby from a little red wagon and carries him away through the cloudy skies of Portland, Oregon, and down into a dense, foreboding forest of trees. His sister Prue lies to her parents, packs her messenger bag and sets off for the woods, followed only by Curtis, her bumbling classmate. Both of them are soon swept into the bustle and drama of a world not far from, but wholly separate from, their own. As frontman and songwriter for The Decemberists, Colin Meloy has made a name for himself by teasing out tales like this of woebegone children, fantastical happenings and well-summoned archetypes into song, so it should be no real surprise that his first real journey into fiction trots down a similar path. It should be no surprise, either, that his words are once again reflected in the wry, careful linework of artist Carson Ellis, who has illustrated all of The Decemberists’ record covers in addition to kids’ books like Lemony Snicket’s The Composer is Dead and The Mysterious Benedict Society. But for Meloy and Ellis, who also happen to be married, Wildwood, the first in a three-title series of middle-grades novels, wasn’t an exercise in divided labor, with him scrawling and her sketching. They plotted out its world and its characters together, setting the story in a fantasied-up version of their hometown of Portland, and drawing both inspiration and guidance from books they loved as kids and still love as grown-ups. And so when actress Amanda Plummer narrates Wildwood‘s audiobook, she’s not just delivering Meloy’s half of the project, leaving Ellis’s work to languish on a page somewhere. Even without the images present, it’s a fully collaborative deal. And with so many visual and narrative reference points, both intentional and coincidental, bubbling right under its surface, we couldn’t help making some connections.

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  Wildwood

  Colin Meloy

  2011 | Unabridged

THE RULES

Imagined worlds draw their power from the depth of their own details, and the realm of Wildwood feels stunningly whole, from the politics that divide its inhabitants to the way the creatures and humans interact (or don’t). This comes from careful consideration on the part of Meloy and Ellis, who built the framework for the book’s reality by studying their favorite literary worlds and the rules that governed them, including the pastoral English setting of Wind in the Willows. Kenneth Grahame played fast and loose with the relationship between the people and people-like creatures in his 1908 classic, anthropomorphizing his creatures and mostly shielding their existence from humans, but allowing occasional interactions on vaguely-defined terms. This was also the general M.O. of Disney, which adapted the novel into The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad in 1949, which then became a Disney World ride in 1955. (Laika, the Portland-based animation studio responsible for the elegantly eerie adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline is working on a big-screen production of Wildwood, though somehow a theme-park ride tie-in seems unlikely.)

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  The Wind in the Willows

  Kenneth Grahame

  2009 | Abridged

THE SARTORIAL SOULMATE

The relationship between humans and their anthropomorphic brethren is well defined, too, in Roald Dahl’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox, though less rife with complex inter-species politics than Wildwood. The story’s core conflict seems simple enough: A wily fox keeps snatching poultry from the pens of three bumbling farmers, who are driven mad by the continual theft and attempt to kill the critter by alternately shooting at, digging up and bulldozing over him and his family. This would do no more than echo the conflicts of farmers of temperate lands the world over if not for the fact that, in classic Dahl style, the vermin in question are highly intelligent, organized and mighty fashionable to boot. Quentin Blake’s classic illustration shows Mr. Fox in a smart vest, tails and neckerchief, making him a sort of sartorial predecessor to Wildwood‘s army of coyotes clad in Napoleonic military uniforms. (In an early draft, the coyotes were described as being dressed in medieval armor, but Ellis didn’t love her accompanying illustrations, so Meloy rewrote the whole section to dress them in a more suitable fashion.)

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  Fantastic Mr Fox

  Roald Dahl

  2009 | Unabridged

THE CHILD PROTAGONISTS

C.S. Lewis proved first, and best, that kids make the best escorts through strange, new worlds. Narnia, of course, was discovered by accident by the innocent snooping of bored, displaced Lucy Pevensie, who at first struggled to convince her siblings of its very existence. Meanwhile, Wildwood has always loomed large on the periphery of Prue and Curtis’s consciousness, and they enter into its fray with years of warnings ringing in their ears, but entirely unprepared for what they finally encounter. In both cases, mere children are thrown headlong into grave peril and thrust into political turmoil beyond anything they’ve experienced in the rest of their short lives, and not only handle the chaos with more grace than adults might but also maintain a certain baseline sense of wonder about the place that reveals its nature in ways not usually accessible to grown folk.

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  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

  C. S. Lewis

  2009 | Unabridged

THE CARTOGRAPHY

Inside the front cover of Wildwood’s paper-and-ink copies is a sprawling, detailed map of the book’s reimagined Portland, the city split down the middle by the Impassable Wilderness. But even when removed from its physical context, the map still serves the reader: Meloy and Ellis plotted out the whole world of the book on paper before a single chapter was written, layering their imagined landscape over actual topography, renaming and repurposing real-life landmarks in Portland’s Forest Park to form the bones of their new world. In doing so, they joined a long history of storytellers-as-cartographers, including J.R.R. Tolkein and his renderings of Middle Earth, though his maps tended to shift to fit his narratives rather than shaping them directly.

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  The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  2008 | Dramatization

THE ADOLESCENT METAPHOR

A square-peg of a teenage girl and her misfit schoolmate follow her younger brother off on an unexpected journey through a world both far away and unimaginably close to their own. Wildwood fits that bill, of course, and so does the first installment in Madeleine L’Engle’s series following Meg Murry, her pal Calvin and her kid brother Charles Wallace, who travel not through the wilds of Portland but through time and space itself. Red-eyed, telepathic, disembodied space monsters and the threat of being evaporated by entering the fifth dimension may loom as larger threats than anything lurking in the Impassable Wilderness, but the stories still seem sympathetic. Being a 12-, 13-year-old girl is strange enough as it is; throw a bunch of strange creatures, alternate realities and mortal peril in the mix and it’s still just another day on the long, weird road out of adolescence.

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  A Wrinkle in Time

  Madeleine L'Engle

  2012 | Unabridged

The Book

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  Heart of Darkness

  Joseph Conrad

  2007 | Unabridged

  And I saw that something restraining, one of those human secrets that baffle probability, had come into play there. There are a bunch of reasons Joseph Conrad's 1902 novella still resonates, but here are two your lit teacher left out: 1) It's supremely badass a grim, suspenseful horror story full of corpses and terrible people. And 2) Even though it's about a turn-of-the-last-century Brit boating up the Congo with colonialist monsters to... the left of him and cannibals to the right, everybody can kinda sorta relate because, shit, who hasn't been on a bad trip? Granted, Charles Marlow's journey is particularly rough stuff, but he's a stooge for an ivory trading company charged with dragging one of his rogue peers out of the jungle, so he's not exactly surprised when things get nasty. His quarry is Kurtz, a man shrouded in mystery, but not because we know too little about him. Everybody Marlow meets paints a glowing picture of this "universal genius" Kurtz is supposedly an artist, journalist, musician, lover, god and, like, the best darn ivory trader of all time. But the real star here is Marlow's boat ride to hell, which Conrad douses with relentless pessimism and inventive bleakness. One of the great feel-bad adventures of all time!

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The Diary

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  The Worst Journey in the World

  Apsley Cherry-Garrard

  2007 | Unabridged

  And then quite suddenly, vague, indefinable, monstrous, there loomed a something ahead. As with Heart of Darkness, the dudes in Apsley Cherry-Garrard's 1922 memoir really should have stayed home. Maybe try to land a cushy desk job somewhere. But no, the under-prepped/over-proud British gloryhounds pull a Chuck Marlow and pit themselves against the harsh indifference of nature and, of course, get their asses handed to them. And for what? Bragging rights at... the South Pole. Oh, and Emperor Penguin eggs for research/omelets. That's the MacGuffin that led the brainy, hearty AC-G and co. deep into Antarctica for The Worst Journey in the World. And that title might sound like the kind of thing an editor would slap on a hundred years later but no: Apsley really kept a diary, came home, had some time to count his blessings and put a little spin on things and still named it that. Tells you something. This thing is bleak.

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The Mystery

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  The Lost City of Z

  David Grann

  2009 | Unabridged

  Large expeditions have only one and all come to grief. Keeping the theme going, here's another one about an industrious Brit who enjoys traveling, meeting new people and endangering his own life needlessly. Like Cherry-Garrard, this guy did it in the name of science and discovery. Like Kurtz, it killed him. Poor Colonel Percy Fawcett. We'll probably never know what happened to the celebrity explorer or the other hundred people who journeyed... with him into the Amazon in search of a mythical city and disappeared forever. But at least it wasn't in vain, because David Grann's book is a blast. It's not just thoroughly researched and colorfully written — the author actually took his own trip into the jungle to investigate the Fawcett mystery personally. Just plain awesome.

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The Survivors

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  Miracle in the Andes

  Nando Parrado

  2008 | Unabridged

  Life is an anomaly here and the mountains will only tolerate that anomaly for so long. Everybody knows the headlines: Plane carrying Uruguayan rugby team crashes in the Andes in 1972; players resort to cannibalism to survive. Like Fawcett, these young men confront death on harsh, alien terrain. An important distinction, of course, is that Nando Parrado and his compatriots were unwilling explorers, and utterly unprepared for their desperate circumstance. But this... autobiography is as uplifting as it is grim well, maybe it's more like a 30/70 split and is probably the greatest (or at least best-written) survival story of all time. I mean it's horrible, all the shit these guys go through but the fact of their survival is more powerful than all of it. Apsley Cherry-Garrard was a pussy.

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The Loner

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  Into the Wild

  Jon Krakauer

  2007 | Unabridged

  I thought climbing the Devils Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams. It's easy to see why Christopher "Alex Supertramp" McCandless has become an icon. Idealistic, confident, given to poetic declarations and bold gestures, the young star of Jon Krakauer's gripping biography has inspired many to reconsider the... trappings of material things, and to make a pilgrimage to the beat-up old bus in the Alaskan wilderness where he spent his last days. That said, there are about a hundred ways his starvation and suffering could have been prevented. Krakauer himself an experienced climber and outdoorsman neither lionizes nor demonizes his subject, but Into the Wild can be read as a cautionary tale without much squinting. Like Nando Parrado, McCandless was a spiritual man who believed the natural world offered a clearer view of God, regardless of his own suffering.

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The Climber

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  127 Hours

  Aron Ralston

  2010 | Abridged

  I can touch the face of infinity in these doldrums. Nothing gives even a slight hint that the stillness will break. The body count in this list is so high that a story about a guy cutting off his own arm counts as a carefree romp, right? And don't go crying about the spoiler: Everybody, regardless of whether they read the book, saw the movie or met the man, knows Aron Ralston... got his right hand trapped by a boulder in Blue John Canyon in Utah and had to self-amputate. With a tiny little knife. After drinking his own pee. Yeah, he's kind of a meathead, and a Phish fan, but nobody deserves that. Interestingly, Ralston has said that it was Into the Wild that inspired him to be an outdoorsy type climbing mountains, camping out, etc. Unlike McCandless, the earnest Ralston was in it for the thrills and not prone to risky behavior. But he did make at least one fateful mistake, one the ghost of Percy Fawcett could've warned him about: He didn't leave a note. Unless somebody knows where you are and when you're due back, you probably won't get rescued. But that's hindsight. Like Nando Parrado, Ralston recognized the desperation of his predicament and, once all other options were exhausted, did the awful things he needed to do to survive.

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THE BOOK

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  The Great Gatsby

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  2009 | Unabridged

  In the most famous novel of the Jazz Age, Nick Carraway is a Midwest-born Yale graduate who arrives in New York to work in bond trading after serving in World War I. Nick rents a house in West Egg, a nouveau riche community on Long Island, and he's thrown into the upper echelons of society life when he reconnects with his cousin Daisy. Daisy has married Tom Buchanan, a white supremacist philanderer,... and they live nearby in the old money enclave of East Egg with their three-year-old daughter. Nick also strikes up a friendship with his next-door neighbor, the mysterious, fabulously wealthy Gatsby, who throws lavish nightly parties. Nick soon learns that Gatsby has been in love with Daisy since he met her years ago in Louisville he has bought his home in West Egg to be closer to her in the hopes that they can rekindle their romance now that he's made his fortune. Nick agrees to help them reconnect, inviting Daisy to Gatsby's house, and setting off a chain of events that will ultimately crush Gatsby's hopes and leave a wake of destruction. Fitzgerald's defining work was published in 1925 the original title, Trimalchio in West Egg didn't stick and in its day, it was largely regarded as a disappointment, at least compared to his two previous novels (This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned). It wasn't until after Fitzgerald's death that Gatsby came to be regarded as one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century, landing a permanent spot on high school reading lists. Equal parts mystery, romance and social commentary, The Great Gatsby is both an historical document and a tragedy with the staying power of Shakespeare. The Great Gatsby's impact on literature has been enormous. Its universal themes of class-consciousness, aspiration, love and the corrupting influence of money can be seen in the works of J.D. Salinger and John O'Hara, among many others in the generations that followed. Fitzgerald's personal associations with Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker (not to mention Ring Lardner, Edmund Wilson and Gertrude Stein) made for a mutual, if not entirely generous, exchange of influences. The book has served as a manual of sorts writers like Richard Yates have studied it for its economical use of dialogue and seamless plot construction. And Gatsby characters actually live on in Chris Bohjalian's contemporary novel The Double Bind. With its iconic characters, colorful setting and lyrical prose, Fitzgerald's extraordinary story is, nearly a century later, a part of our cultural legacy.

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THE DRINKING BUDDY

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  A Moveable Feast

  Ernest Hemingway

  2009 | Unabridged

  Both Hemingway and Fitzgerald were Midwesterners, passionate writers, and tragic figures of 20th Century literature, and as such, these contemporaries will in some ways forever be linked. This relationship has been well-chronicled, but perhaps nowhere as amusingly and pathetically as in A Moveable Feast. Hemingway's semi-fictionalized account of living in Paris in the 1920s recalls his run-ins with Fitzgerald, and his famously tormented wife, Zelda just after Gatsby was released. In one... memorable episode, the envious, ambitious Hemingway agrees to help the slightly elder and more famous Fitzgerald pick up his car in Lyon. The ill-fated, booze-soaked journey ends with Fitzgerald stuck in a hotel room convinced he's about to die, while Hemingway feasts alone in the downstairs dining room. A later scene in which Hemingway recalls Fitzgerald asking him to assess his manhood underscores Hemingway's shamelessness in exploiting his "friend." When Hemingway finally reads The Great Gatsby himself, he admits, in backhanded Hemingway-ese, that the book floors him with its genius. Meanwhile, Fitzgerald is credited with jumpstarting Hemingway's career, as he introduced Hemingway to his editor at Scribner's who later published The Sun Also Rises.

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THE LOVER

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  The Portable Dorothy Parker

  Marion Meade

  2008 | Unabridged

  Longtime friends, Parker and Fitzgerald met at the famed Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel in New York and were rumored to have had a fling in the 1920s, while both were married to other people. Parker was said to be an early supporter of Fitzgerald's work, though the slightly older Parker was by then a prominent literary figure in her own right. Including the original Portable Dorothy Parker as Parker edited... it in 1944 a selection of poems and short stories as well as essays, book and theater reviews and letters, this anthology covers the depth of her talents, which go well beyond her famous wit. Running through Parker's work, especially in stories like "The Big Blonde" and "The Standard of Living," is the same vein of social commentary one finds in Gatsby with special attention paid to race and class relations, the war between the sexes and the excesses of the era though, unsurprisingly, Parker is a more biting critic. The anthology is also an historical testament to their personal relationship, which continued on some level for decades, until they were both working as screenwriters in Hollywood: It includes an interview in which Parker alludes to Fitzgerald's work ethic and misfortunes, and a letter she sent to him in 1934. In the end, it was Parker, who at Fitzgerald's funeral in 1940, honored his great contribution to the literary world by repeating a line from Gatsby: "Poor son of a bitch."

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THE MASTER’S APPRENTICE

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  Revolutionary Road

  Richard Yates (2)

  2008 | Unabridged

  Like Fitzgerald, Richard Yates is held up as a great American novelist whose work was underappreciated in its day. (Fitzgerald, at least, has been canonized, while Yates is still considered a "writer's writer.") Yates wrote admiringly about Fitzgerald's influence on his work, revealing that he studied it relentlessly when teaching himself how to write. "The Great Gatsby turned out to be the most nourishing novel I read" he wrote in The New... York Times Book Review. "It gains range as it gathers momentum, until the end of it leaves you with a stunning illumination of the world." Yates' masterful Revolutionary Road, like Gatsby, is set in a post-war period of optimism, only in this case it's 30 years later, after World War Two. Frank and April Wheeler are a young couple who have moved to a Connecticut town to raise their children. But even as they self-consciously adopt the suburban lifestyle, they begin to suspect that it's a sham. The only thread holding the Wheelers' marriage together is the conviction that they're better, more bohemian and more interesting than their neighbors until they find themselves tragically entombed in their bourgeois roles. Yates's still-relevant book builds on Gatsby's themes of social mobility, self-made mythologies and the dark revelation that the American dream has been oversold.

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THE NEW YORK ACOLYTES

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  Wonderful Town

  John O'Hara

  2008 | Abridged

  Any number of short stories collected in the anthology Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker might qualify as Fitzgerald-inspired but there are two in particular that seem to echo Gatsby: John O'Hara's "Drawing Room B" and J.D. Salinger's "Slight Rebellion off Madison." O'Hara's story, written in 1947, concerns Leda Pentleigh, an aging actress on a train from New York to Chicago who is consumed with thoughts of her celebrity... (or current lack thereof). When a young actor approaches her for advice, her bruised ego stomps all over her best intentions. Published in 1946, "Slight Rebellion" features the pre-Catcher in the Rye debut of Holden Caulfield it would become the basis of Chapter 17 in the novel. Holden goes on a date with his girlfriend Sally. Depressed, he reveals his disillusionment with prep school and New York and urges her to run away with him. She refuses, and he later drunk-dials her and ends up alone and ashamed on Madison Avenue, waiting for the bus. O'Hara and Salinger each cited Fitzgerald as an important influence in their work and it shows: both stories concern characters whose authenticity is smothered by the constraints of class and status, both feature singular narrative styles, and both embody the spot-on dialogue and savvy commentary on social hypocrisies common in Fitzgerald's work.

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THE FICTIONAL “SEQUEL”

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  The Double Bind

  Chris Bohjalian

  2007 | Abridged

  While many other authors have heaped praise on The Great Gatsby, Chris Bohjalian goes a little further in this quirky mystery novel he writes its characters and plot into his own story. The plot concerns Laurel Estabrook, who, as a University of Vermont student, was assaulted while biking on a rural back road. Now an employee at a local homeless shelter in Burlington, she receives a box of photos from a former... resident, Bobbie Crocker, who has recently died. In the box, Laurel finds clues to Crocker's past he was apparently a successful photographer who fell on hard times due to mental illness. As she delves deeper, she's disturbed to find images of her hometown, West Egg, and one of herself that was taken, she suspects, on the very day she was attacked. Increasingly obsessed, Laurel starts to uncover connections to the Buchanan family and she becomes convinced that Bobbie was Daisy and Gatsby's long-lost illegitimate son. As far as homages go, The Double Bind's narrative style is uniquely Bohjalian's and its leitmotifs of self-invention and personal tragedy are only loosely connected to Gatsby's. Yet for fans of the original, The Double Bind offers a parallel universe in which Fitzgerald's fictions actually come off the page and mingle with reality.

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The Book

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  Beowulf

  Seamus Heaney

  2009 | Abridged

  Nobody knows who first made up the Beowulf story, or where or when. Coulda been a pagan Scandinavian in the year 500, or a Christian Saxon poet half a millennia later. The scholars are divided and confounded, the only "source material" for this epic poem being a damaged manuscript about a thousand years old. But I can tell you why Beowulf exists: because monsters are awesome. Grendel is awesome. According to our... mystery poet, Grendel is a "wrecker of mead-benchesa powerful demon, a prowler through the dark" who storms the countryside making midnight snacks of the mightiest Danish warriors. Monsters, as opposed to villains, are rarely burdened by complicated motivations. They attack because they're hungry, mean or jealous; they bubble with hate and boil with evil just because. Grendel is said to nurse a "hard grievance" against humanity, but the text so spellbindingly translated by Seamus Heaney doesn't expand on this. Because, bottom line, he's a big scary monster and that's good enough. Anyway, yeah, along comes Beowulf, from across the sea in Geatland, a man as accomplished in the art of foe-smiting as he is in bragging about it. Spoiler alert: He dispatches with Grendel handily. As is often the case for monster-smiters, the foes keep lining up for beatdowns; after Grendel, there's Grendel's mom and a fire-dragon (and, via flashback, some kinda sea beastie). And where modern readers might expect that massive ego to be his undoing, Beowulf is a straight-up force of good pitted against no-bullshit forces of evil, and never misses an opportunity to tear them limb from limb with his bare hands. Monster-killers? Pretty awesome, too.

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The Shark

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  Jaws

  Peter Benchley

  2009 | Unabridged

  He's a Harvard legacy who wrote speeches for Lyndon Johnson. His grandpa co-founded the famed litnerd coven, the Algonquin Round Table. His dad wrote children's books, and humor pieces for the New Yorker. So how the hell did Peter Benchley end up writing a classic slab of horror-pulp like Jaws? Who knows, but it's likely the effectiveness and enduringness of the book not to mention the namesake movie with which it shares... a narrative skeleton, if not the psycho-thriller meat can be attributed a little bit to writing chops, and a lot to how scary and vicious great white sharks are. Like Grendel, Jaws (yes, I'm pretending this is a title-shark) strikes without warning. One minute you're enjoying a drunken skinny dip off some quaint beach in Amity (or a frosty flagon at the mead hall), and the next you're a stickpile of severed limbs and a fountain of blood. Your last thought is something along the lines of "wtf omg those are huge teeth." Of course, Benchley scores extra scarepoints by choosing an actual real monster that, in your more paranoid moments, you will think about before deciding whether or not to go back in the water. They say there's like a one in a million chance that a great white shark will attack you. Yeah. Tell that to poor Chrissy Watkins. Oh, wait, you can't. Jaws ate her.

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The Plant

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  The Ruins

  Scott Smith

  2008 | Unabridged

  I'd like to think the "powerful demon" at the center of Scott Smith's even pulpier horror novel looks over at Jaws and Grendel like "whatevs, who has the energy for all that?" Don't think it's a spoiler to say that The Ruins is about a people-eating plant that lives in a Mexican jungle and waits for the next gaggle of too-stupid-to-live tourists to get within a vine's reach. Like many photosynthesis-inclined monsters,... it gets by not through hunting and gathering, but the low-impact "FEED ME SEYMOUR" approach. Smith ups the tension in the humans-v.-monster dynamic by never leaving the victims' POV. We have no idea where The Plant came from, or why it's doing what it's doing, or how, or anything. All we know is our mostly clueless protagonist backpackers are suddenly, day after day after day, trapped and fighting for their lives. Uh, unless one of you kids has a Beowulf in your family tree, you are probably screwed.

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The Clown

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  It

  Stephen King

  2010 | Unabridged

  Pennywise is, certainly, the scariest monster on our list, at least to our modern sensibilities. I'm sure Vikings wet their beds thinking about mead-bench-wreckers, but we are talking about A Clown That Lives In The Sewers And Eats Children here. You used to be a child. You probably pass a storm drain every day. You don't like clowns; nobody likes clowns. Of course, if It was just about clowns eating kids, one... would never make it through the 44-plus hours audiobook (because one would be in a padded cell). Nope, Stephen King a man known for his gigantic horror epics really outdid himself with this one, creating a monster that can take on many non-clown forms, too: a werewolf, a spider, a whole town full of cruel bigots. It's really thorough. And yet, we see hints of Grendel in Pennywise, and glimmers of Beowulf in the small pack of dorky kids (and later, their dorky adult selves) pitted against him. This is a classic, if utterly complicated and unpredictable, story of good standing up to evil. More surprising are the parts of It that strongly resemble King's monster-free Stand By Me: the nostalgia, the outcast kids, the ever-present bully issues. But those are only the things you think about between Clown Attacks.

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The Imaginary Monsters

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  The Wild Things

  Dave Eggers

  2009 | Unabridged

  Okay, everybody settle down. Not all monsters are scary. The ones in Dave Eggers's "all ages" novel adapted from Spike Jonze's movie of the same name, and Maurice Sendak's classic children's book Where The Wild Things Are do have a history of eating people, but they're usually pretty funny about it. Plus: Not a drop of blood in the whole book. But don't mistake the Wild Things for good guys; they spend... most of their time creating chaos for their new king, the young Max (a human boy with a similar predilection for misbehavior). Like Jaws in the ocean and Pennywise in the sewer, these monsters live just outside the confines of civilized society, and yet Max feels more than a little kinship with them. Is it because he created them with his own imagination? Does that make them less dangerous than a "naturally" occurring fiend?

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The Creation

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  Frankenstein

  Mary Shelley

  2009 | Unabridged

  Our journey ends here with the only monster nursing a legitimate "hard grievance" against humanity, and one human in particular. The "demon" at the center of Mary Shelley's classic gothic novel did not ask to be born into a world in which he has no natural place. I'm not saying it's cool to run around murdering everybody who calls you ugly especially when you are, really but if you wanna wring your... dad Dr. Frankenstein's cowardly neck, be my guest. Over the years, the power and particulars of the original tale have been corrupted by movies and Halloween decorations, so it may surprise you to discover just how human Shelley's monster is. He speaks like a heavy hearted poet; he teaches himself to read Plutarch and Goethe; damn if he isn't a vegetarian to boot. And, for a monster, he's fairly reasonable, promising the dirty doctor that he'll stop killing his friends and family once he's provided with a similarly hideous monster girlfriend. He lays out the terms in eloquent badassery: "If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace. But if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends." Grendel, were he capable, would be proud.

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THE BOOK

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  In Cold Blood

  Truman Capote

  2007 | Unabridged

  True crime has long exercised a guilty fascination over readers: warped as a murderer's mind may be, something in us wants to know how such a twisted logic works and how it can lead to unspeakable acts. In Cold Blood may very well be both the first and the best true crime book ever written. This tale of four grisly murders on one Midwest November night was serialized in its entirety in... four issues of the New Yorker in 1965, causing those issues to quickly sell out and making the book the talk of New York. When it was published in 1966 it became a sensation, catapulting Truman Capote to new heights of fame and made into a 1967 movie. The book's success was so overwhelming that it even intimidated its author the murders that it is based on would fascinate Capote for the rest of his life, and he never completed another book after In Cold Blood. That's the kind of legend that's tough to live up to, but In Cold Blood walks the talk. Capote's telling of a completely unanticipated quadruple-homicide that shocked a sleepy Kansas town in 1959 blends the shock of true crime with the imaginative license of the best fiction. After compiling over 8,000 pages of notes, Capote built these two murderers and their victims into nuanced individuals Perry Smith, the nave accomplice to psychopath Dick Hickcock, is among the most fully realized characters of the 20th century. Capote also painted a portrait of a 1950s small town in crisis, a whole patch of middle America trying to comprehend what these murders meant and how they could have happened. Capote claimed to be inventing a new genre with In Cold Blood the so-called nonfiction novel. Though his proclamation may have been a little bit overstated (he certainly perfected the genre, if not quite creating it), the book was nonetheless groundbreaking. Among its greatest legacies is that it inspired a cadre of writers known as the New Journalists among them Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion who used his lessons to write some of the most distinctive nonfiction of the last 40 years. Its waves continue to ripple through our culture today, most recently with a 2005 Oscar-winning film based on the time Capote spent writing of In Cold Blood. More than 40 years after its publication, In Cold Blood remains not just a riveting read, but also a penetrating psychological portrait and a book that will cast much of what you read today in a new light.

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THE ANCESTOR

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  My Antonia

  Willa Cather

  2007 | Unabridged

  The day before Capote died, he worked on a story about meeting Willa Cather for the first time as an 18-year-old at the New Yorker. It was no mistake that the meeting stuck in Capote's mind for his entire life: after the meeting, Cather became Capote's mentor, and her novel My Antonia was one of the books that most influenced his development as a writer. Cather's 1918 novel of rural immigrants staking... out lives in Nebraska makes an ideal accompaniment to In Cold Blood: whereas Capote evaluates the Midwest from midcentury, My Antonia is regarded as the first book to establish the Midwest as a palpable, lifelike place worthy of a reader's attention. Both books in their own way seek to understand the meaning of the quiet heartland, and reading each in turn you can watch Cather's post-WWI hardscrabble immigrants develop into Capote's 1950s rurals, displaced within a modernizing superpower. Collectively the two books build up a story about the changing shape of America, a story that continues to this day as a rank of contemporary novelists attempt to plumb the depths of the American heartland.

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THE AMERICAN BERSERK

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  American Pastoral

  Philip Roth

  2008 | Unabridged

  At first glance, Philip Roth and Truman Capote have little in common: Roth's a self-infatuated hedonist who writes cerebral dramas of outlandish heterosexual appetites; Capote was a flamboyant gay man who wrote vaguely surreal books about the lives of outsiders. And yet, In Cold Blood and American Pastoral really should be read together. Capote's searing contemplation of the disquiet at the heart of the picturesque 1950s Midwest is taken in a fruitful... new direction by Roth, whose American Pastoral details a pleasant American family that's derailed when the daughter becomes a terrorist protesting the Vietnam War. The novel presents two views of the American Dream gone horribly wrong, aka "the American berserk." Roth coined the term in American Pastoral, referring to the simmering chaos that exists beneath the seemingly placid American lifestyle. This term has since been applied to everything from the David Lynch's creepy suburban drama Blue Velvet to the potent music of contemporary composer John Adams, but it arguably got its first and best treatment in Capote's In Cold Blood. Capote and Roth present distinct visions of America in two very different times and places, but the similarities are ripe for consideration, and the books force us to wonder: is the most American thing about us our fear that the American Dream is impossible to attain?

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THE PORNOVIOLENT

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  No Country For Old Men

  Cormac McCarthy

  2008 | Unabridged

  In a 1976 essay simply titled "Pornoviolence," writer and Capote-disciple Tom Wolfe decried In Cold Blood as creating a new kind of writing that he termed pornoviolence: books that draw you forward by promising violence, just as pornography keeps your interest by promising sex. Wolfe blames Capote for clearing the way for the likes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, entertainments that have no other value than to tempt you with sadism.... (If Doom had been invented back then, Wolfe surely would have chalked that up to Capote too.) Whether Capote "invented" pornoviolence or merely caught wind of the cultural zeitgeist, Wolfe does have a point: since In Cold Blood, violence has become increasingly more mainstream as literature. There is no better example of that than Cormac McCarthy's violence-ridden high art spectacles. For the curious, No Country for Old Men is a good place to start. One of McCarthy's shorter, less prolix novels, the book involves a madman who just might be the devil on a murder spree in the New Mexico desert, a cowboy who stumbles on $2 million in drug money (which the madman wants), and an oldtimer sheriff who should have taken early retirement. There's a reason the Coen brothers adapted this into a successful movie the fluid plot rips right along and the suspense is deadly but the book's also a serious entry into McCarthy's canon of violent fantasias set in the American Southwest borderlands. Variously regarded as a parable about chance and free will, a vision of hell, or a dispatch from the war on drugs, No Country for Old Men is a strange and titillating experience, albeit one that surely qualifies for pornoviolence.

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THE LATTER-DAY COLD BLOOD

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  Columbine

  Dave Cullen

  2010 | Unabridged

  If there's one tragedy that fits as the In Cold Blood of our time, it just might be the story of two lost teens who opened fire on their classmates one spring day in 1999. Utterly shocking, senseless, and downright terrifying, the murders at Columbine High captured a nation's attention just as Capote's tale of the killings in Holcomb did four decades previously. Both books force us to read on with the... same two questions: what happened and why? With Columbine, Cullen shows his debt to Capote (Cullen's book won many comparisons to In Cold Blood when it was released), but he also shows the growth of narrative nonfiction in the forty years since. More than just the story of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the book expands to encompass criticism of the media frenzy in response to the massacre, an examination of the many myths created in the aftermath, and a dissection of how the nation tried to understand this unprecedented event. Cullen shows how the murders were not merely another school shooting but in reality an attempt at domestic terrorism (the assailants had rigged up bombs and hoped to kill hundreds, instead of thirteen). He also provides the decade-long story of church martyrdom, lawsuits, and personal anguish that occurred after that deadly day. Though the tragedy at Columbine High sadly demonstrates that the kind of psychopathic deviance Capote plumbed in 1966 is still with us today, it nonetheless offers us a remarkable look into that psyche.

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THE NEXT-GEN CAPOTE

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  Consider the Lobster

  David Foster Wallace

  2008 | Abridged

  Capote's storied tenure at the New Yorker demonstrated that fiction writers can often make for the most innovative journalists. It also showed just what a top drawer magazine can do for a serious writer: had Capote not come to Holcomb equipped with the prestige, funding and literary support of the New Yorker, it's likely that In Cold Blood never would have seen the light of day in its present form. The unique... results that can come about when a gifted novelist and a premiere magazine work together was again demonstrated by the collaboration between David Foster Wallace and Harper's magazine in the 1990s, which gave rise to a name-making series of essays collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Consider the Lobster was Wallace's highly anticipated follow-up, his madcap, insightful report from throughout the America of the 2000s. The book is absurdly far-flung in its investigations (from the porn industry's annual awards to Presidential candidate John McCain to the ethics of cooking lobsters), and throughout Wallace showcases his much-remarked-upon ability to make the hapless, endlessly intrigued narrator of these pieces (Wallace himself, or a version of Wallace) the center of attention. Just as In Cold Blood inspired a group of imitators and innovators, so has Wallace changed the face of American journalism. Reading Consider the Lobster is a chance to see this process in action and to wonder what will come next.

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THE BOOK

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  Slaughterhouse-Five

  Kurt Vonnegut

  2011 | Unabridged

  In this absurdist sci-fi /military mashup, Billy Pilgrim is a world-weary optometrist living in Upstate New York during the prosperous years following World War II. Only he can't exactly enjoy the trappings of his suburban dream because a time-travel portal - revealed to him when he's kidnapped by a race of aliens called the Tralfamadorians - allows him to alternately revisit his past as a POW in Dresden, Germany, and his... future, where he is eventually assassinated by a war enemy.
  
  Published in 1969, Slaughterhouse-Five encapsulates Vonnegut's own experience as a prisoner during the horrific bombing of Dresden, which killed 35,000 German civilians. Though he would continue to grapple with the enormity of the event in future writings, it was this book, his seventh, that established his signature storytelling style and proved to be his greatest critical and commercial success. Slaughterhouse-Five is widely considered one of the most influential novels of the 20th century and a cultural touchstone of its era. ("So it goes," the Tralfamadorian utterance that typifies the race's extraterrestrial-Buddhist attitude towards death and destruction, became a favorite catch phrase of Vietnam protestors.)
  
  Vonnegut's voice, a blend of fanciful imaginings and plain-speaking prose, incisive political critique and unexpected emotional resonance, was drawn, in part, from his own influences, writers like Sinclair, Twain and Swift. As Vonnegut's status rose from cult favorite to bestselling author, his work rippled outward to touch generations of writers after him. While Vonnegut surely impacted his own writing students like Gail Godwin and John Irving, he's also the admitted inspiration for Ken Kalfus' sardonic social satires and even the unsparing comic monologues of Jon Stewart. With Vonnegut's death in 2007, many came forward to announce their admiration for the iconoclastic writer, and though he may never be truly imitated, the following books give us a glimpse at his long literary shadow.

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THE MORAL HUMORIST

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  The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson

  Mark Twain

  2007

  As a pioneer of American humor writing, Twain was an enormous influence on young Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut's love for the author was so great that he named his son after him. Later, with his pouf of hair, prodigious moustache and air of twinkling pessimism, Vonnegut even began to resemble his hero. But the legacy is most obvious in the work itself. In stories like his novella Pudd'nhead Wilson, Twain called attention to... the injustices of social conventions - in this case, the arbitrary birthrights of race, as a slave's baby and master's baby are switched in their cribs. Twain's tongue-in-cheek wit, quirky characterization and ironic plot twists always cloaked a more serious message. Vonnegut discovered in his own writing that humor was sometimes the most effective device for depicting otherwise incomprehensible tragedy. Off the page, he borrowed Twain's penchant for well timed, wry observations to create an enduring cult of personality.

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THE COLLEAGUE

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  Catch-22

  Joseph Heller

  2009 | Unabridged

  Like Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim, Yossarian is a disillusioned soldier, questioning the rationality of a war that has killed off his fellow servicemen and friends. And like Pilgrim, Yossarian is forced to grapple with issues of free will in the face of what seems like inevitable, thoughtless destruction. Catch-22 predated Slaughterhouse-Five by eight years but its commentary on the atrocities of the Allies in World War II, its non-chronological narrative, and its acute... sense of irony (now widely used in contemporary vernacular, the book's term "catch-22" refers to the absurd bureaucratic rules that presented a no-win situation for the soldiers) have inspired paragraphs on many a compare-and-contrast term paper. In real life, Heller and Vonnegut were personal friends and neighbors on Long Island, and taken together, their most famous works are an essential part of the modern humanist canon.

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THE PROTEGE

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  The World According to Garp

  John Irving

  2009 | Unabridged

  As a student of the Iowa Writers Workshop in the 1960s, John Irving directly learned his craft from Vonnegut, who was a writer in residence there for two years (at the very time he began writing Slaughterhouse-Five.) The two remained friends until Vonnegut's death in 2007, when Irving eulogized him by revealing that Vonnegut taught him to use fewer semicolons (which he called transvestites). More broadly, Vonnegut's influence is felt in the... random and occasionally cruel acts of plot that impact Irving's helpless characters, told with a "so it goes" detachment. The World According to Garp is his fourth novel, written after he met Vonnegut. Its protagonist, T.S. Garp, is brought into the world under unusual circumstances, and spends a lifetime contemplating its meaning and mysteries. Irving's affinity for braiding comedy and tragedy and both global and personal history shows that he learned much more from Vonnegut than semicolon placement.

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THE LITERARY SATIRIST

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  A Disorder Peculiar to the Country

  Ken Kalfus

  2008 | Unabridged

  Vonnegut's genius was that he could get laughs out of World War II's atrocities, and in this viciously dark comedy Ken Kalfus barrels through the reader's discomfort to satirize September 11. Marshall and Joyce are caught in the middle of a beyond-bitter divorce when the planes hit the World Trade Center towers. He's disappointed that she wasn't, as scheduled, on the flight that hit the Pentagon and she's disturbed to learn that... he never made it up to his Trade Tower office and escapes unscathed. The domestic terrorism builds and implodes from there. Kalfus, a self-identified Vonnegut fan, makes the violence around his characters that much more horrific by emphasizing their bourgeois pettiness. Even as they're traumatized by a growing sense that New York is no longer safe for their children, they continue to savage one another in increasingly outlandish ways. In the inhuman, unrelenting world of this novel, Kalfus makes Vonnegut look like Suzy Sunbeam.

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THE CONTEMPORARY COMIC

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  America (The Audiobook)

  Jon Stewart

  2007 | Abridged

  Daily Show comedian Stewart has said that Vonnegut's books - and particularly Slaughterhouse-Five - made his adolescent life bearable. And in 2005, Vonnegut appeared on Stewart's show to promote his book A Man Without a Country, which he said he originally wanted to call The 51st State: The State of Denial. This might have been an equally fitting title for Stewart's America, a sly, cutting satire of our country's values and institutions... that would make Stewart's literary progenitor proud. ("From your morning hardcore pornography masturbation session, to your lunchtime abortion, right up through your twilight neo-Nazi march through a predominantly Jewish/black community, the judicial branch is there to make sure everything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law...under God.") There are no sacred cows here, only the tasty hamburger of the Daily Show writers' critiques, dressed up as a faux civics textbook. But Stewart has a truly Vonnegutian, humanist point of view that makes America as compelling as it is hilarious.

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THE BOOK

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  Pride and Prejudice

  Jane Austen

  2008 | Unabridged

  Simply told, the plot may sound more Harlequin Romance than Great Book. We begin with the Bennets, a family in rural 19th Century England. Though burdened with the universal difficulties of a flighty mother and preoccupied father, the clan's true problem is more time and place specific: too many daughters to marry off, and not enough money to do it. Elizabeth and Jane are the eldest Bennet offspring, burdened both by their... family's social inadequacies and by their own justifiably high standards when it comes to choosing husbands. Will the girls find the men of their dreams, or will they settle for less than a true marriage of minds and hearts? What follows is one of the great love stories in English literature. Jane Austen was just 21 when she completed the first draft of Pride and Prejudice. So it's especially remarkable that her writing is one of the wonders of British literature funny, clear and wonderfully detailed. Elizabeth Bennet feels like a truly modern heroine, if one constrained by her time and place. Austen herself never married, though her great subjects were the politics of courtship and social conventions. Famously reclusive, she neatly penned her novels on a tiny wooden lap desk in the drawing room of her family's home in Bath. Rarely perhaps never before or since, has a writer written so much, so well, under such strange circumstances. But many readers and viewers don't necessarily know how truly difficult Austen's writing life must have been, especially given the enormous popularity of her work these last few years. First, there were the multiple movie and TV versions of every novel, from Emma to Northanger Abbey. Then there were Austen "spin-offs": from The Jane Austen Book Club (contemporary women look to the author as a font of wisdom and romantic inspiration) and Becoming Jane (Anne Hathaway is lovely but fictional) to last year's unlikely hit read, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. In the midst of all these versions and revisions, it's too easy to forget why Austen's work and life inspires so much in the first place. Which is why it seemed more than fitting to lay out a network of her literary descendants.

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THE CHICK LIT PROTOTYPE

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  Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason

  Helen Fielding

  2008 | Unabridged

  Poor Bridget Jones. She's been blamed for so much: the rise of hot pink book jackets, Mr. Darcy jokes, the stereotype of single women-as-shoe-shopping, cheese-eating-megalomaniacs, Renee Zellweger's yo-yo dieting. I'm convinced, however, that most of the people who condemn Ms. Jones out of hand haven't actually read the books. Because, actually? They're hilarious. Fielding's skewering of British social conventions, and her ability to use pop culture against itself (the term "singleton," first... appeared in Bridget Jones, for example) is in the grand Anglo-satirical tradition of P. G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, and Jane Austen. Yes, the progenitor of rom-com is funny sometimes even laugh-out-loud hilarious (Mrs. Bennett is a particular object of ridicule, but the various snobbish sisters and priggish parsons across the Austen oeuvre keep the giggles coming as well). Back, however, to Bridget Jones. The End of Reason is the second installment, and it's actually weirder and more outrageous than its predecessor. Fielding seems to have decided that her character deserves whatever ridiculous torment she can devise (such as trading tampons for cigarettes in a Thai prison); it's almost as if she's deliberately playing with the stereotype she so infamously created. Hmm. Nothing chick-lit about that.

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THE SHARP WIT

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  The Portable Dorothy Parker

  Marion Meade

  2008 | Unabridged

  The connection between the high priestess of sarcasm and the sly wit of the drawing room may not be immediately obvious. Dorothy Parker was a product of the new freedoms of the Roaring '20s, smoking and drinking and cracking wise with the boys around the Algonquin roundtable; Austen's idea of a big night out was a quadrille at Bath. But in the latter's prose is the constant, discernible longing for more freedom... freedom that Parker had in spades. We'll never know if, in Parker's time and place, Austen would have chosen to use her sharp pen on the same odd (and, frankly, often dated) combination of unstinting criticism and lovelorn short fiction.

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THE CONTEMPORARY NOVELIST

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  A Thousand Acres

  Jane Smiley

  2009 | Unabridged

  One of Austen's great subjects was sisters: their love for one another, their rivalries, the differences in the ways they deal with family, suitors and society. While Smiley's Pulitzer prize-winning novel is explicitly based on Shakespeare's King Lear (there are three sisters and a crazed, power-mad father), the work reflects the canon of female authors as well as the Bard's play. Like Lear, it is a tragedy, harrowing, heartbreaking, and inevitably doomed.... It's also profane, upsetting, and focused on aging, rather than the relatively optimistic problems of proposals and betrothals. It does, however, concern several truly Austenian subjects: the inheritance of property by female rather than male heirs; and the parental expectations placed on too-dutiful daughters. I'd like to think that had Austen lived in a time when women's problems could extend outside the parlor (in her era, women were totally legally dependent on men), she would have come to write something as disturbing and un-comely as Smiley's novel.

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THE LYRICAL FEMINIST

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  Moral Disorder

  Margaret Atwood

  2007 | Unabridged

  Atwood has claimed with characteristic dry wit to be the first chick-lit author. According to any other yardstick, she is one of the finest, fiercest and most varied authors currently writing. While these short stories don't bear quite the heft of her now-classic dystopian fantasy, The Handmaid's Tale (1985), the overly feminist bite of her collection Life Before Man (1979), or the historic sweep and multiply narrated range of Alias Grace (1996),... Moral Disorder is Atwood in her emotionally subtle mode. The stories center on Nell, a woman growing up in post-war Canada. As Nell ages, we follow her relationships with family, friends, children and lovers. The connection to Austen could feel tenuous: after all, neither she nor her heroines lived to enjoy the contemplativeness of old age, and we rarely meet them after the first blush of young love. Nell is an Austenian protagonist: independent and intelligent, she seeks a marriage of equals. What could be more disorderly?

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THE ALIENATED GENIUS

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  To the Lighthouse

  Virginia Woolf

  2008 | Unabridged

  In A Room of One's Own, Woolf's seminal nonfiction treatise on women and writing, Jane Austen appears as literary folk hero, able to transcend the restrictions her gender placed upon her. On the author's ability to compose her works, in public yet in secret, Woolf explains, "[she] was glad that a hinge creaked, so that she might hide her manuscript before anyone came in." Yet, "I could not find any signs that... her circumstance had harmed her work in the slightest." Okay, but how does this relate to To the Lighthouse, one of Woolf's trickiest and most tenaciously Modern works? The novel centers on the Ramsays, a middle class family, emotionally and physically close to each other, but with repressed desires and ambitions that they cannot fully express. Austen's writing always concerned the push and pull familial relationships: sisters and parents, cousins and uncles. In this way, To the Lighthouse is almost a continuation, or twentieth-century retelling of Austen's work. Like Austen, Woolf struggled: to write, and to live happily. Ultimately, she lost the battle, killing herself at the age of 49. Perhaps she saw in Austen an example of why and how it was worthwhile to keep on, no matter how futile her efforts might feel. At the British Library in London, Woolf's final blue-pencil edited manuscript lies in the same glass case as Austen's tiny wooden lap desk. Both are powerful reminders of what it means to write, no matter what.

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