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Three gripping tales of human folly, struggle, and survival.
A native of Jackson, Mississippi, Kathryn Stockett had migrated to Manhattan for a career in magazine publishing, when she found herself repeatedly talking to other southern-born New Yorkers about their experience of childhood and "the women who'd raised us in our mama's kitchens." Drawing on both her own family's past and deep research into the history of her former hometown, she fashioned in her bestselling novel The Help a story that examines on the forces that divided -- and linked --black and white women in the 1960s South. Here, Kathryn Stockett shares with us three novels she loves.
By Gin Phillips
"A stranger bought me this novel at a bookstore. He nodded and said, 'Just read it.' I was blown away by this story about a mining family in Alabama who finds a baby in a well. These are sturdy, fascinating Americans. My favorite detail: the children believed that Birmingham was the biggest city in the world."
By Todd Johnson
" I am in love with the dialect and language of this book. Five women bickering, judging, loving, growing old together and you cannot stop laughing, even when your heart is hurting. Keep a pencil nearby-- you’ll constantly be underlining all your favorite, funny lines."
By David Benioff
"City of Thievesis to me, the perfect novel. It’s like zooming through a breathtaking Russian city where you have to force yourself to slow down, because the setting is so gorgeous, so visceral. Oh but it’s so hard to read slowly because you literally feel the fingernails of the starving people down your back. A killer adventure. I have never felt the environment like this before. I have never craved an omelet more in my life."
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"The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science," Jean Strouse writes of her subject's more famous brothers, "Alice simply lived." It took a biographer of sensitivity and brilliance to give that "simply" the profundity it deserves, and the resulting book, now reissued in the peerless NYRB Classics series, is one of the richest life stories you'll ever read.
The world of Jane Austen's fiction has long been an imaginative playground for writers and readers of a certain stripe. Shannon Hale's Austenland wittily took the next step, setting comic romance in a faux-Pemberly resort for the Darcy-smitten. Her latest returns for more Regency fun, but with a twist: does murder stalk Pembrook Park?
Childlike retreat? Arts and crafts challenge? Frugal and eco-friendly living option? The notion of the "tiny house" has the surprising potential to fire the imagination. In this exuberant volume of sketches, plans, and commentary, the artist Derek Diedricksen shares his infectious enthusiasm for the idea of the micro-mansion.
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