Community Reading List: 2018 Fiction

News of the World by Paulette Jiles

All That Man Is by David Szalay Finalist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize Winner of the 2016 Paris Review Plimpton Prize for Fiction A magnificent and ambitiously conceived portrait of contemporary life, by a genius of realism Nine men. Each of them at a different stage in life, each of them away from home, and each of them striving--in the suburbs of Prague, in an overdeveloped Alpine village, beside a Belgian motorway, in a dingy Cyprus hotel--to understand what it means to be alive, here and now. Tracing a dramatic arc from the spring of youth to the winter of old age, the ostensibly separate narratives of All That Man Is aggregate into a picture of a single shared existence, a picture that interrogates the state of modern manhood while bringing to life, unforgettably, the physical and emotional terrain of an increasingly globalized Europe. And so these nine lives form an ingenious and new kind of novel, in which David Szalay expertly plots a dark predicament for the twenty-first-century man. Dark and disturbing, but also often wickedly and uproariously comic, All That Man Is is notable for the acute psychological penetration Szalay brings to bear on his characters, from the working-class ex-grunt to the pompous college student, the middle-aged loser to the Russian oligarch. Steadily and mercilessly, as this brilliantly conceived book progresses, the protagonist at the center of each chapter is older than the last one, it gets colder out, and All That Man Is gathers exquisite power. Szalay is a writer of supreme gifts--a master of a new kind of realism that vibrates with detail, intelligence, relevance, and devastating pathos.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy A story about the childhood experiences of fraternal twins whose lives are destroyed by the "Love Laws" prevalent in 1960s Kerala, India.

My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent

La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman

The Eternonaut by Héctor Germán Oesterheld; Francisco Solano Lopez

Dexterity by Douglas Bauer

Barkskins by Annie Proulx

Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable by Samuel Beckett

The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque; Arthur Wesley Wheen (Translator)

Saturday by Ian McEwan

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel

The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald; Michael Hulse (Translator)

Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck; Susan Bernofsky

House of Names by Colm Tóibín

Love and Summer by William Trevor