Great Books To Read

[Corswandt]

I'll ask at the Relógio d'Água website if they're interested. They have a section handling this sort of query.

I knew they'd be the only ones to reply so fast - or maybe at all (thank you, Mr. Carlos Vasconcelos) - but I only got the standard issue boilerplate reply "Thanks for your suggestion, which we will consider." which, granted, is probably all they could say right now. I do believe that, if somebody else had already stepped up (namely Leya's imprint Dom Quixote, which is the publisher of all of Énard's books that got released in PT so far), Relógio d'Água would say so; this means the rights for PT are indeed still available.

Anyways, contemporary French language fiction isn't really Relógio d'Água's thing (was it ever?), even though they're branching off a bit as of late (fantasy, science fiction, Sally Rooney), so I also think this is [/the end].

 

[Ben Jackson]

Great books for recommendation

Africa
A Dry White Season Andre Brink
Scenes of Provicial Life J M Coetzee
Open City Teju Cole ( an African answer to Sebald)
The Fisherman Chigozie Obioma
Arrow of God Chinua Achebe

Asia
A Thousand Cranes Yasunari Kawabata
Soul Mountain Gao Xinjiang (read the novel in January, so unique and possessing linguistic innovation)
A Woman in the Dunes Abe Kobo (read this last year, great work)
Confessions of a Mask Yukio Mishima

Usa/Canada
Blonde Joyce Carol Oates (I think her best work)
Seize the Day Saul Bellow
The English Patient Michael Ondaatje (Breathtaking, beautiful language)
Giovanni's Room James Baldwin
Catch-22 Joseph Heller
The Hours Michael Cunningham

Western Canon
Swann's Way Marcel Proust (the only volume I've read from In Search of Lost Time, still stunned by its brilliant language)
Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert
The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann
Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf
East of Eden John Steinbeck
Exile and the Kingdom Albert Camus
Love in the Time of Cholera Garcia Marquez