Edmund G. Love’s Subways Are for Sleeping was turned into a musical bomb on Broadway. But the book, a light but heartfelt look at 10 New Yorkers creatively making ends meet in the 1950s, is worth remembering. READ MORE >

In short but piercing books that make most confessional writing look toothless in comparison, Annie Ernaux has addressed obsessive love, bereavement, abortion, marriage, illness, and sexual jealousy. READ MORE >

Tolstoy’s final work, a novella about a real-life soldier in the Caucasus, is a compressed example of the author’s genius, and considered by some critics to be his best work. READ MORE >

The aftermath of winning a war is easy: Lift your arms and celebrate. Losing is harder and more complicated, but in The Culture of Defeat, German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch looked at the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, and World War I to find common ways that the vanquished begin the process of redefining and rebuilding themselves. READ MORE >

Janet Lewis was a versatile writer whose life very nearly lasted the entire 20th century. Her three most famous novels were inspired by the cases in an 1873 law book. In all three, men fight for their lives against circumstantial evidence. READ MORE >

To help celebrate the one-year anniversary of The Second Pass, a group of 12 devoted readers and wonderful writers champion a diverse list of their favorite out-of-print books—everything from a passionate look at experimental German rock to the memoirs of an 18th-century bookseller. READ MORE >

The reputation of Colin MacInnes’ novel Absolute Beginners (1959), about teenagers in a changing postwar London, couldn’t survive its musical adaptation starring David Bowie (1985). But the book deserves much better. It changed the author’s life (really changed it) not once, but twice. READ MORE >

In two sharply satiric novels by Hans Scherfig—originally published in 1938 and 1940, respectively—Danish school kids are put through drudgery and abuse, and let loose in the world to become mindless bureaucrats. READ MORE >

If you’re like most people circa 2010, you pay fleeting attention to horse racing only on the first Saturday in May, if then. That’s no reason not to read Joe Palmer. Racing was his beat, but he covered it—and various tangential subjects—with a beguiling combination of erudition and mid-century New York patter. READ MORE >

In the 1920s, James Branch Cabell was widely considered one of America’s great writers. His fall into obscurity was rapid and, to this day, irreversible. But his richly imagined, ornate work—particularly his most famous novel, Jurgen—remains fresher than that of many authors whose reputations outlived his. READ MORE >

In his renowned fiction (he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955), Halldór Laxness wrote about the people of Iceland and honored the country’s rich saga tradition. In Independent People, a stubbornly self-reliant sheep farmer pushes his family to the brink and beyond. READ MORE >

Recounting the recent past is easy. Predicting the future is hard. But that won’t stop us from trying. These nine books may not have been runaway successes when first published, but their best qualities make them built to last. We think people will still be reading them a hundred years from now. READ MORE >

How can a survivor of childhood abuse consider Lolita one of her favorite novels not in spite of her history, but because of it? By focusing on Nabokov’s realistic combination of horror and beauty, his portrayal of a young girl who was no match for a monstrous, self-justifying man — and thus finding a kind of forgiveness in an unforgiving book. READ MORE >

Nina Hamnett and Stefan Knapp were “capable if unremarkable artists” who lived very different lives. She was a sexually adventurous bohemian in London and Paris. He spent two years imprisoned in a Siberian work camp. Their engrossing, neglected memoirs recount their experiences — and indelibly capture the wider world in which they lived. READ MORE >

In the best of Brian Moore’s novels — including his masterpiece, The Emperor of Ice-Cream — deftly drawn characters confront crises in mid-20th-century Belfast. Moore described the city as “this dull, dead town,” but his fiction brings it to vivid life. READ MORE >

Jane Austen inspires millions of fans, teams of filmmakers, and zombie re-mixers. But the work of Maria Edgeworth is largely forgotten. Her 1801 novel Belinda reads “like an experimental variation on Austen conducted before the fact.” READ MORE >

In 1859, having recently published a first novel to great success, George Eliot wrote The Lifted Veil, a Gothic-inflected novella that features a clairvoyant narrator and, in one particularly memorable scene, a dying woman brought back to life by another’s blood. A departure from the realism of Eliot’s oeuvre, the book fits comfortably alongside the chilling work of Poe and Stoker. READ MORE >

Anthony Burgess was a polymath who published dozens of books. He’s best known, of course, for A Clockwork Orange, but his most impressive work might have been the epic Earthly Powers. In it, the decadent in-law of a recently deceased Pope is asked to document three miracles that he saw the Pontiff perform. The novel that results is part James Michener parody, part history of the 20th century, and complete genius. READ MORE >

In Carrie Tiffany’s debut novel, Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living, a train full of peculiar characters moves across the dry lands of Depression-era Australia. Dispensing farming advice to their countrymen, they struggle against their own deprivation and uncontrollable passions. READ MORE >

Growing up among the refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas, the author felt a vague but deep unhappiness. Then one day, he reached into the glove box of a friend’s van, found the novel Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, and started to read: “Something has happened to me, I can’t doubt it any more.” READ MORE >

It was one year ago this week that David Foster Wallace tragically took his own life. A look back at the humor, beauty and ambivalence in the work of a legendarily ambitious novelist and the best nonfiction writer of his generation. READ MORE >

Sylvia Plath is synonymous with The Bell Jar and her poetry. The shorter pieces collected in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams may be less essential — and questionably edited by Ted Hughes — but they offer insights about Plath and her work that no real fan should miss. READ MORE >

Elaine Dundy wrote the kind of beguiling, complex heroines that are rarely found in American literature. In The Old Man and Me, a young American woman in 1960s London plans to seduce and murder a literary lion in order to gain her inheritance. Dundy tells the tale in her trademark withering, loony voice. READ MORE >

When he died a year ago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was remembered most for his brave and brilliant writing about the Soviet labor camps. But he was a great novelist as well — perhaps the truest heir to Tolstoy — and The First Circle is one of his most unappreciated masterpieces. READ MORE >

In 1981, Gay Talese published Thy Neighbor’s Wife, a (deeply) reported look at Americans who believed in the sweeping, liberating promises of the sexual revolution. Time hasn’t been kind to their dreams, but Talese’s book, recently reissued, stands up as a classic. READ MORE >

In 1973, Ward Just was in the early stages of trading in his journalist’s hat for an illustrious career in fiction. The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert was a collection of stories that went into the halls of power and took the emotional lives there seriously. READ MORE >

With so many guides available telling you what to read, it’s time to figure out what books you can overlook. Here are ten, critically acclaimed and academically anointed, that are safe to skip. READ MORE >

In the early 1950s, two teenage authors published novels about the (very) precocious exploits of young girls. Françoise Mallet-Joris got there first with The Illusionist, but Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse was a bigger smash three years later. In both books, girls wage war on convention with mixed results — but no dire moral consequences. READ MORE >

In 1981, Danny Peary published Cult Movies, a guide to 100 films ranging from Casablanca to Eraserhead. Andy Miller found the book as a 15-year-old who had been bored nearly to death by 2001: A Space Odyssey. Peary saved his cinematic life. READ MORE >

Forget what you think you know about the Gothic, Twilight fans. In Wieland, one of the first novels published in America, Charles Brockden Brown wrote a tale of mental disturbance, familial murder and spontaneous combustion that remains deeply strange and forbidding. READ MORE >

Simone Weil wrote of a divine being whose relationship to us is defined by absence and separation. In the essays and personal letters that make up Waiting for God, she outlines a theology that fully embraces pain and suffering. READ MORE >

Wilfrid Sheed was arguably the best critic and essayist of his generation, writing timeless, incisive, often hilarious pieces about Hemingway, Salinger, Mailer, himself, and many others. He brought the same skill to his fiction, but most of his work is mystifyingly out of print. READ MORE >

Stephen King is a household name, but his 1981 exploration of the horror genre, Danse Macabre, is not. Covering everything from film to literature to radio, it surveys the world of horror with the sharp eye of a critic and the fluttering heart of a fan. READ MORE >

Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker is set more than 2,000 years in the future, when much of human knowledge is a dim memory and civilization is being rebuilt from scratch. Why you may not know one of the 20th century’s best works of post-doomsday fiction. READ MORE >

Los Angeles has inspired many famous writers, from Raymond Chandler to Joan Didion. But few have captured the city as authoritatively and affectionately as the relatively unknown Eve Babitz, whose sharp, hysterical 1974 memoir, Eve’s Hollywood, traffics in “an elegant and elevated form of gossip.” READ MORE >

The Vietnam War produced a long shelf of great books, but none quite like Michael Herr’s Dispatches. On assignment for Esquire, he ended up writing a brilliant, shell-shocked work that stands beside Heart of Darkness. His chronicle of the terrors and the twisted joys of war is still relevant 32 years later. READ MORE >