Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2616

Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2616

Twenty-two novels spanning British, Australian, American, and Russian literary fiction — four E.M. Forster titles in a single box, three Barry Oakley novels, and a supporting cast that reads like a very good university syllabus: Burgess, Muriel Spark, André Gide, Elizabeth Bowen, Turgenev, Updike, Hardy, Waugh, Fitzgerald. This is what a careful reader's shelf looks like when it finally gets thinned out: decades of accumulated good taste arriving all at once. For anyone building a serious literary fiction collection, this is a considerable shortcut.

1. A Wild Ass of a Man — Barry Oakley — Barry Oakley's debut novel, a picaresque and wildly entertaining account of an ambitious young Australian's collision with the adult worlds of work, love, and self-invention.
2. A Salute to the Great McCarthy — Barry Oakley — Oakley's comic novel about Australian Rules football, written with the affectionate irreverence and sharp comic timing that established him as one of the most distinctive satirists in Australian fiction.
3. Let's Hear It for Prendergast — Barry Oakley — A darkly comic novel about a failed Australian playwright whose domestic and professional lives are in simultaneous freefall, written with Oakley's characteristic blend of farce and sympathy.
4. Night and Silence Who is Here? — Pamela Hansford Johnson — A comedy of American academic life in which a visiting English novelist encounters the full absurdity of the creative writing industry, written with the wry intelligence and precise social observation that mark all of Johnson's best work.
5. Cork Street, Next to the Hatter's — Pamela Hansford Johnson — A sharply observed novel about London's contemporary art world, in which Johnson skewers the pretensions of dealers, collectors, and artists with characteristic wit and a clear-eyed understanding of how taste and money intersect.
6. Fathers and Sons — Turgenev — Turgenev's masterpiece, in which the conflict between generations is embodied in the nihilist Bazarov, set against the fading world of the Russian landed gentry in a novel of extraordinary depth and sadness.
7. The Abbess of Crewe — Muriel Spark — Spark's witty and devastating roman à clef about the Watergate scandal, transposing the Nixon White House to an English convent and producing one of the funniest and most formally perfect short novels in the language.
8. Strait is the Gate — André Gide — Gide's early novella about religious passion and self-denial, in which a young woman's spiritual idealism becomes a form of quiet destruction — brief, concentrated, and quietly devastating.
9. The Longest Journey — E.M. Forster — The least celebrated but perhaps most personal of Forster's novels, following a Cambridge undergraduate who compromises his ideals for social respectability and pays the price — written with the urgency of a young novelist working out what he believes.
10. A Clockwork Orange — Anthony Burgess — Burgess's visionary and still-startling novel about free will, violence, and state power, narrated in the invented teenage slang "Nadsat" — a book that has not aged, and shows no sign of doing so.
11. The Malayan Trilogy — Anthony Burgess — Three connected novels set during the final years of British Malaya, collecting "Time for a Tiger," "The Enemy in the Blanket," and "Beds in the East" — a richly observed, linguistically dazzling portrait of a culture in the process of transforming itself forever.
12. The Diary of a Madman — Nikolai Gogol — Gogol's brilliantly unsettling story of a minor government clerk whose grip on reality loosens until he believes himself to be the King of Spain — a comic and deeply sad exploration of alienation and the cruelties of bureaucratic life.
13. Home of the Gentry — Turgenev — Turgenev's melancholy novel about a man who returns to his family estate after an unhappy marriage, finds love, and then loses it — written with his extraordinary gift for atmosphere and the particular Russian art of beautiful regret.
14. Rabbit is Rich — John Updike — The third Rabbit novel, in which Harry Angstrom has finally made a comfortable life for himself but finds comfort less satisfying than ambition — a Pulitzer Prize-winning portrait of middle-aged America at its most prosperous and most empty.
15. Jude the Obscure — Thomas Hardy — Hardy's last and bleakest novel, in which a stonemason's dreams of education and love are systematically destroyed by class, convention, and bad luck — the savage indictment of Victorian society that caused such outrage Hardy never wrote another novel.
16. A Room with a View — E.M. Forster — One of Forster's most joyful and accessible novels, in which a young Englishwoman's liberation — emotional, intellectual, and romantic — begins with a pension in Florence and is completed in the Surrey countryside.
17. The Death of the Heart — Elizabeth Bowen — Bowen's finest novel, in which sixteen-year-old Portia discovers the gap between the emotional world she has imagined and the adult world of calculation and performance surrounding her — written in prose of extraordinary precision and feeling.
18. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Mark Twain — Twain's immortal river novel, in which Huck and the escaped slave Jim drift down the Mississippi and America's great moral contradictions — freedom and slavery, innocence and complicity — are held up to the light with deadpan compassion.
19. Howards End — E.M. Forster — Forster's most ambitious novel, in which the competing values of culture, commerce, and property play out across two families, building to one of the most morally complex climaxes in English fiction.
20. Where Angels Fear to Tread — E.M. Forster — Forster's first novel, in which an impulsive English widow's Italian marriage sets off a chain of interference, self-deception, and tragedy that reveals exactly what the author thought was wrong with Edwardian England.
21. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold — Evelyn Waugh — Waugh's disturbing and semi-autobiographical novel about a famous novelist who suffers a breakdown at sea and begins hearing voices — at once a comedy, a horror story, and a candid act of self-examination from one of the century's most technically accomplished writers.
22. The Crack-Up — F. Scott Fitzgerald — A posthumous collection of Fitzgerald's essays and autobiographical writings in which the author of Gatsby reflects with painful honesty on the collapse of his personal and creative life — required reading for anyone who wants to understand what the American dream looks like from the wreckage.