Diary of a Bad Year
J. M. Coetzee
Coetzee’s latest novel is written as two, entwined diaries—his own and that of a younger woman who he comes to pass the time with.
Literary Theory
Terry Eagleton
The classic introduction to literary theory and a capable and somewhat subversive argument for Marxism.
Boxed In
Mark Crispin Miller
An academic thesis that applies the traditional methods of close reading to television commercials.
1984
George Orwell
The classic novel of authoritarianism. Also, the Bush administration’s how-to manual.
Gravity’s Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
Pynchon’s famously difficult masterpiece. I destroyed three copies in a (failed) effort to grasp it completely.
The Shock Doctrine
Naomi Klein
Klein expertly and devastatingly reveals the history behind a model of capitalism that first fed on disaster, then fomented it.
Waiting for the Barbarians
J. M. Coetzee
Coetzee’s most important novel, sadly more relevant everyday.
Oyrx and Crake
Margaret Atwood
Limbo
Bernard Wolfe
A bizarre dystopia in which the elite voluntarily amputate their limbs and have them replaced with high performing machines.
The Ecocriticism Reader
Cheryll Glotfelty & Harold Fromm
An introductory collection in literary ecology, the movement that aims to do for environmentalism what gender and race studies did for civil rights.
The Comedy of Survival
Joseph Meeker
Meeker argues that the destructive aspects of western civilization are founded on the tragic mode, while the comic mode offers a path for redemption.
After Theory
Terry Eagleton
