3 brilliant January read

DAY TIME READ

The emotional debut novel of Katee Khan, Constrain Stars (Doubleday, about €11.99, on January 26) not so ordinary romance novel. Keris, the pilot of space of superachievement, and Max, the promising chef operating family food business meets and falls in love, but their Universe, Europe, forbids them to be together. Set between space and Novaya Zemlya was created after catastrophic nuclear war this story sees that couple tries to express disagreement with strict rules of their utopia, trying to save their relations. They have to fight to remain together later, to survive when they drift, one in space only with 90 minutes of the remaining air. To tell more would only spoil him, but it is motivation, the unique and beautifully created history on difficulties of the first love which will remain with you after reading. It will be huge in 2017.

A Reading Man's Guide to Dirty Books

Chicks may like to read about sex. But guys? You won't catch us hunkering down under the bedsheets with soft-core sensation of the year Fifty Shades of Grey.   We require, you know, pictures. Right?  Tom Bissell,  a connoisseur of the finest literary smut since before the age of consent, is here to tell you otherwise.

John Updike
Couples (1968)

No. 1
John Updike
Couples (1968)

When I was in the sixth grade, I got my hands on a hardcover copy of John Updike's Couples. A few adults in my orbit—teachers, parents, friends of parents—took note. For them, "John Updike" wasn't a name so much as a signifier of literary urbanity. So I'd sit there before class, in Catholic school, reading Couples, which is filled with scenes involving "fumbly dripping genitals," astonished that my teacher wasn't rushing over to pull the book from my hands and douse me with a fire extinguisher. No one, I realized with a thrill,has any idea what's actually in this thing.

Soon after I finished Couples, I read another Updike novel, Rabbit Is Rich (1981):"To stick your tongue in just as far as it would go while her pussy tickles your nose. No acne in that crotch. Heaven." Hang on. Crotches can have acne? Good to know! If I ever have children of my own, I'll be planting the dirtiest Updike novels I can find in all my home's high-traffic areas. The best way to encourage reading, especially in these digital times, is to remind young people how sexually diabolical good writing can be.

Nicholson Baker
The Fermata (1994)

No. 2
Nicholson Baker
The Fermata (1994)

Nicholson Baker's The Fermata is probably the most good-natured sexy novel of our time, despite its having one of the most potentially sinister and disturbing setups imaginable. Its narrator, Arno Strine, has been blessed with the ability to freeze time, producing what he calls "the Fold," through which he alone is free to move and loiter. (A fermata is, technically speaking, a pause in a piece of music.) In another writer's hands, this planet-stilling conceit might make for some nifty hunk of Inception-like sci-fi, but Baker uses it to explore the inner terrain of imagination, male desire, and loneliness, for what Arno likes to do while in the Fold is take women's clothes off, touch them a little, and masturbate.

It helps that Baker is among our greatest living prose stylists, able to describe a time-frozen woman's breast as a "hot heavy ostrich egg" and the female anus as "discrete, singular, clearly bounded, focused, in contrast to the bounteous plied gyno-confusion of the vadge." Baker is particularly good on ejaculation, coming up with so many ways to describe the grand event ("I released one-liners of sperm up her forearm"; "I would send forth four gray stripes of fatherhood") that he might well be the Picasso of come. The best passage in the book describes the difference between male and female urine discharge, the latter falling from between a woman's legs "confusedly, in a stegosaurian fan." There is more loving, observant detail in this passage than  E. L. James has managed in 1,600 pages.

Alan Hollinghurst
The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

No. 3
Alan Hollinghurst
The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library was once described by none other than Nicholson Baker as containing an "initially kind of disgusting level of homosexual sex"; yet Baker also ranked it high among the finest first novels he'd ever read. As a non-gay man, I don't find the level of homosexual sex contained in the book disgusting. If anything, I find it conceptually overwhelming. The Swimming-Pool Library is like a gelateria of erotic variability: interracial, intergenerational, rough, soft, quickies, hardies, scaries, get-the-fuck-off-me's—The Swimming-Pool Library goes everywhere, sexually speaking, provided no women dwell there.

Hollinghurst's story is primarily concerned with two men: William, who is pretty and young and brilliant, and Charles, who is old and rich and desperate. William and Charles need each other emotionally and intellectually but not sexually. They meet while seeking out anonymous sex at a public restroom in London, during which Charles has heart trouble and William saves him. Hollinghurst is a tender and lyrically fussy writer, which means his sex scenes can be astonishingly sad and mournful. When one of William's lovers gets undressed, Hollinghurst takes the time to notice "the red blotch of an insect bite in the tender, creased skin at his waistband."

It's been said that repressing homosexuals created Proust, whereas liberating them created Cabaret. Maybe so, but it also created The Swimming-Pool Library, an immensely sexy gay novel every straight man owes it to himself to read.

Nic Kelman
girls (2003)

No. 4
Nic Kelman
girls (2003)

Nic Kelman's girls feels like a drug-fueled sex party's bleak days-long hangover. Yes, Fifty Shades of Grey plays around with bondage themes, but girls explores the far more insidious bondage of being a man with a brain—and by "brain" I mean the primitive Neanderthal brain that hastened our escape from the savanna by telling our loping ancestors to fuck whatever they felt like fucking. Reading girls is like wandering around a strange city at night with money in your pocket, loose women on your mind, and great black wings flapping in your chest.

There aren't really any sustained characters in girls; it's told mostly in a second-person "you" that floats between various rich older men involved with various young—sometimes alarmingly so—women. The women, moreover, tend to be sex workers, as in the book's opening vignette, which involves a businessman in Korea deciding to summon to his room a prostitute who turns out to be younger than he anticipated. As the man begins to touch the girl, he notices "how clumsy" his fingers are, "how enormous, how ugly. Like a gorilla's."

This is not a misogynistic book, though its characters are often misogynists. Nevertheless, girls mixes up vividly detailed sex scenes with episodes of sociosexual horror so successfully that I imagine many women could read it only by turning the pages with tongs. The distinct type of misogyny Kelman's most interested in cataloging is, at any rate, less a hatred of women than a hatred of human existence itself.

Kelman doesn't shrink from the more nightmarish aspects of sex. One older man swings a teenage girl around so that her "little breasts" meet his "hungry mouth," and as he stuffs his fingers into her, he notes that she "couldn't have weighed more than a hundred and five pounds"—a line that made me nearly physically ill. But if I'm honest, I must also admit the line triggered an awful kind of animal arousal, too. Kelman's prose cracks right through the soft shale of what we think sex writing should properly address and shows us the petroleum darkness agush at fathoms the civilized mind no longer cares to explore.

James Salter
A Sport and a Pastime (1967)

No. 5
James Salter
A Sport and a Pastime (1967)

It's somewhat shocking to realize that James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime was published within a decade of the final relaxation of American censorship. The book's sex scenes are so raw, sad, and beautiful that its prose seems to exist outside aesthetic time. These pages could have been written yesterday or pulled from a steamer trunk sealed tight for a hundred years at the bottom of the ocean.

Salter's nameless narrator, a man wandering around provincial France sometime in the early 1960s, meets another young American, named Phillip Dean. After a few brief, ghostly scenes involving the two, Dean wanders off to take up with Anne-Marie, a poor and somewhat plain 18-year-old French girl. Soon enough, Salter's narrator is watching the young lovers court, fall in love, undress, have sex, and drift apart. Much of what the narrator tells involves experiences he has no direct access to. As a result, the book feels like an innovatively triangulated hybrid of memoir, novel, and dream.

Salter's prose is the functional equivalent of sex, thrumming and disassociated and suddenly hard and breathless when it chooses to pounce and linger: "The trains are running on time. Along the empty streets, yellow headlights of a car occasionally pass.... With a touch like flowers, she is gently tracing the base of his cock, driven by now all the way into her, touching his balls, and beginning to writhe slowly beneath him in a sort of obedient rebellion."

The great mistake most writers make in writing about sex is approaching it as though it merits special attention. It doesn't. It simply merits the same attention one would give weather, a face, a tree. Describing the sexual act requires no specialist vocabulary, no raising or lowering of diction, and absolutely no euphemism, which is a tool of the craven. In that sense, A Sport and a Pastime could be the aspiring writer's how-to guide. Its sex scenes, most of which are brief, are so rich with conflicted emotion and churning ambivalence that no one who's ever been young and in love will be able to read it without wincing, as when Dean notes Anne-Marie's bad breath or her homely "shopgirl's" face moments after making love to her. Isn't at least half of what makes sex sex what we're thinking while having it? Not all those thoughts are kind. Some, in fact, are privately cruel. Intimacy with another human being is nothing if not being constantly aware of how easily you could hurt them.

I'm not sure that fans of Fifty Shades of Grey even want to read about sex. With all due respect to Sue (and Sue's husband), I think the book's success is more about its modernization of the Harlequin-romance formula—a kind of de-vampirized, harder-edged Twilight. It's not about sex so much as it is about tunneling into the densely protected heart of a Dark Unavailable Man. Or maybe the Grey books' zillions of readers just want to be abused, and the flog that comes down on their backs is one of nerve-deadening prose.

A hot literary sex scene is, above all else, truthful about sex as it's felt and experienced by actual human beings. A bad literary sex scene is cynical—a commercial for impossible sensations. Writers who write about sex effectively unprivatize privacy; they remind a reader that he or she is not alone in kink or quirk. To write about sex well, you have to be brave. To read about sex well, though, you have to be honest. You have to be willing to be turned on, and you have to be willing to be disgusted; you also have to understand the difference between being turned on and being disgusted. That's the nutshell history of  censorship: turned-on people claiming to be disgusted.

Reading about sex takes two of our most private selves—the sexual self and the reading self and makes a two-backed beast of them. It allows you to wander into a library and discover an orgy. It makes you smarter and more attentive and might even make you a better lover. Once again, gentlemen: Read to the lady, why don't you.

Presidential Library: Ronald Reagan

Presidential Library:
Ronald Reagan

"Reagan, however, appears to have undergone a profound shift when he was given a copy of Whittaker Chambers's Witness (1952). Indeed, the work of a former communist spy convinced Reagan that liberalism was even more of an enemy of the West than communism itself."

—from Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History by John Patrick Diggins

Presidential Library: Barack Obama

Presidential Library:
Barack Obama

"See, the book's [Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness] not really about Africa. Or black people. It's about the man who wrote it. The European. The American...So I read the book to help me understand just what it is that makes white people so afraid. Their demons. The way ideas get twisted around. It helps me understand how people learn to hate."

—from Obama's memoir, Dreams from My Father

Presidential Library: Bill Clinton

Presidential Library:
Bill Clinton

"Once, instead of paying attention to the class, I read Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. At the end of the hour, [the professor] asked me what was so much more interesting than his lecture. I held up the book and told him it was the greatest novel written in any language since William Faulkner died. I still think so."

—from his 2004 autobiography, My Life

David Simon Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) by James Agee with photographs by Walker Evans

David Simon

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)
by James Agee with photographs by Walker Evans

A suburban boy's father marks up his English essays, explaining both the wit and weaknesses of leading sentences with gerunds. He tells stories of fierce heroes, word warriors: Broun, who loved the street parade, and Pegler, who sat next to him all those years, despising the common man; Bigart, selfless and understated, or Mencken, who believed in only Mencken. But all of them so gifted, so deft, so able to trick a phrase. Here, says the father, read this transition. Here, look what he does with the second graf...

The father takes the son to a Front Page revival at a D.C. theater. The boy is oversold. He will be a newspaperman, a journalist.

Years later, he is on the metro desk at an old gray rag, Mencken's old paper, the youngest and last-hired scribbler. He prides himself on needing only minutes to bring fifteen clean column inches on anything, to be fast on rewrite when they put him there, to always talk a desk sergeant out of whatever handful of facts are required. It is all easy and good.

Until an older reporter hands him a book. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

So, thinks the young man, something about celebrity.

He begins to read, bored at first, then confused, then with growing alarm at the delicacy of the reporting, the self-awareness of a thinking journalist as he approaches and attempts to represent the love, fear, and sadness of real lives. My God, Agee is feeling this. Feeling what he is seeing. Feeling what he is writing.

And these people, these poor and unguarded sharecroppers, have opened their lives to the monstrous hegemony of reporting. But the journalist—thank God—he's utterly aware of the stakes involved, the dignity at risk. He gathers it all with caution and nuance. Page after fucking page of unmistakable proof of the true human condition.

"If I could do it," Agee declares, "I'd do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game... As it is though, I'll do what little I can in writing."

After reading Agee, I knew how callow a young reporter's ambitions can be, how small my sense of craft, my dry professionalism was. Famous Men is the book that made me ashamed and proud to be a journalist—all in the same instant. Reading it made me grow up. Or at least, it demanded that I begin to grow up.

Whatever honor can be found in using the lives of others to tell tales is there, in the pages of that improbable book. Along with one final lesson as well: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is now, in retrospect, a classic work, an exercise in pure, declarative humanism. It will read true forever.

And yet, at the time of publication, it sold 600 copies.

But Agee knew. He had to know.
David Simon is the creator of The Wire and Treme.

Patton Oswalt A Boy and His Dog (1969) by Harlan Ellison

Patton Oswalt

A Boy and His Dog (1969)
by Harlan Ellison

I was being my typical asshole self one day in the seventh grade and got sent to detention. I had a copy of They Came from Outer Space: 12 Classic Science Fiction Tales That Became Major Motion Pictures, a collection of stories that were the basis for films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Thing from Another World. One of these stories was Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog."

I loved science fiction and, up to that point in my life, was happy to read about spaceships and aliens, robots and ray guns.

Ellison didn't write science fiction in a way I'd read it before. His stories had sex and confusion and no clear-cut heroes. There was violence, but not the violence I'd seen in movies. It was sloppy and sudden, like I'd seen on playgrounds. And there was a vertiginous sense that science fiction wasn't some gleaming antigravity future I'd never be a part of. It was two steps away and might come roaring down on us if someone pressed the wrong button.

"A Boy and His Dog" is about a dystopian future where human scavengers sift through a post-WWIII wasteland, and intelligent telepathic dogs, bred for warfare, use the remaining humans and their opposable thumbs to help find food, open doors and cans, and pull triggers on guns. It was Lord of the Flies, postpubescent and pissed off.

Ellison didn't change my life so much as he changed my reading habits, revealing a dozen branching paths and side alleys where before there seemed to be an orderly road to adulthood. He brought rawness and confusion and awe and real terror, and I'm forever indebted.

Patton Oswalt is the author of Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

Anthony Bourdain Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) by Hunter S. Thompson

Anthony Bourdain

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)
by Hunter S. Thompson

I vividly remember my introduction to Hunter Thompson's masterpiece in its original serial form in the pages of Rolling Stone. I was absurdly young (maybe 15?) and in no way prepared for the angry, hallucinatory, and searingly funny prose that seemed to leap off the page and burn its way into my skull. Thompson's savagely descriptive sentences deeply affected my own, leading to a lifelong love for hyperbole. And as a young man just coming of age as it became clear there would be no revolution, no peace in Vietnam, and four more years of Richard Nixon, I responded to Thompson's rage. But it was the sentiment underlying Thompson's story—the heartbreak and disappointment that would peek through between images like that of his dead grandmother crawling up his leg with a knife in her teeth—that affected me most. I became determined not just to write like Thompson but to live like Thompson, too. Probably not the ideal role model for a 15-year-old. But there it is.

Anthony Bourdain's latest book is Medium Raw.

John Jeremiah Sullivan No One Here Gets Out Alive (1980) by Danny Sugerman and Jerry Hopkins

John Jeremiah Sullivan

No One Here Gets Out Alive (1980)
by Danny Sugerman and Jerry Hopkins

You can't ask writers to name the most important books of their youth. They cannot hear the question—it passes through a region in the left temporal lobe that changes it into a different question: What would you like us to think were the most important books of your youth? How many authors have racked 300 words recounting the Jove-like descent of Hemingway's Michigan stories into their adolescent world, when what they should have said is Choose Your Own Adventure 91: You Are a Superstar.

I undertook, as an experiment, to suppress that part of the brain responsible for this distortion, and yesterday began to receive the first stray images. Flame-bright reds and oranges. A Jesus-like man, standing: his lithe and shirtless torso draped down the cover. His left areola—flat, dark, and hard, like an old Spanish coin—seems somehow disturbingly prominent.

Rows of tall black capital letters appear: NO ONE HERE GETS OUT ALIVE. Little white ones: The Biography of Jim Morrison. I don't need to see the authors' names. Hail, Hopkins and Sugerman, unacknowledged legislators.

In my memory there's a group of us, the world's most unintentionally humorous gang, who carried this book through the hallways in the eighth grade, always with cover out, like a badge. Signifying what? That we were skaters and people in bands. The strange tale of James Douglas Morrison, a Florida-born military brat who wanted with every cell in his body to be a great English poet but had been so culturally malformed by post-World War II America that he emerged a drug-gobbling sex shaman, canting such verses as

Ride the snake
Ride the snake
To the lake
The ancient lake, baby
The snake is long
Seven miles
Ride the snake

There was an album, An American Prayer: Jim reads his poems over riffs laid down by the other three Doors. A thing positively glorious in its awfulness. I popped it into my mom's car tape deck, when she picked me up from the strip-mall record store. "Her cunt gripped him like a warm friendly hand..." My mother's finger shot out toward the eject button. "I would have been ashamed to play something like that in front of my parents," she said. Exactly, Mother!

No One Here Gets Out Alive does include this one sentence, in which the co-authors address Jim's artistic "lineage," which is apparently vast, comprising "Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Poe, Blake, Artaud, Cocteau, Nijinsky, Byron, Coleridge, Dylan Thomas," and others. The list led me to read some of those writers, at first as a way to know Jim. Inevitably, they were better at their worst than the Lizard King at his best. Not that I won't go to my grave defending "Break on Through," but poetry-wise, there's no recovering from

Lament for my cock
Sore and crucified
I seek to know you
Acquiring soulful
wisdom

Therein lay the beauty of Jim as a literary figure. His almost unimaginable suckiness made him approachable, and through him you discovered actual writers, eventually shedding him, much as a snake does its skin. A snake does not despise or dishonor his old skin; he just moves on. He's old, and his skin is cold. Ride the snake.

John Jeremiah Sullivan's Pulphead comes out in November.

Roy Blount Jr. The Benchley Roundup (1954) by Robert Benchley

Roy Blount Jr.

The Benchley Roundup (1954)
by Robert Benchley

By the tenth grade, since it is hard to build true greatness on, for instance, a three-inch vertical leap, the prospects of my becoming a three-sport immortal had dimmed. But what else could I do when I grew up that wouldn't demand much maturity? Fortunately, my English teacher, Ann Lewis, liked the essays I wrote for her class. One of these anticipated Marshall McLuhan's insight that the medium is the message: Instead of taking on the assigned topic, I wrote about my pencil. Miss Lewis urged me to write for the school paper, and also to read Robert Benchley.

Benchley had my initials. He had maintained a room in New York's Royalton Hotel—my middle name is Alton. Okay, he drank himself to death, but people really liked him. And The Benchley Roundup included an essay entitled "My Face." It began, "Merely as an observer of natural phenomena, I am fascinated by my own personal appearance. This does not mean that I am pleased with it...I simply have a morbid interest in it." I was a teenager, with pimples. You could earn a living making fun of your own self-consciousness? That got me through high school, and to quote Benchley, "It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous." Or in my case, I had a mortgage and a two-inch vertical leap.

Roy Blount Jr.'s new book, Alphabetter Juice, or The Joy of Text, came out May 10.

Neil Labute The Hardy Boys Series (1927) by Franklin W. Dixon

Neil Labute

The Hardy Boys Series (1927)
by Franklin W. Dixon

Message to Fenton Hardy, Detective

Dear Mr. Hardy:

I know that you don't technically exist, but I wanted to send you a note of thanks all the same for the many hours of joy that you brought me as a boy. I accompanied you and your sons on many daring adventures, and I was thrilled to spend time with you, Frank, Joe, and even their lovable sidekick, Chet. My home life was kind of tricky back then, and I didn't have too many positive male figures, but you guys never let me down. Sure, I enjoyed solving all those mysteries with you, but even more than that, I feel like I learned a lot of important things about being a man and other good stuff like that along the way. I definitely improved my powers of deduction and sleuthing, but I also learned to treat other people with respect (even girls) and how to be self-suffcient and to finish something once I started it. Basically, I always considered you a kind of substitute father and a literary figure that I will forever look up to. Is that okay? Hope so. Thanks again, "Dad."

Yours in fiction,
Neil LaBute

P.S. I always saved up my money so that I could buy each book in the hardback edition. That said, when I ran out of your titles, I started reading a few of the Nancy Drew mysteries. I often felt bad about that and a little dirty for such a literary infidelity, but I feel happier now, getting it off my chest. For the record, yours were better.

Neil Labute's play Reasons to Be Pretty opens this fall in London.

Karen Russell The Sheltering Sky (1949) by Paul Bowles

Karen Russell

The Sheltering Sky (1949)
by Paul Bowles

I read this fever-yellow nightmare of a book during my junior year in college, when I was living in Seville. It was my first time outside the U.S., my first experience with the disorienting and liberating anonymity of travel. In fact, my goal was to become more anonymous—to peel away from my blonde countrywomen with their Fodor's and their Reeboks, the indigestible American lumps in the crowds. Of course I failed at this. All of Spain's real castles reminded me of Disney World; I ordered gazpacho off every menu because the one time I'd deviated I'd been served some kind of ensalada that looked like a plate of eyeballs in mayonnaise. But I held out hope that my accent would disintegrate. Soon, I thought, this world would feel less foreign; maybe I'd even get mistaken for a native. My friend Tim, probably sensing the depths of my delusion, recommended Bowles's famous Saharan gothic.

In The Sheltering Sky, a Western trio's optimistic hubris catalyzes an annihilating event—one of the most chilling reversals I've ever read, in part because it occurs smack in the middle of the book. An American couple, Kit and Port, tour North Africa with a friend. Port considers himself a "traveler," not a tourist—so much an intimate of the North African desert that he anthropomorphizes the sky as a benign entity. Then Bowles repeals this notion of the sky as "sheltering": Port's passport is stolen, which sets a horror show in motion. But Bowles doesn't presume to be the god of his book; he's merely tracking his characters down a warren of consequences. And Port's bureaucratic conniving, juxtaposed against the imperturbably blue sky of the Sahara, makes for one hell of a terrifying picture.

This book changed the way I read. Safer novels had primed me to expect a certain kind of arc—characters were challenged by events but they overcame them; characters were refined by the machinery of plot, they "grew" as people, they changed for the better. Bowles's characters succumb to the desert. If they survive it, as Kit does, they become new creatures that you could not really label "improved" in the conventional sense. By deviating from the arc that I'd expected for Port, Bowles exposed my childlike faith in arcs, in a happier story, a route through the desert. I realized just how pampered I'd been as a reader (and a traveler) and how little trust I could place in my own predictions of what was bound to happen, in my life and in novels.

Most readers probably know all about the gut-drop you feel when you approach a book's final few pages: Uh-oh, how will she wrap this up? But Bowles's triumph with The Sheltering Sky is to craft a narrative with a tragedy so shocking that, after this particular event (page 234 in my edition), you'll heft the rest of the story and wonder: How will this continue?

I've never felt safe inside a book since.

Karen Russell's debut novel, Swamplandia!, was published in February.

John Waters Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (1970) by William Inge

John Waters

Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (1970)
by William Inge

In 1970, after reading Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff, one of the two novels by Pulitzer-winning playwright William Inge (Picnic, Bus Stop), I learned a valuable lesson. No matter how brilliant the writer (and I loved William Inge), trying too hard to be intellectually provocative can be a disaster, especially when you mix lofty intentions with horndog sex scenes in the name of literary honesty.

Could any novel, even in that decade, have been as politically incorrect as this story of Evelyn Wyckoff, a white middle-aged schoolteacher in the fictitious town of Freedom (!), Kansas? Surrounded as she is by closeted lesbian spinsters in her lonely rooming house, Miss Wyckoff's sexual tension builds until she is mounted in her classroom by the young-black-stud janitor. After repeated master-slave sexual encounters with this verbally abusive custodian, she is caught by other cleaning-crew staff in the act, screaming in pain with her breasts banging up against the piping-hot radiator as she is penetrated from behind. I'm not kidding!

This accidentally (one would hope) racist, sexist, very misguided attempt to examine loneliness and racial tension, written without a drop of irony, ends up being an unintentional howler that forever stains the reputation of this great playwright. For trash to be taken seriously, Inge should have first made fun of his own respectability, not his characters'. Otherwise, I realized, there will always be wiseasses, like myself, who will celebrate—for all the wrong reasons—ridiculously earnest attempts at literary transgression.

John Waters's latest essay collection, Role Models, came out last year.

Wells Tower Gringos (1991) by Charles Portis

Wells Tower

Gringos (1991)
by Charles Portis

Sometime after my fifth reading of Charles Portis's Gringos, I stopped worrying so much about death, politics, and getting fat, and I started worrying about my car.

Gringos is a compact, hilarious meander in the life of Jimmy Burns, an amateur archaeologist, junk trader, and shade-tree mechanic eking out a transcendently unexamined life in Mexico's Yucatán peninsula. Burns's anxieties are more automotive than existential, a stacking of priorities that, as the book proceeds, begins to resemble a quietly heroic state of grace. These are the sorts of unassailable proverbs you get from Jimmy Burns: "You put things off and then one morning you wake up and say—today I will change the oil in my truck." Repeat this line a few times. It sticks in your head like the answer to a Buddhist koan.

I put Burnsisms into practice all the time. The other day, I was driving around with my lady friend when, out of nowhere, she yelled, "Look, dammit, there are some things going on between us we seriously need to discuss."

"Okay," I said, "but right now I need to listen to that thumping sound, which I think is a blown sway-bar bushing." I don't know what a sway-bar bushing is, but saying these words made everything get calm and quiet so that all I could hear was the soothing drone of the engine and the tranquil grinding of my sweetheart's molars.

Over the course of the novel, Burns's heroics range past the everyday and into more swashbuckling territory. At one point, he's compelled to blow out the brains of a homicidal hippie guru, but he doesn't let the killing ruffle his composure. "Shotgun blast or not at close range, I was still surprised at how fast and clean Dan had gone down," Burns reflects. "I wasn't used to seeing my will so little resisted, having been in sales for so long."

Most people know Charles Portis only as the author of True Grit (whose comic brilliance both the recent Coen brothers adaptation and the 1969 John Wayne film failed to fulfill), but for my money Gringos is his subtlest, funniest, and most valuable for its depth of inarguable wisdom: If your clutch plate doesn't rust to your flywheel and you get a fair price on that set of used tires, you've tasted as much of life's sweet fullness as anyone deserves.

Wells Tower is the author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.

Colum McCann Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce

Colum McCann

Ulysses (1922)
by James Joyce

The fact is that every book changes our lives. But Kerouac kicked me around when I was 13. I was a suburban kid living in Dublin, and he peeled me open with On the Road. Several years later, when I was 21, I took a bicycle across the United States. I was looking for the ghost of Dean Moriarty. After that it was all Ferlinghetti, Brautigan, Kesey. And then I discovered who I should have known all along—Joyce. Fancy that, I had to go to America to find an Irish writer. I've been discovering and rediscovering him ever since. Ulysses is the most complete literary compendium of human experience. Every time I read it, it leaves me alert and raw. I recently had a chance to look at a rare first edition. When I cracked open the spine, a tiny piece of the page dropped out, no bigger than a tab of acid. Nobody was looking, not even Kerouac. So I put it on my finger and did what anyone else would do: I ate it.

Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin won a National Book Award in 2009.

Novelist David Bezmozgis and The Free World

Every once in a while, there's a new book by a writer you may not know yet, toward which we like to bump your gaze. For example, David Bezmozgis has a debut novel, The Free World, out this week, that's such a pleasure to experience that it got us wondering how he went about concocting it, making this thing we like so much. Here's the gist of it:

It's 1978 and a three-generation family of Russian Jews is pushing toward the un-Soviet world—the eponymous free world. When the reluctant, Commie-decorated patriarch, Samuil, gets held up for medical complications, Rome—at the time, a sort of eastern émigré staging ground—at once becomes the family's heat-soaked purgatory. Bezmozgis blends a deeply-felt affinity for historical vividness (as though eager to put to record the most treasured details from personal family stories…) with a quiver of adroitly-administered lyrical beats ("She looked to have beauty like a long blade, carelessly held") that sum to a story spilling over with that question, ever pervasive, of whether where you're trying to go is better than what you've left behind. That concern, and the uncertain answers, serve as a sort of shared pulse for each of the family members as they navigate the summer. Is Calgary or Melbourne or Boston really better than Riga? Or for the most magnetic character in the book, the younger son Alec, is the long-blade beauty of a mistress really worth more than the plain loveliness of a new bride? Each character, sketched indelibly downstream to the source of their dilemmas and desires, has a different idea about what the next move can and should be. Which makes it even more compelling to watch them tear out in those competing directions, while yet remaining a family intent on making one leap together.

It's a historical book in the best kind of way—pulpy and viscerally inspired by the digging, the real-deal research. It can hardly be considered nostalgia, but there's a full-bodied respect (if not reverence) for the way things were thirty years ago, the way things looked. And in the book, there's real integrity to those late-'70s visuals, made manifest in these attentively constructed set pieces that feel arranged for the stage or screen. Which is hardly coincidental: Bezmozgis, trained as a filmmaker and a respected director himself, is plenty up front about the ways in which pictures of things inspired the writing. So, because we think you'll like the book, we thought a sort of visual walk-through by Bezmozgis of the images that inspired the novel-making might be more convincing than a straight-shooting conversation.