Culture & Literature
One of the defining genres of American literature is the story of the immigrant experience. Usually written through the voice of a child, these books have enabled those of us who were born here to see our country more clearly; and have struck a chord with those who left behind a home and country they loved just as much as we love ours. We have learned through these books that we are all the same beneath the skin, no matter where we were born or to what culture we believe we belong.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith tells the story of a poor immigrant Irish family's life in New York City in the early decades of the 1900s as seen through the eyes of young Francie Nolan.
Call It Sleep by Henry Roth is the story of a young Jewish boy living with his family in a tenement building in a New York City slum in the 1930s after their immagration to the United States from Austria.
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston is a mesmerizing narrative of growing up caught between the traditions and beliefs of her immigrant Chinese family and the Western world of Central California where they now reside.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first book in a series of memoirs by poet Maya Angelou and looks at a childhood spent moving between the racist South where she sometimes lived with her beloved grandmother and the urban Black experience in the North where she lived with her mother.
Another very American genre is the Southern Gothic novel. These books are set in the South and have a sensibility that is completely Southern and very dark. Some of the best practitioners of this particular style of literature are:
1. Flannery O'Conner - author of Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away
2. William Faulkner - author of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying
3. Truman Capote - whose first novel, Other Voices, Other Room's places him in this category
4. Tennessee Williams - author of the plays A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie
Another American author who would fall into the Southern Gothic classification if only she were Southern is Joyce Carole Oates whose dark works of fiction have covered almost every aspect of American contemporary culture.
World Literature
Fortunately for those of us who love to read, more and more works of literature from around the world are being published here in translated form. And if you love mysteries, there are many great detective novels and police procedurals that offer as much in the way of cultural information as they do mysteries to be solved.
The city of Edinburgh, Scotland plays as large a part in the Rebus police procedurals by Ian Rankin as the human characters do.
And contemporary Swedish life is every bit as enthralling as the crimes depcited in the Martin Beck series by Swedish husband and wife writing team Per Waholl and Maj Sjowall.
Apartheid South Africa is the setting for the wonderfully descriptive mysteries of James McClure featuring Inspector Kramer and his Bantu sidekick, Zondi.
Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra is a huge epic novel that follows the parrallel lives of an Indian police inspector and a powerful Indian gangster with lots of peripheral characters and stories along the way.
South America has produced some of the greatest authors in the world, such as Gabriela Garcia Marquez and his wonderful novel 1000 Years of Solitude, Jose Donoso and his masterpiece The Obscene Bird of Night, Isabel Allende and her spellbinding novel about Chile, The House of Spirits.
Ben Okri's The Famished Road is magical-realism African style.
The Master and Margarita, a Russian novel by Mikhail Bulgakovi, is a wonderfully surreal literary visit to the Soviet Republic.
Dawn Dusk or Night: A Year with Nicolas Sarkozy is Yasmina Reza's fascinating journal of the year she spent on the campaign trail with Nicolas Sarkozy. A completely unique campaign history as observed and written by a poet as well as an excellent view of politics and contemporary life in France.
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