The Thanatos Syndrome
by Walker Percy | 
Love in the Ruins
by Walker Percy | 
The Fourth Hand
by John Irving | 
Ravelstein
by Saul Bellow | 
The Second Coming
by Walker Percy | 
Ship of Fools
by Katherine Anne Porter | 
The Water-Method Man
by John Irving | 
Lancelot
by Walker Percy | 
The Lay of the Land
by Richard Ford | 
Giles Goat-Boy
by John Barth | 
Reflections in a Golden Eye
by Carson McCullers | 
Rabbit Redux
by John Updike | 
Cosmopolis
by Don DeLillo | 
Falconer
by John Cheever | 
The Mezzanine
by Nicholson Baker | 
Small Great Things
by Jodi Picoult | 
Prodigal Summer
by Barbara Kingsolver | 
Olive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout | 
Don't Let Me Go
by Catherine Ryan Hyde | 
We Need to Talk About Kevin
by Lionel Shriver |
Published when Wallace was just twenty-four years old, The Broom of the System stunned critics and marked the emergence of an extraordinary new talent. At the center of this outlandishly funny, fiercely intelligent novel is the bewitching heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. The year is 1990 and the place is a slightly altered Cleveland, Ohio. Lenore's great-grandmother has disappeared with twenty-five other inmates of the Shaker Heights Nursing Home. Her beau, and boss, Rick Vigorous, is insanely jealous, and her cockatiel, Vlad the Impaler, has suddenly started spouting a mixture of psycho-babble, Auden, and the King James Bible. Ingenious and entertaining, this debut from one of the most innovative writers of his generation brilliantly explores the paradoxes of language, storytelling, and reality.