View Single Post
Old 05-21-2011, 07:30 AM   #9
Hamlet53
Nameless Being
 
So I will jump in with a couple of nominations.

Seven Japanese Tales by Junchiro Tanizaki. Since this is supposedly an open category I assume that, as the title implies, a collection of shorter stories can be considered.

Tanizaki is one of my favorite authors, and this is a great book to be introduced to his writing.

Spoiler:
Seven Japanese Tales represents aspects of Tanizaki's prose art between 1910 and 1959. The four short stories have a strong concern with abnormal psychology. He tells of a tattoo artist who is obsessed with the desire to decorate the body of a supremely beautiful woman; a city man who is struck with terror when obliged to ride trolley cars. There is a study of the emotions of a schoolboy thief, and an account of a young man exhausted by months of passion for his mistress. The three longer tales, written in his maturity, tell the story of a famous blind woman who teaches the samisen and the koto, and of a pupil who becomes her lover. When she is disfigured by some unknown enemy, her lover blinds himself. There is an account of a young man's erotic confusions between his dead mother, his stepmother and his wife. Finally, a blind man tells of the ambitions and stratagems, loves and cruelties during the feudal wars of sixteenth-century Japan. (from Cyber read)


Available as an ebook.

I would also like to nominate Feast of All Saints by Anne Rice.

I am cheating a little here, I read this in April as the book of the month for the evening book club at my local library. With the sesquicentennial of the Civil War this year it is a timely read.

Spoiler:
Before the Civil War, there lived in Louisiana, people unique in Southern history. For though they were descended from African slaves, they were also descended from the French and Spanish who enslaved them. In this dazzling historical novel, Anne Rice chronicles four of these so-called Free People of Color--men and women caught perilously between the worlds of master and slave, privilege and oppression, passion and pain.


Available as ebook.
  Reply With Quote