100 Fiction Books to Read Before You Die
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Book of Margery Kempe by Margery Kempe
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Sparks
The Girl by Meridel Le Sueur
The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Kindred by Octavia Butler
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Passing by Nella Larson
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion
The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
The Power by Naomi Alderman
The Street by Ann Petry
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskill
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
Small Island by Andrea Levy
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
The Price of Salt/Carol by Patricia Highsmith
Room by Emma Donoghue
The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
Garden of Earthly Delights by Joyce Carol Oates
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Wise Blood by Flannery O Conner
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsey
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
House of Incest by Anaïs Nin
The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Corregidora by Gayl Jones
Whose Names are Unknown by Sanora Babb
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
My Antonia by Willa Cather
Democracy by Joan Didion
Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates
The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O Connor
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
I Must Betray You be Ruta Sepetys
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
The Mare by Mary Gaitskill
City of Beasts by Isabel Allende
Fledgling by Octavia Butler
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin
The First Bad Man by Miranda July
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Moses, Man of the Mountain by Zora Neale Hurston
Disobedience by Naomi Alderman
Quicksand by Nella Larsen
The Narrows by Ann Petry
The Blood of Others by Simone de Beauvoir
Under the Sea by Rachel Carson
Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee
Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
The Birdcatcher by Gayl Jones
Desert of the Heart by Jane Rule
In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa
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From the report by Bridget Read, posted 24 Sept 2020:
Meridel Le Sueur wrote in 1932 that she saw hunger “like the beak of a terrible bird at the vitals” in the breadlines and soup kitchens of the Great Depression, when unemployment rates reached 24.9 percent. There was no government welfare state at the time. Just under a century later, we have something called unemployment insurance. Now the breadlines have mostly moved out of sight, with hundreds of thousands of people on hold for hours with benefit representatives. And for those who can’t get help from the government, there is r/unemployment, which now functions as a kind of ad hoc, crowd-sourced, people’s benefit office, where some 46,000 members of the American unemployed have congregated to help themselves.
The anxious corridors of r/unemployment are riddled with acronyms: PUA, LWA, PEUC. The feed is inundated with Kafkaesque tales of dysfunction: One state has a 24/7 chat function from which no one has ever been able to get a response. Posters say they are required to respond to texts in order to claim their benefits, but they can’t afford cell service. After five months of silence, one claimant received a letter one day after its stated deadline to be returned.
Some of the local benefit programs are wildly ill-named — assistance in Pennsylvania, routinely late to deposit, goes on something called a “Reliacard.” California’s Employment Development Department uses a 60-year-old programming language called COBOL that was invented when Dwight Eisenhower was president. On days when assistance is set to arrive, the forum is consumed by spasms of fear. “Be honest, how many times have you logged into the unemployment website to check if you got your benefits today?” one poster asks. “I’ve checked at least 20 times,” someone replies. “It’s driving me crazy.”
But r/unemployment is an orderly, well-lit place compared to the rest of Reddit, where conversations are typically crude and unmanaged. Its moderators run it with temperance rules: no swearing, no memes, no trolling. “Remember the human,” regulations say. They do not allow posts of phone numbers or emails, lest they be reported as “doxxing” by Reddit administrators. Subscribers must tag their posts with “flair” that delineates what state they’re in, so unofficial experts, often on unemployment themselves — grad students, gas station managers, stadium workers, car salesmen, servers — can weigh in effectively on hyperspecific questions.
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“I don’t believe in being safe or right,”
“Write something inappropriate, however you define the term,” she prompts. “I give you absolute license,” she says, after a pause.
Guernica: You demonstrate the complexities of that anger through your characters.
...That’s class. Trying to write with love and respect about people who even as you love them are destroying themselves and to try to write it accurately and with some of the grace of Meridel Le Sueur is the challenge. But you can’t write about this stuff and be boring. That would be a sin against God.
“When I write these characters I try to take you inside what it feels like to be treated with contempt and to have such a narrow range of possibilities out.“
“But the options for marrying well are limited, and if you’re as angry and damaged as most working-class girls are you’ll marry the first mean-assed boy who takes you up, so the next thing you know you have three babies and he’s broken your jaw. They always break your jaw.“
“You win those awards by being humble and grateful. Gratitude can eat the heart out of you, because the first thing you have to do is acknowledge that you aren’t as good as the people you’re begging help from. That’s one of the reasons why a lot of the very successful working-class kids who win scholarships drink themselves to death or shoot themselves in the head.“
“Remember that all of the ways you derive strength can cut the other way. It can wear you down. I’ve noticed that it happens about once a decade again where all of the sudden they start using that language of contempt, and I have to stand up to it all over again with a whole new generation with another vocabulary.“
“The idea that great literature is written by nasty girls told me that nasty girls and women are my aunts. They don’t act out of meanness purely for the sake of meanness; they give back what is given to them. When they’re given respect, they return respect. When they’re given contempt, they show you that the contempt is not justified. The wages of violence is violence, so I try to avoid violence but confrontation I believe in. Holding people accountable I believe in, and that’s nasty. It means telling the truth even when it costs you something, even when no one wants to hear it or talk about it. You have to honor your version of the truth and you have to really search for it and make characters that live up to that. A no bones about it, we’re in this together approach is what I honor. My aunts were paragons of it. They were also self-destructive and fell in love with the wrong people and didn’t necessarily protect their children, but they tried. I don’t believe in simple.“
“The defining aspect of class is shame.“
It’s the bad bargain we make with girls all the time. Marry a man and move into his family. Yeah, right. It’s a lie. You never really leave your people behind.
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