Top 10 books from the USA that are still worth reading

 

Top 10 books by Pindostan authors that are still worth reading (in chronological order)

1. "The History of New York as Told by Diedrich Knickerbocker" by Washington Irving. This is recommended for those who believe that humor and irony can only be used by the British. The comic story, parodying the pompous style of officious works, tells about the times when New York was still New Amsterdam...

2. "Monikins" by Fenimore Cooper. yes, the one who is "Chingachgook, the Big Serpent". It turns out that he was also a satirist, and quite sarcastic. Monikins are such fictional anthropoid apes, whose brain is in the tail. So, aristocrats live in High-Jumping, growing tails and measuring them, and in High-Jumping it is fashionable to cut off tails... A vicious lampoon of England and the United States of the first half of the XIX century.

3. "Collected Stories" by Edgar Allan Poe. Well, there is no need for much advertising here - chilling horror movies alternate with banter stories, and there are also dJudYuktives and [not] science fiction. Classics of genres, and almost all of them. If anything, he did not kill his wife, and did not even dig up her teeth...

4. "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville. Well, a rather banal story - a man wrote a novel in intricate language about hunting an albino sperm whale, and in it they began to look for the second wash, then the third, then the one hundred and fifty hundred... Melville's style is so unique - "mysterious and epical", it provokes E to search for hidden meanings. Try it - maybe you will find your own...

5. "The Song of Hiawatha" by Henry Longfellow. These Ojibwe Indians would have sat there and sat in their figwams, with their stories about how everything came into existence, and about the great chief Hiawatha, and no one would have known about them, except for the scholars, if the uncle with the beard hadn't taken them and put them into English cheerful verse. And now it is practically a monument of folklore.

6. "Spoon River" by Edgar Lee Masters. Would it occur to you to tell the story of a simple American town in verse epitaphs at the cemetery of its inhabitants? A person's life fits into a few lines. The plots intertwine, branch, intersect, but the common thing is that everyone ends up there...

7. "Gangsters of New York" by Herbert Osbury. Like the story of New York crime in the XIX century. But in fact, I highly recommend it to everyone who cries over "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and worries about poor blacks in slavery - compare with the existence led by poor "white blacks" in the slums of the "civilized" North, and answer the question of who is worse off...

8. "Smoke Bellew". Jack London is a creepy author. After all, for engaging in elegant literature Education and imagination are needed. Otherwise, all these books about "real reality and the harsh grin of imperialism" will be boring to read. And only those things where London describes what he himself saw and experienced, "with attempts at humor" - stories about road tramps and Alaskan stories about Smoke and the Kid - are truly interesting and wonderful.

9. "The Popular Science of Cats Written by Old Opossum." T. Eliot, of course, lived all his adult life, and even more so worked, in England. But he came there in his youth from the United States. So you can't throw the poet out of literature - charming poems about cats and cats, the best hymn to these creatures in world literature. And yes, the book "The Kats" is based on the text of this book.

10. "60 Stories" by Donald Barthélemy. Barthélemy, yes Pynchon, yes Dunleavy, yes Barthes - they are kind of a separate trend of "black American postmodern humor". I would also add "intellectual" (although Dunleavy still does not reach this word - there is nothing particularly intellectual in the adventures of the Dublin races3,14). And Barthélemy compares favorably with all of them in that he wrote not long novels, but short stories. "60 Stories" is a "selection" from his own work.