Tuesday, October 09, 2018

Deborah Eisenberg's ten favorite books

Deborah Eisenberg is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of honors including the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a Whiting Writer’s Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her latest story collection is Your Duck Is My Duck. One of Eisenberg's ten favorite books, as shared at Vulture.com:
The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

It’s been some years since I’ve read The Leopard, but I’ve read it a few times and it lives in my mind as a perfect thing, glowing and stately — it’s an incomparable experience of communing with a great and generous intellect. Like Cao’s The Story of the Stone, The Leopard concerns an aristocratic family trembling on the brink of change, and like The Story of the Stone, it was published only posthumously. Although both authors died unrecognized, their books became probably the most popular and beloved books of their respective countries.
Read about another book on the list.

The Leopard is among John Bardinelli's top five one-hit wonder novels and Peter Mayle's six best books.

--Marshal Zeringue