Reading List
Lou Berney
Crime Novelist
Lou Berney writes crime fiction that spends most of its attention on the people around the crime. The Long and Faraway Gone swept the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity and Barry awards in a single year, and November Road put a New Orleans mob fixer on the run in the days after the Kennedy assassination. He teaches in the writing programme at Oklahoma City University, and his own reading tilts toward novels that refuse to stay inside their genre.
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Deacon King Kong
by James McBride · 2020 · Fiction
“This is a crime novel and a family novel and a novel about nothing less than everything American . The richness of the world McBride creates is magical.” — via Article
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Case Histories
by Kate Atkinson · 2004 · Fiction
“I had never read a crime novel like it, both dark and light, both hilarious and harrowing, and I knew immediately this is what I wanted to do.” — via Article
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Love Medicine
by Louise Erdrich · 1984 · Fiction
“weaving elegant prose, wry humor, and biting social commentary into such a profoundly moving and satisfying narrative fabric, as she did in her very first novel.” — via Article
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Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes · 1605 · Fiction
“But Don Quixote is a pure joy to read, packed full of larger-than-life characters who are in fact exactly true to life.” — via Article
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Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut · 1969 · Fiction
“I was assigned this book during my first year of college, in freshman comp, and it blew my mind.” — via Article
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In a Lonely Place
by Dorothy B. Hughes · 1947 · Fiction
“The faint throb of unease that runs through the story is brilliantly handled. In a Lonely Place is both way ahead of its time and exactly of its time, and it still chills me every time I read it.” — via Article