Reading List
Adam Haslett
Novelist and Short Story Writer
Adam Haslett is an American fiction writer and journalist. He studied at Swarthmore College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Yale Law School.
His debut story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here (2002), was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and is known for its portraits of mental illness. His first novel, Union Atlantic (2010), finished the week the 2008 financial crisis broke, is a study of the culture of impunity behind it. Imagine Me Gone (2016), about a family living with a father’s and son’s depression, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was again a Pulitzer finalist. Mothers and Sons followed in 2024.
His journalism on American politics, finance and culture has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire and The Nation, among others.
Methland
by Nick Reding
“This is a book which I have just finished reading. I don’t know how much methamphetamine there is in Britain. It’s a drug that in World War II was used by soldiers on both sides of the war in milder doses. It is basically something that keeps you awake and charged up and gives you a high. This book is an account of how it has become a plague of sorts in American farming communities.” — via Interview, July 2010
Crude World
by Peter Maass
“It shows the way in which business of that scale, even if practised under what passes for law in those countries, ends up as corruption. So there is this evil of greed and disequilibrium of one substance taking over an entire economy and the effects that has on the possibility of any other kind of development.” — via Interview, July 2010
Moby-Dick
by Herman Melville · 1851 · Fiction
“The entire adventure is bathed in reverence for the natural world through which Ahab, Ishmael and the rest of the sailors move. Ishmael’s descriptions sing with awe for the ocean and the whales. And in this light Ahab’s fixation, however distorting it is of life, comes to be seen as a kind of respect for the majesty of the creature he’s pursuing. And so there is nothing simple about his avoidance.” — via Interview, July 2010
Disowning Knowledge
by Stanley Cavell
“I think that this is a compelling reading of the play. Cavell also explains why Edmund doesn’t reveal his identity to Gloucester while he is leading his blind father across the heath. To be recognised by his father at that moment would make clear his own lack of trust in him, having not gone to him at the outset of the play to ask about Edmund’s claims about their father.” — via Interview, July 2010
Out of Eden
by Paul W Kahn
“The question concerning the nature of evil is a longstanding one but I would go so far as to say that in this profound book, the philosopher Paul Kahn has gone a very long way in answering it. He argues that in our secular age we have given reason such a dominant place in our understanding of modern politics that we can only understand evil acts by individuals or nations as deficits of rationality.” — via Interview, July 2010