"This novel was handed to me on a silver platter by my husband, who said, "You cannot die without reading this." I keep coming back to it because it's so detailed in recording the inner life of Dick Diver, the central character. His yearning — to save his mentally unstable wife, Nicole — just keeps unfolding. That aching is quite destructive but also so understandable. The word I think of with this story is "fragile." I was utterly struck by the fineness of Fitzgerald's writing and the timelessness of Dick and Nicole's failures."

"A work of genius. But more important—and from a purely selfish point of view—a woman wrote it. That might seem ridiculous to male writers, but a man never has to think twice about the gender of genius. He’s got too many examples on his side of the fence. Eliot was the first woman I read who could go toe-to-toe with, say, Tolstoy. I was 15. Since then, I’ve learned how many grand achievements in the novel have been female, but when I was a teenager, that was news to me."

"In Argentina’s ‘dirty war’ in the ’70s, the military government had thousands of activists and political opponents ‘disappeared.’ This novel is about a mother and father dealing with the disappearance of their son. It’s a moving book that also has a lot of dark comedy in it. For instance, the parents accept free nose jobs in exchange for a debt. It also captures the comic absurdity of the bureaucracy of a dictatorship. What’s most interesting to me is, as one character makes clear, the truth tellers in life are so often written off as crazy."

"I normally wouldn’t find myself reading a Young Adult novel, but when something is as suspenseful and well written as this one, why not? The story is about a 17-year-old girl named Zoe who’s still in shock from a year’s worth of traumatic events. She gets involved with someone she’s not supposed to, and it makes her question whether she should or shouldn’t take a gamble on what might be perfect love. I’m sure they’ll make a movie about this eventually, but read the book first!"

"Youthful optimism and sexuality are thwarted by the bitterness of a crumbling town in Peter Bogdanovich’s lovely film of Larry McMurtry’s novel. One can feel the influence of John Ford and Orson Welles in both the deep focus compositions and the unexpected bursts of volatility. For example: there’s a fantastic scene where an argument between Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms escalates into a fistfight—the shots start to come faster and faster, almost every new shot from a different camera angle, culminating in a shocking moment of violence."

"I was 12 or 13 when was introduced to the fantasy/adventure books written by the author of the famous Tarzan series, and first read this novel. The idea of a huge mole machine burrowing to the center of the earth and discovering flying reptiles and other dinosaurish creatures was magical. The writing style now seems somewhat formal and clumsy, but as a young reader I was whisked along into the unknown. Later, in the 1930s, the author has Tarzan make the journey, too. How could that not work?"

"I was not prepared for the journey this compelling novel took me on. Or so I thought. I knew nothing of the lives of Puerto Rican immigrants to the United States, and certainly very little of the lives of the children. This book changed that. It is a book of such power that it is as if a completely new layer of the American experience has been exposed to our view. And like many a great work of fiction, not one line is wasted and every single word rings true."

"There has been no finer nonfiction written in the last century than this penetrating examination not only of a particular family and its travails (written with the complex plot of a Tolstoy novel), but also of the ways in which our society is broken, of a system that congratulates itself as democracy and yet is intractably inequitable. This book has no agenda and makes no argument; it simply reveals the truth of the country in which we live, and allows us to formulate our own call to action."

"The first time I read this book it transported me back to my early Catholic days on the South Side of Chicago, when the nuns put forth a model of Christ as a kind of superhero, whose superpower was love, defined as his ability to look with affection at anyone and everyone, no exceptions. Morrison models that capability here in this great novel, and reminds us that the first move in any assessment of a person or notion should be sympathy, based on the reality of our grand mutual suffering."