Tom Perrotta

"A friend of mine turned me on to O’Connor in high school, and I’ve been reading her ever since, constantly amazed at her bold vision and wicked sense of humor. She’s one of the few writers I know who make religion seem like a radical challenge, rather than a source of comfort."

"A strange and beautiful book about the lonely souls and thwarted dreamers who inhabit a small Ohio town. There’s no sentimentality in Anderson’s vision, no nostalgia for middle America in a simpler time. Winesburg is a place where people are doomed to remain a mystery to their neighbors, and even to themselves."

"Roz Chast is always funny, but this graphic memoir about caring for her aging parents is also raw, brutally honest, and heartbreaking. It’s an unsparing portrait of decline, but also a loving act of witness; it tells the truth without sugar-coating or looking away."

"Levi is best known for his unflinching Holocaust memoirs, but this is a sunnier work, the autobiography of a chemist, narrated in a humane and sometimes light-hearted voice. There’s a deep love for the physical world in these pages, and an infectious sense of wonder."

"Forget rock and roll, this is one of the greatest biographies I’ve ever read on any subject. Guralnick makes us feel Elvis Presley’s dizzying rise to superstardom as the unprecedented cultural phenomenon it was—Elvis didn’t know what he was trying to be, because nothing like Elvis had ever existed before."

"I hated this in high school, because I was young and couldn’t see myself or my world in the story of Hester Prynne. But then I reread it a few years ago, and realized that it contained a blueprint for the Sexual Revolution, the eternal clash between unruly desire and oppressive social convention. It’s all right here."