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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott FitzgeraldJay Gatsby seemingly has everything. Day and night his West Egg, Long Island, mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing, and debating his mysterious character. For Gatsby—young, handsome, fabulously rich—always seems alone in the crowd, watching and waiting, though no one knows what for. Beneath the shimmering surface of his life he is hiding a secret: a silent longing that can never be fulfilled. Pro tip: Already read the book? Pick up one of two graphic novel adaptations illustrated by K. Woodman-Maynard or Aya Morton.
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Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia WoolfIn the wake of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic, Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. In this engulfing portrait of one day in a woman's life, from first light to the dark of night, Woolf achieves an uncanny simulacrum of consciousness, bringing past, present, and future together, and recording, impression by impression, minute by minute, the feel of life itself.
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Ulysses by James JoyceUlysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book—although he found it sufficiently unobscene to allow its importation into the United States.To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book. Even the verbal vaudeville of the final chapters can be navigated with relative ease, as long as you're willing to be buffeted, tickled, challenged, and (occasionally) vexed by Joyce's sheer command of language.
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