This is a kind of Alice in Wonderland premise: A man is looking for a cat. Murakami describes these banal domestic experiences, but, cumulatively, he spins an outrageous, trippy story. That's a kind of magic—to make the magical seem...

Moore is completely unsentimental but able to stir enormous feelings in the reader, or, certainly, in me. Her style is so original: The way this book is structured, the narrative is like an anagram. It begins with Benna, a singer, and her...

I discovered Christopher Isherwood in college. His writing style is so direct, warm, and inclusive. There's one passage in this book, published in 1964, that has really stayed with me—the description of America. The narrator is a British...

Like the Roth novel, this short story contains some of the most exquisite dialogue I've ever read. It's only four pages, covering about 45 minutes, as a couple waits for a train in Spain. You come to realize that they're talking about her...

A friend gave this book to me, and I was just so struck by how beautifully the sentences were designed. The narrative is meditative and poetic. It seems a very accurate telling of what it is to be married—that is, for a fairly privileged...

What struck me about this novel, which is the story of an affair between two people, is the unusual way Roth tells the story—devoid of any description, stripped down to the dialogue alone. At times you aren't clear on who is speaking. His...