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Dwight Garner Book Recommendations

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Dwight Garner is a book critic. Book critic for the New York Times. garner@nytimes.com

32 books in list
Book Cover for: Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, Salman Rushdie

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

Salman Rushdie
Dwight GarnerDwight Garner

Candid, plain-spoken and gripping... “Knife” is a clarifying book. It reminds us of the threats the free world faces. It reminds us of the things worth fighting for.

Hardcover, 2024

$28.00$14.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Book Cover for: Disruptions: Stories, Steven Millhauser

Disruptions: Stories

Steven Millhauser
Dwight GarnerDwight Garner

There are too many preset frequencies on Millhauser’s dial. A little of him, for this reader, goes a long way…When Millhauser is on, he hands you a periscope of his own unique design, and he allows you to really look and feel. You can bring your own allegory.

Hardcover, 2023

$28.00$14.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Book Cover for: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Milan Kundera
Dwight GarnerDwight Garner

It’s hard to overstate how central Milan Kundera was, in the mid-1980s, to literary culture in America and elsewhere. He was the best-known Czech writer since Kafka, and his fiction brought news of sophisticated Eastern European societies trembling under the threat of Soviet repression.

Paperback, 2005

$18.99$9.49 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Book Cover for: Life Ceremony: Stories, Sayaka Murata

Life Ceremony: Stories

Sayaka Murata
Dwight GarnerDwight Garner

Murata’s prose is deadpan, as clear as cellophane, and has the tidiness of a bento box. She’s not the most subtle writer. You don’t read her for her extra-fine perceptual apparatus. You read her because when her stuff works, it’s chilly and transgressive at the same time.

Paperback, 2023

$17.00$8.50 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Book Cover for: August Wilson: A Life, Patti Hartigan

August Wilson: A Life

Patti Hartigan
Dwight GarnerDwight Garner

Her book is an achievement: It’s solid and well reported. But it’s dutiful… This biography’s best set piece might be the lead-up to a public debate in the winter of 1997 at Manhattan’s Town Hall, between Wilson and a less generous critic, Robert Brustein of The New Republic.

Hardcover, 2023

$32.50$16.25 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Book Cover for: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Milan Kundera
Dwight GarnerDwight Garner

It’s hard to overstate how central Kundera was, in the mid-1980s, to literary culture in America and elsewhere. He was the best-known Czech writer since Kafka, and his fiction brought news of sophisticated Eastern European societies trembling under the threat of Soviet repression.

Paperback, 2005

$18.99$9.49 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Book Cover for: Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir, Werner Herzog

Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir

Werner Herzog
Dwight GarnerDwight Garner

This book will be a boon to those people who, after dinner, sometimes like to unwind by reading choice morsels from books aloud. There are some instant classics here.

Hardcover, 2023

$30.00$15.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Book Cover for: Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food, Fuchsia Dunlop

Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food

Fuchsia Dunlop
Dwight GarnerDwight Garner

The book puts Dunlop, the Cambridge-educated English writer and cook, on a new level as a gastronomic commentator. Her prose is as rich and vivid as that of M.F.K. Fisher and Betty Fussell. She lacks Fisher’s froideur, thankfully, and has Fussell’s buoyancy.

Hardcover, 2023

$32.50$16.25 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Book Cover for: Onlookers: Stories, Ann Beattie

Onlookers: Stories

Ann Beattie
Dwight GarnerDwight Garner

She’s a dry yet earthy writer, in touch with moods and manners, with an eye for passing comedy. She is a fine appraiser of socioeconomic detail. She takes notes on her species…She pries at the mystery of life. There’s a strong feeling of convergence in her best stories.

Hardcover, 2023

$28.00$14.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Book Cover for: Trust the Plan: The Rise of Qanon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America, Will Sommer

Trust the Plan: The Rise of Qanon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America

Will Sommer
Dwight GarnerDwight Garner

Among the takeaways from “Trust the Plan” is the cynicism of most of the major figures in the QAnon universe. To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens on Jerry Falwell: If you gave them enemas they could be buried in match boxes. Their followers are sheep to be shorn.

Hardcover, 2023

$29.99$14.99 + Free shipping50% off your first book