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David Grossman's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books David Grossman recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of David Grossman's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

History

History was written nearly thirty years after Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia spent a year in hiding among remote farming villages in the mountains south of Rome. There she witnessed the full impact of the war and first formed the ambition to write an account of what history - the great political events driven by men of power, wealth, and ambition - does when it reaches the realm of ordinary people struggling for life and bread.

The central character in this powerful and unforgiving novel is Ida Mancuso, a schoolteacher whose husband has died and whose feckless teenage son...
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Recommended by David Grossman, and 1 others.

David GrossmanMorante opposes the anonymity of war—the war of masses, states, armies, troops and she commits us to the individual (Source)

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2
In this extraordinary collection of short stories, Thomas Mann uses settings as diverse as Germany, Italy, the Holy Land and the Far East to explore a theme which always preoccupied him: the two faces of things. Thus, in A Man and His Dog and Disorder and Early Sorrow, small domestic tempests become symbolic of the discordant muddle of humanity. In The Transposed Heads and The Tables of Law the demands of the intellect clash with the desires of physiology, an idea developed more fully in The Black Swan, where body and spirit are tragically out of harmony. Written between 1918 and 1953, these... more
Recommended by David Grossman, and 1 others.

David GrossmanThe story begins with joy and enthusiasm and quickly deteriorates when the family meets the phenomena of Italian nationalism and Fascism (Source)

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3

Dubliners

For the centennial of its original publication, an irresistible Graphic Deluxe Edition of one of the most beloved books of the 20th century

Perhaps the greatest short story collection in the English language, James Joyce’s Dubliners is a vivid and unflinching portrait of “dear dirty Dublin” at the turn of the twentieth century. These fifteen stories, including such unforgettable ones as “Araby,” “Grace,” and “The Dead,” delve into the heart of the city of Joyce’s birth, capturing the cadences of Dubliners’ speech and portraying with an almost brute realism their...
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Recommended by David Grossman, and 1 others.

David GrossmanIt is the perfect story—you can almost touch the characters, and yet it is told from a remote point of view, from a distance but not without affection (Source)

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4

The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories

The collected fiction of "one of the most original imaginations in modern Europe" (Cynthia Ozick)

Bruno Schulz's untimely death at the hands of a Nazi stands as one of the great losses to modern literature. During his lifetime, his work found little critical regard, but word of his remarkable talents gradually won him an international readership. This volume brings together his complete fiction, including three short stories and his final surviving work, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Illustrated with Schulz's original drawings, this edition beautifully...
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Recommended by David Grossman, and 1 others.

David GrossmanHe was a modest artist, regarded today as one of the greatest 20th-century writers. He said that our everyday life and our art consist of fragments of old legends, artefacts of ancient cults, crumbs of mythology (Source)

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5

Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son

Tevye is the compassionate, lovable, Bible-quoting dairyman from Anatevka, and Tevye the Dairyman is a heartwarming and poignant account of life in turn-of-the-century Russia. Through the workaday world of a rural dairyman, his grit, wit, and heart, his daughters' courtships and marriages, and the eventual menace of the pogroms, Sholem Aleichem reveals the fabric of a now-vanished world.

Motl is the clear-eyed, spirited, mischievous boy who narrates Motl the Cantor's Son, a comic novel about his emigration with his family from Russia to America. It is a journey that...
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Recommended by David Grossman, and 1 others.

David GrossmanHe is unique in his ability to document and enliven the lives of millions of Jews who lived in the shtetls (Source)

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