Shelfology Book Pairing

FSG 80th Anniversary Special Edition

by Joan Didion

The essential portrait of America in the sixties, by the acclaimed author of The Year of Magical Thinking. More than a half century after its publication in 1968, Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains an essential portrait of America—and California in particular—during the sixties. This collection, which was Didion’s nonfiction debut, is a bold announcement of one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era and includes pieces exploring such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes; growing up in California; the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room; and San Francisco’s Haight–Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture. The power of Didion’s essays only grows over time, owing to her stature as “an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control” (The New York Times Book Review).

by Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina (Russian: «Анна Каренина»; Russian pronunciation: ) is a novel by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, published in serial installments from 1873 to 1877 in the periodical The Russian Messenger. Tolstoy clashed with editor Mikhail Katkov over political issues that arose in the final installment (Tolstoy's unpopular views of volunteers going to Serbia); therefore, the novel's first complete appearance was in book form in 1878. Widely regarded as a pinnacle in realist fiction, Tolstoy considered Anna Karenina his first true novel, when he came to consider War and Peace to be more than a novel. Fyodor Dostoyevsky declared it to be "flawless as a work of art". His opinion was shared by Vladimir Nabokov, who especially admired "the flawless magic of Tolstoy's style", and by William Faulkner, who described the novel as "the best ever written". The novel is currently enjoying popularity, as demonstrated by a recent poll of 125 contemporary authors by J. Peder Zane, published in 2007 in "The Top Ten" in Time, which declared that Anna Karenina is the "greatest novel ever written"