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Mary Gordon

Top Ten Books

Raised in an observant Roman Catholic household, American author Mary Gordon considered joining a convent before turning her interests to writing, dealing primarily with religiousness, faith, morals and piety in her works of fiction. She is the author of several books, including The Liar’s Wife, The Company of Women, and in 2017, There Your Heart Lies. Gordon is the recipient of three O. Henry Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the New York Public Library Literary Lion Award, and in 2008, was named the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of Writing at Barnard College.
Below are Mary Gordon's favorite books, available to purchase individually or as a set. See the full list...

10

Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf

I first read it because it was on sale for a quarter in a bookstore in Penn Station. I thought it was going to be something like the Albee play. I read it on the train to Boston, and I felt that the prose had broken one of my ribs: it was so powerful. I had been a poet until then, not thinking of writing fiction and “Mrs. Dalloway,” let me know you could do in fiction what I wanted to do in poetry.

9

The Good Soldier

Ford Madox Ford

It reminds me, always, of the futility of most judgments, how difficult it is to know anyone whom one thinks one knows, the truth that some problems have no solution but a tragic one.

8

Pale Horse, Pale Rider

Katherine Anne Porter

Porter accomplishes an extraordinary amount in a few pages. She addresses the horrors of war from a woman’s perspective; she touches on the difficult a terrain a working woman must navigate in a man’s world; she creates a desirable male, describing his physical allure from a female point of view: quite rare in most fiction. But most astonishing, in chronicling Miranda’s near death experience and her reluctant return to life, she describes the indescribable and deals with the most profound human issues: life, death, identity, in shatteringly beautiful prose.
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Mary-Louise Parker
$226.95
Remembrance of Things Past

Marcel Proust
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Masha Gessen’s Guide to Understanding Tyranny
$210.87
Berlin Diaries, 1940-1945

Marie Vassiltchikov
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Matthew Modine
$182.93
The Cousteau Almanac of the Environment: An Inventory of Life on a Water Planet (Vintage Edition)

Jacques-Yves Cousteau
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Meg Wolitzer
$146.91
To The Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf
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Meghan Udell
$204.68
The Moving Finger

Agatha Christie
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Michael C. Hall
$167.83
Fun Home

Alison Bechdel
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Michael Cunningham
$163.87
To The Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf
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Michael Ian Black
$122.91
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

E.L. Konigsburg
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Michael Pollan
$178.80
The Odyssey

Homer