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Britt-Marie is a true fanatic of cleanliness and neatness. She lives by her own rules: don’t wake up later than six in the morning, don’t eat after six in the evening, use decent dishes, don’t make a mess on your desk, write only with a pencil, and so on. Britt-Marie has created an ideal world for herself and is never ready to give up at least one point from her set of “laws.” But not everything depends on her...
After forty years of married life, the heroine finds out that her husband cheated on her. Now living with this person is simply unbearable. Betrayal destroys everything that Britt-Marie has built over many years. There is no longer any stability, everything is mixed up and moving in an unknown direction... Having gathered courage, the heroine packs her suitcase and goes to look for a new life in the old roadside village of Borg. This is a sloppy, slowly fading place without any prospects... But what if this is where Britt-Marie is finally destined to become happy?
Alaska is an amazing place. This is a beautiful picturesque country with incredible nature, but at the same time – a land full of deadly dangers. When little Leni, at the age of thirteen, came with her family to Alaska, the places and people here seemed incredible to her. But the fairy tale passes too quickly. When winter comes, even the most resilient and strong can falter. Like, for example, her father, who was destroyed by the Vietnam War. And because of this, life in a new place turns out to be no better than before.
As you know, it is human nature to adapt. Year after year, Leni grew, got used to her new life, and truly became her own here. But I never learned to breathe deeply. And even though here, on the very edge of the world, people are not prone to excessive vulnerability and sentimentality, Leni herself cannot get rid of the ghosts of the past.
This novel by the Pulitzer Prize winner tells simply the main thing: that one must be able to say goodbye to the past and let go of loved ones.
Aaron is a shy man who has suffered from the overprotection of his overbearing mother since childhood. Despite his physical disabilities, the main character tries to live a full life. One day he meets a girl, Dorothy. He falls in love with her, proposes and becomes a loving husband. But the happiness does not last long: Dorothy dies as a result of a freak accident.
At first, Aaron tries to cope with his heartache. But nothing works. And then... He meets Dorothy again. The ghost of his dead wife accompanies Aaron almost everywhere. They talk again, discuss important things and even quarrel.
But a pleasant illusion cannot last forever. Aaron will have to come to terms with his loss and learn to move on...
The Financial Times wrote: “With her previous books, three of which were shortlisted for the Booker, Sarah Waters has set the bar very high. And even against such a background, “Dear Guests” is the apotheosis of her talent.” So, meet Frances Ray and her mother. In London, which had not yet recovered from the Great War, they were left completely alone in a large, decaying house: their father and brothers were no longer alive, and funds did not allow them to keep servants. Desperate, Francis and Mrs. Ray rent out half the house to complete strangers - the young Barber couple, Leonard and Liliana, from the “clerk class”. And the whole life of the Ray family changes, but not at all in the way they expected. “This is a book about an old cranky boiler, porcelain cups and rotten floorboards. This is a book about love and passion, shaking to the core and driving you crazy. And it’s also a real detective story, with a corpse, the police and a build-up of atmosphere in the spirit of Dostoevsky.”
We started reading less. There are many reasons for this: from the abundance of various gadgets that take up time to the large amount of worthless literary fluff that fills the shelves of bookstores. We have compiled the top 10 best books of modern prose that will definitely appeal to the reader and make them look at literature with different eyes. The rating was compiled taking into account the opinions of readers of major literary portals and critics.
10. Bernard Werber “The Third Humanity. Voice of the Earth"
The book is in 10th place in the ranking of the best works of modern prose. This is the third novel in the "The Third Humanity" series. In it, the writer discusses the topic of the ecological future of the planet. Werber's books are always fascinating reading. In Europe, the genre in which he works is called fantasy, and in South Korea, many of the writer’s novels are considered poetic works. Verber became famous thanks to his novel “Ants,” which he wrote for 12 years. An interesting fact is that readers fell in love with the writer’s novels long before critics started talking about him, who seemed to have deliberately ignored the author for many years.
9.
- another book by a famous blogger on the 9th line of the top 10 best books in the genre of modern prose. The Latvian writer Vyacheslav Soldatenko is hiding under the pseudonym of Slava Se. When his short stories and notes from his personal blog began to gain popularity, a major publishing house invited the author to publish a book based on them. The circulation sold out in a matter of days. “Your My Knee” is another collection of the writer’s notes, written with humor. Books by Slava Se are a great way to combat sadness and bad mood.
Few people know that Slava Se worked as a plumber for about 10 years, although he is a psychologist by profession.
8.
Donna Tartt with the novel “The Goldfinch” in 8th place in our top 10 best works of modern prose. The book was awarded the highest honor in the literary world, the Pulitzer Prize in 2014. Stephen King expressed his admiration for him, who said that such books appear extremely rarely.
The novel will tell the reader the story of thirteen-year-old Theo Decker, who, after an explosion in a museum, received a valuable canvas and ring from a dying stranger. An old painting by a Dutch painter becomes the only consolation of an orphan wandering among foster families.
7.
The novel is on the seventh line of our top 10 best books in the genre of modern prose. Readers will discover a world in which wizards live side by side with people. They submit to the highest governing body - the council of white witches. He strictly monitors the purity of the blood of magicians and hunts half-breeds, such as Nathan Byrne. Although his father is one of the most powerful Black sorcerers, this does not save the young man from persecution.
The book is one of the most exciting new works of modern literature of 2015. It is compared to another famous series of novels about wizards - Harry Potter.
6. Anthony Dorr “All the Light We Cannot See”
At 6th position in the ranking of the best books in the genre of modern prose - another Pulitzer Prize nominee. It's novel . The plot centers on the touching story of a German boy and a blind French girl who are trying to survive the difficult years of the war. The author, who tells the reader a story set against the backdrop of World War II, managed to write not about its horrors, but about peace. The novel develops in several places and at different times.
5.
Novel Mariam Petrosyan “The house in which...”, occupying fifth place in the top 10 best books, can scare the reader with its considerable volume of a thousand pages. But as soon as you open it, time seems to stand still, such an exciting story awaits the reader. The plot centers on the House. This is an unusual boarding school for disabled children, many of whom have amazing abilities. Here live the Blind Man, the Lord, the Sphinx, the Tabaki and other inhabitants of this strange House, in which one day can accommodate a whole life. Each newcomer must decide whether he is worthy of the honor of being here, or whether it is better for him to leave. The house keeps many secrets, and its own laws operate within its walls. The boarding school is a universe of orphans and disabled children, where there is no entry for the unworthy or weak in spirit.
4.
Rick Yancey and his first novel in a trilogy of the same name "5th wave"– on the 4th line in the ranking of the best works of modern prose. Thanks to numerous science fiction books and films, we have long formed ideas about what the plan for the conquest of the Earth by alien creatures will be. The destruction of capitals and large cities, the use of technology unknown to us - this is approximately how it is seen. And humanity, forgetting about previous differences, unites against a common enemy. One of the novel's main characters, Cassie, knows that everything is wrong. Aliens, who have been observing the development of earthly civilization for more than 6 thousand years, have thoroughly studied all models of human behavior. In the “5th wave” they will use their weaknesses, best and worst character traits against people. Rick Yancey depicts the almost hopeless situation in which human civilization finds itself. But even the wisest alien race can make mistakes in assessing the capabilities of people.
3.
Paula Hawkins with her amazing detective novel "The Girl on the Train" takes third place in the top 10 best books in the genre of modern prose. More than 3 million copies were sold in the first months after its release, and one of the well-known film companies has already begun work on its film adaptation. The main character of the novel watches the life of a happy married couple from the train window day after day. And then Jess, Jason's wife, suddenly disappears. Before this, Rachel manages to notice something unusual and shocking from the window of a passing train in the couple's yard. Now she must decide whether she should contact the police or try to figure out the reason for Jess's disappearance herself.
2.
In second place in our rating is the novel, filmed in 2009. Susie Salmond was brutally murdered at the age of 14. Once in her personal paradise, she observes what happens to her family after the death of the girl.
1.
First place in the ranking of the best books in the genre of modern prose goes to Diana Setterfield and her novel “The Thirteenth Tale.” This is a work that opened up for the reader the long-forgotten genre of “neo-Gothic”. The most amazing thing is that this is the author’s first novel, the rights to which were purchased for huge amounts of money. In terms of sales and popularity, it overtook many bestsellers and was translated into other languages. will tell the reader about the adventures of Margaret Lee, who receives an invitation from a famous writer to become her personal biographer. She is unable to refuse such luck and comes to a gloomy mansion, in which all subsequent events will unfold.
During the times of Ancient Greece, fiction was created mainly in poetic form, since then the artistry of a work was determined by the presence of rhythm and euphony. Prose was considered literature not of fiction, but of journalistic and everyday literature. The situation changed with the advent of the Middle Ages, and by the 19th century prose had won unconditional primacy over poetry in foreign literature. And what genres of foreign prose are best characterized - read on.
Novel
The most popular genre of foreign prose is undoubtedly the novel. It represents the largest form of epic - one of the types of foreign literature.
The main feature of the novel is that it presents to the reader not a short episode or excerpt, but a full-fledged, logically formed story. The narrative in a novel covers a long period of time and can describe the entire life of the characters or even the fate of several generations.
As a rule, in a classic novel, attention is paid to the everyday experiences of the main characters. This distinguishes the novel from such prose genres as, for example, allegory or fable, in which characters are usually endowed with some abstract qualities.
Classic foreign prose is rich in all kinds of adventure, love, historical novels and many others. “Jane Eyre” by the English writer Charlotte Bronte, “The Conjuring of Frau Sorge” by the German writer Hermann Sudermann, “The Count of Monte Cristo” by the Frenchman Alexandre Dumas, “Don Quixote” by the Spaniard Miguel de Cervantes - the list goes on for a very long time.
Epic
The epic is particularly monumental and large-scale events. Its main feature is its complex and ornate plot, with a huge number of characters. Previously, epics were most often written in verse, in the form of poems, but then they also included prose, transforming into the genre of the epic novel. Most often this is a collection of several works or one particularly large one, divided into several volumes. Unlike an ordinary novel, an epic novel covers not just a large time period, but is also closely tied to certain historical events.
Foreign prose of the 20th century is famous for the seven-volume cycle “In Search of Lost Time” by the French writer Marcel Proust, who was associated with the literary movement of modernism. This cycle is considered one of the most significant works of literature of the last century. Other famous foreign epic novels: “The Enchanted Soul” by the French writer Romain Rolland, “The Ten Men of the Sword” by the Japanese writer Eiji Yoshikawa and, of course, the fantasy epic “The Lord of the Rings” by the Englishman John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.
Story
One of the most popular prose genres in foreign literature is the story. What distinguishes a story from a novel is the small amount of writing (for foreign prose - no more than 7.5 thousand words) and its content - usually it is dedicated to a single event in a person’s life, a specific episode from his life, that is, the narrative has clear time limits unlike the novel. As a rule, there are not a large number of characters in the story.
The main distinguishing feature of a story is the number of actions developing in the plot: in contrast to larger genres, a story should have no more than one conflict established and resolved by the end of the work.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe, “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz Hotel” by Francis Scott Fitzgerald, “The South” by Jorge Luis Borges, “The Nightingale and the Rose” by Oscar Wilde and others are classics of foreign prose among stories.
Novella
Unlike Russian literature, for which the short story is a rather rare genre, foreign prose clearly separates the concepts of short story and short story; Moreover, in Russian and European literature these terms mean completely different things, which quite often confuses readers. What is considered a short story in Russian literature is defined in foreign prose as a story (“short story”). The short story (“novella”) resembles something close to the Russian genre of the story, which in foreign prose is called a “short novel” or is not distinguished from a novel (“novel”) at all.
Foreign prose suggests that the volume of a short story is 17.5-40 thousand words. Compared to a short story, a novella is characterized by a deeper disclosure of the psychological background of the characters’ actions, and also has more time for plot development. It involves multiple storylines and more conflict (but still less than is needed for a novel).
The most famous examples of short stories in foreign prose: “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway, “The Stranger” by Albert Camus, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” by Robert Stevenson, “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka and others.
Memoirs
Memoirs are considered by many to be a subgenre of autobiography. But while an autobiography focuses more on the internal, personal development of a person, memoirs seek to capture the external part of his life - memories of certain events in which the author himself participated or heard from eyewitnesses. An autobiography completely describes the path of life, and memoirs are always written about some moments from the past.
The hallmark of memoirs is subjectivity. This happens because the main character of memoirs should always be their author, who most often strives to show himself better and more interesting than he really is, and as a result retells events only through the prism of his own worldview.
It can be argued that foreign prose was replenished with this genre back in ancient times, for example, according to all the laws of memoirs, the work of Gaius Julius Caesar was written entitled “Notes on the Gallic War,” where he described the battles with the armies of the Gauls that took place over a period of nine years. During the European Middle Ages and the Renaissance, memoirs continued to be written by military leaders such as the French Geoffroy de Villehardouin (The Capture of Constantinople) and Blaise de Montluc (Comments). And in the 19th century, the American writer Henry David Thoreau (“Walden, or Life in the Woods”) wrote memoirs about two years of his life spent in a forest house.
If, in addition to foreign prose, you are interested in other types of literature and its genres, then pay attention to the following video lecture:
On our website it is easy to understand the variety that is offered modern prose. The best books compete and strive to enter the top collections of selective readers. Contemporary Russian prose often ranks high in the portal's ratings.
Modern prose, the best books – how to choose?
To quickly navigate the pages of the portal and successfully choose a good work that will be easy to read and at the same time be nourishing food for the mind, pay attention to the highest rated, as well as the newest books. Modern prose is characterized by the fact that it is close to the reader. In it you will find characters that are similar to you, your children, friends and relatives.
Pay attention to our top books; modern prose from this list most closely matches the realities of our time and allows you to experience the emotions of people close to the spirit of our era.
Modern Russian prose and how it captivates the reader
This is the main task of the book - to attract the reader, placing its characters in the most possible life situations. The peculiarities that modern Russian prose has are to transfer the consciousness of the observer to situations familiar to him and even places where he has been more than once in reality.
If the author makes such a transfer of consciousness painlessly, the reader finds himself in his native environment, but already on the pages of the book. In this case, the reader will empathize more strongly with the hero of the work and will be able to believe more strongly in what is happening on the pages of the book.
Is it easy to believe in the characters that come out of the pages of a book? Modern prose without cuts reflects the life of people of our time, so the answer to this question is Yes, believe me.
Modern foreign prose
Edited by A. V. Tatarinov
For undergraduates, graduate students and teachers of philological faculties of universities.
2nd edition, stereotypical
© FLINT Publishing House, 2015
* * *“Modern foreign prose” as a single text
A. V. Tatarinov
It is not the easiest task in the world of literary fiction to keep track of current And unfinished, record the formation of new ideological and aesthetic models and draw conclusions about the current state of the literary process and its prospects.
Two years ago, such a task was set at the Department of Foreign Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies of Kuban State University. This is not the first year that the courses “Modern Foreign Literature” and “Modern Literary Process” have been taught. Meetings of the “XXI Century” club were held regularly to discuss the latest prose. Subjects that require attention to the literature of our days have appeared in the curricula of specialist, bachelor's, and master's degrees. There were no teaching aids.
Of course, the point is not in thick textbooks that remove all historical and existential questions from the student’s mind. We are far from overestimating the works that transform literature into a system of classifying formulas. What is important here is not the outcome, not the unambiguous result, but the strong-willed decision to present the latest foreign prose as a complex space in which it is possible to highlight the dominant names, ideas and images. It is important not to forget that each historical era (and the turn of the millennium is always Time!) has its own literary universe. And it contains motives that are directly related to philosophy and religion, psychology and politics. That is why this book ends with the article “ Nowadays like a literary era."
We have abandoned the standard elitist approach to the creation of textbooks, which are written by highly experienced professors capable of any conceptualization. Modern requires youth, or more precisely, a combination of experience, a mature view of the movement of literary matter and healthy youthful arrogance, justified daring in the interpretation of non-canonical facts of literature. The authors of “Modern Foreign Prose” are doctors of science and master’s students, candidates and graduate students. There were also students who, by the time the book was published, had received a different philological status. Talent and desire to speak out were the criteria for selecting the authors of the articles. The interest of young hermeneuts was predetermined by the presence in the textbook of M. Cunningham and A. Nothomb, W. F. Gibson, J. Littell and A. Baricco.
This does not mean that there was no unified strategy. It manifests itself in the plot and compositional organization of our project - research and educational at the same time. British, American, French- separate sections. In them, each writer is presented holistically: from a short biography to the dominant features of poetics. With a mandatory description of the creative path, the main artistic achievements and, as a rule, with a detailed analysis of the novel, which the author of the article considers key in the writer’s work. Somewhat more complicated - with German: We didn’t succeed with the works about K. Wolf, G. Müller, G. Grasse. This significant absence is partially compensated for by the review article “Modern German Prose.”
In the section “From Italy and Portugal to Argentina and Japan” we also adhere to the monographic principle, which provides for biography, portraiture and analysis in relation to the writer’s current creative path. There are articles about recently departed classics, without whom it is difficult to imagine the literary process of our time (G. G. Marquez, J. Saramago), and about living masters of words who are not very well known to the Russian reader (R. Galanaki, for example).
The presence of H. L. Borges may raise doubts. Does the Argentine writer who died in 1986 have anything to do with modern literature? For Borges, we decided to make an exception: this classic of the 20th century, by the meaning of his artistic system and moral philosophy, remains one of the influential participants in literary modernity, an apologist for versions, intertextual games and hypotheses, so important for rhetoric, which finds its foundations on the border of modernism and postmodernism.
The last section is “The Author’s World in Selected Works.” Let's be honest: about M. Pavic, O. Pamuk or K. McCarthy, the editor would like to see complete works that satisfy the requirements of the first and second sections. But what we see in front of us turned out. Such an approach in representing artistic worlds is also possible. These writers, as well as D. Kovelart, D. Coe, D. Fforde, M. Shalev and H. Luntiala, are present in separate texts - quite appropriate for solving the problem of authorial individuality.
And one last thing. The voices of professional and ordinary readers are often heard denying the quality of modern literature. There is, they say, no former greatness, there are only personal games of not very talented dreamers, preoccupied with their own complexes and sensational plots that allow them to win over potential consumers. Our book shows that this is not so. There is a literary process! There are no fewer achievements than falls and losses.
British prose
Julian Barnes
V. V. Bogdan
In one of his interviews, Julian Barnes mentioned Faulkner's statement that the best obituary for a writer is: “He wrote books and he died,” and then noted that this is exactly the kind of anonymity that one should strive for, although in our time it is almost impossible. But still, Julian Barnes has almost achieved his goal, and with absolute certainty one can only say about him what he wrote about himself on his official website on the Internet. Namely: he was born on January 19, 1946 in the city of Leicester in central England, received a good education - from 11 to 18 years old he studied at the City of London School, then entered Magdalene College at Oxford University. In 1987 he graduated from the university with honors. After graduating from university, Julian Barnes worked for three years as a lexicographer-compiler of the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1977 he began working as a columnist and literary editor for the New Statesman and New Review magazines, and from 1979 to 1986 he worked as a television critic. The following is a long list of literary awards and prizes, including: the Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending (2011), the Somerset Maugham Prize for his debut novel Metroland (1981), the Medici Prize for Flaubert's Parrot (1986), and also Order of Arts and Letters (1995, 2004). Julian Barnes wrote many short stories, novels and essays, and also translated Alphonse Daudet's diary from the French. The final sentence of Julian Barnes' short autobiography is this: Barnes lives in London. In other words, if we discard the numerous dates (which Julian Barnes, by the way, himself does not like) and the somewhat impersonal listing of places of work, then it turns out just as Faulkner taught: Julian Barnes lives and writes books. According to Barnes, such knowledge is enough for readers: “I would prefer that people read my books rather than try to understand what kind of person I am.”
But Julian Barnes also has a flip side - a fascinating biography for those readers for whom the meager truth is not enough. At the beginning of his literary career, he wrote several detective stories under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, which were positively received by critics as good examples of the genre. On the back of these books, Barnes presented a completely different biography - fictional, but very “hot”: Dan Kavanagh was born in County Sligo in 1946. After devoting his youth to idleness, promiscuity and petty theft, he left home at the age of seventeen and signed up as a deckhand. sailor on a Liberian tanker. After jumping ship in Montevideo, he crossed America, working as a cowboy, as a waiter on roller skates in a drive-thru eatery, and as a bouncer in a gay bar in San Francisco. He currently works in London, but by whom he would prefer not to specify, but lives in North Islington. Moreover, from book to book, Kavanagh’s biography changed very significantly, without losing, however, its blatant absurdity. Of course, these descriptions are a joke. As we read them, we can almost hear Julian Barnes laughing at us. In the third chapter of Flaubert's Parrot, he writes: “What are the chances even of the most experienced of biographers that the object of his attention, looking at the author of a future biography, will not think of playing him?” These author's fabrications are an example of such a joke.
Julian Barnes paradoxically fully compensates for his taciturnity regarding his personal life with his style of narration, involving the reader in dialogue, forcing him to follow the thread of his reasoning and see and imagine what he himself sees and imagines. Julian Barnes, a seemingly reserved man, turns out to be an outspoken writer. He wants the reader to be as close to the author as possible: “I like to imagine the writer and reader sitting together, not face to face, but side by side, looking in the same direction, like through a café window. And in my script, the writer asks the reader: “What do you think of her? He looks weird, doesn't he? I wonder why they are fighting?” The reader’s gaze is directed parallel to the writer’s gaze; the writer simply notices everything first.”
