Jemiscoe Chambers-Black-- Have you ever had something remind you of your toddler years and make you not want to share? That’s what Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation did to me. It’s the book that I clutch to my chest and scream, “Mine.” However, it’s so beautifully written, I have to share.

Dept. of Speculation’s structure is written in short paragraphs of randomness that become gorgeous prose. The novel follows a writer who vows never to get married because she is too busy becoming an “Art Monster.” But she ends up falling in love, getting married, and eventually having a baby, and in her confliction and honesty, I’m moved. There are many delicious moments in this book that spill off the page when the inner thoughts of this career woman turned stay-at-home-mom pour out:

“What did you today, you’d say when you got home from work, and I’d try my best to craft an anecdote for you out of nothing.”

Eventually, her husband has an affair, and the reader is taken on a journey filled with love, family, sacrifice, and eventually forgiveness. So, while I’ve shared this gem, know that no one can borrow my copy. I really recommend this book, but get your own.

Kirah Brouillette-- On a whim, I re-read Salman Rushdie’s infamous novel The Satanic Verses, the magically real story of two morally bankrupt Bollywood actors, Gibreel and Saladin, who die in a terrorist plot and are later reborn as an angel and Satan. With an embedded storyline around the prophet Mohammed that offended some Muslims enough that violent protests followed and the author himself was put under a fatwa by the Ayahtollah Komeni in 1989, it can be a tall order to finish.

What gets you by though, is the purity of Rushdie’s prose; the way he uses cadence and free punctuation to draw you into this foggily familiar world – a world where realism meets the magic of literary allusion, all bound by rising emotion shared between all characters, in both worlds at once.

“Is there a Devil. After that the glass – baprebap! – began to shake ... slowslow at first, then faster-faster ... until it jumped ... fell down on its side and ... into a thousand ... pieces, smashed. Believe, don’t believe ... but thenandthere I learned my lesson: don’t meddle, Mhatre, in what you do not comprehend.”

Arrun Chittur-- I was drawn to Jonathan Safran Foer’s Here I Am by the speculative story line - the novel’s catalyst is an earthquake that leads to existential conflict in Israel. Foer uses meandering paragraphs in which the narrator reflects on the main character’s (Jacob) behalf, focusing the reader not on the natural disaster and ensuing conflict, but on the ‘real’ story.

Jacob and Julia Bloch, married 15 years, have three sons and a house in suburbia. Jacob descends from a line of proud Jewish patriarchs who passively remind the family of their history. And their unfulfilled obligation. As Jacob and Julia’s marriage unravels, the children are forced into young adulthood and Jacob becomes more timid and cautious, which only exacerbates his distance from Julia. Israel suffers from catastrophic loss, as the family does in the death of Jacob’s grandfather. Yet Jacob seems content to live in the shadow of a more interesting life he’s too afraid to live.

Then as if on cue, you enter the second half of the book and see pieces of yourself in Jacob. You ask yourself about opportunities lost, what you ‘could’ be doing. You remember the lesson, that it’s never too late. Until it is.

Kirah Brouillette-- People often escape trauma through art, stories and music. For me it’s sometimes opera – the perfect culmination of them all. The lyrical and visual beauty of it soothes me. When I picked up Elio Vittorini’s novel Conversations In Sicily, written in 1937, I didn’t expect to find the opera. Yet I did.

Set in Mussolini-era Italy, it’s the story of Silvestro, a man gone numb from the spread of fascism, war and death. He journeys home to his mother, meeting characters along the way who reveal huge themes through careful dialogue: fascist rule, economic inequality, broken familial bonds. From its format in sections reminiscent of movements, to the tactile descriptions of Sicily that mimic the visual glory of opera, to the wonderful use of sound and repetition to create a musical cadence to each paragraph, this novel is a masterpiece of operatic imitation, political commentary and lyrical prose. Vittorini – himself a fan of opera – claimed to have used the operatic overtones purposely, so it would pass the fascist censors of his time.

In a world that feels as though we, too, are inundated with death and war (ideological and actual), Conversations In Sicily is the soothing we all need.

Margaret McNellis-- Pillars of the Earth was my first exposure to Ken Follett, and I was transfixed. Not only does this epic novel present multiple point-of-view characters without bogging down the prose or losing the reader, but it touches on issues that continue to challenge people today, even though it takes place in the twelfth century. Follett weaves in ten years of research into Romantic and Gothic architecture throughout England, modeling his fictional Kingsbridge Cathedral on the Salisbury Cathedral.

The story covers several main characters, some from childhood into middle age, and some into their elder years. Follett juxtaposes the struggles of the poor and the rich, weaving them together to show how society relies on people from all walks of life.

Pillars is what inspired me to write historical fiction, and I often look to Follett for how to incorporate historical facts and cultures into my work. It’s the first in the Kingsbridge Trilogy, followed by World Without End and Column of Fire; the latter was released in September 2017. Column, which takes place in Renaissance England, is next on my list of non-MFA books to read, and I’m chomping at the bit to dig into it.

Student Picks: Offill, Rushdie

Student Picks: Vittorini, Foer, Follett