Growth of the Soil By Knut Hamsun
The long, long road over the moors and up into the forest—who trod it into being first of all? Man, a human being, the first that came here.
SteppenWolf by Hermann Hesse recommended translator: Basil Creighton
THE DAY HAD GONE BY JUST AS DAYS GO BY. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life. I had worked for an hour or two and perused the pages of old books.
Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth
EITHER FORSWEAR fucking others or the affair is over. This was the ultimatum, the maddeningly improbable, wholly unforeseen ultimatum, that the mistress of fifty-two delivered in tears to her lover of sixty-four on the anniversary of an attachment that had persisted with an amazing licentiousness—and that, no less amazingly, had stayed their secret—for thirteen years.
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction by J.D. salinger
One night some twenty years ago, during a siege of mumps in our enormous family, my youngest sister, Franny, was moved, crib and all, into the ostensibly germ-free room I shared with my eldest brother, Seymour.