Описание: Writing fiction in the form of autobiography, the writer Richard Kalich describes an unexpected dilemma upon reaching old age: he will only be allowed to bring 100 favorite books from the crowded shelves of his New York City apartment when he moves into an assisted living facility.
Kalich gets to work building his new library, paring down to whats most important with a crazed urgency that becomes a reexamination of his past, his generation, and the nature of Love and Evil.
Kalich is a survivor in a scrappy world that might truly have delimited him if he hadnt perceived how literature, how writing and reading, could be a liberation. Therefore, choosing the right books will determine whether he can live a fulfilled life.
Bibliophiles will applaud Kalichs selection of quintessential authors (Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Leo Tolstoy), and delight in his excavation of out-of-the-way classics like Ivan Angelos The Celebration, Max Frischs Sketchbook, 1966-1971, Peter Handkes The Afternoon of a Writer, Par Lagervists The Dwarf, David Marksons The Last Novel, Tarjei Vesaass The Ice Palace, Nathaniel Wests Miss Lonelyhearts, and August Wilsons Seven Guitars.
Richard Kalichs writing is both highly literary and comically self-deprecating in a way that only Woody Allen might have imagined.
