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 what's 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 hadn't 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 Kalich's selection of quintessential authors (Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Leo Tolstoy), and delight in his excavation of out-of-the-way classics like Ivan Angelo's The Celebration, Max Frisch's Sketchbook, 1966-1971, Peter Handke's The Afternoon of a Writer, Par Lagervist's The Dwarf, David Markson's The Last Novel, Tarjei Vesaas's The Ice Palace, Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelyhearts, and August Wilson's Seven Guitars.
Richard Kalich's writing is both highly literary and comically self-deprecating in a way that only Woody Allen might have imagined.
