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_NO LONGER HUMAN_ BY OSAMU DAZAI (New Directions, $14). This book just blew me away because of its voice. It's an account, written in three notebooks, of a man in Japan whose sense of
alienation is so profound that he attempts suicide. Others might consider the book relentlessly grim, but I love it because that voice is so strong and so pure. _MRS. DALLOWAY_ BY VIRGINIA
WOOLF (Mariner, $14). SUBSCRIBE TO THE WEEK Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives. SUBSCRIBE & SAVE SIGN UP FOR THE
WEEK'S FREE NEWSLETTERS From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. From our morning news briefing to a
weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. I have re-read this book every few years from the time I was in my 20s, and I am always so interested
how different it seems each time. Clarissa Dalloway — deciding to get the flowers herself, as the book opens — seemed in my youth to be a lovely woman. As I grew older, I saw more and more
the sadness that beats in her heart. And Septimus Smith and his wife provide such a wonderful, and tragic, juxtaposition to her life of luxury. _ANOTHER COUNTRY_ BY JAMES BALDWIN (Vintage,
$16). Many years ago, when I first read Baldwin's 1962 novel about a doomed Greenwich Village jazz drummer, I thought, "Wow, I can't believe it. The narrator is so fierce and
strong, and the book pulsates with such honesty. The language — !" _FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS_ BY ERNEST HEMINGWAY (Scribner, $18). A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the
day – and the best features from TheWeek.com I have loved Hemingway's Spanish Civil War epic since I was 17, and each time I come back to it, it always surprises me. I'm also
interested in the fact that many of his sentences are actually much longer than we tend to remember. They go many places in this book. _HATESHIP, FRIENDSHIP, COURTSHIP, LOVESHIP, MARRIAGE_
BY ALICE MUNRO (Vintage, $16). Munro brings such great authority to the page that I will follow her anywhere. And she takes me many places; I am never disappointed. In the title story, for
example, she moves the point of view with such ease all around a small Canadian prairie town. _SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE_ BY KURT VONNEGUT (Dial, $16). I came to this book later in life. I think
it is, among other things, the loveliest, most delicate account of post-traumatic stress I've ever read — like the water that simply runs from the eyes of Billy Pilgrim. _— Elizabeth
Strout is the Pulitzer-winning author of_ Olive Kitteridge. _Like that 2008 work, her new book,_ Anything Is Possible, _is a collection of interconnected stories, these set in the hometown
of the title character of 2016's_ My Name Is Lucy Barton.