Books by John Williams
“Butcher’s Crossing is a Western in that it’s about a buffalo hunt. A young man from Boston shows up in the last town in Kansas, and says he wants to go hunt buffalo. Since it dates from 1960, you might think of it as the world of late Zane Grey—a time when people are making a lot of great Westerns still, the High Noon era. But it’s an anti-Western. The point of the novel is that the very things you do that you think are going to make you a man, that are going to bring you into this wonderful, new, transcendent Emersonian relationship with nature… well you’re just killing buffalo. You’re killing them and killing them and killing them. At some point you realise that the glory is the obscenity.” Read more...
Forgotten Classics: The Best B-Side Books
John Plotz, Literary Scholar
“A lot of people think, ‘This is a novel about drugs.’ It is not at all! It is about a young man, William Stoner, who goes off to university at great financial cost and deprivation to his father, who is a pioneer farmer. The boy goes off to agricultural college and this is seen as a great triumph. But while he is there he encounters literature for the first time, specifically a Shakespearian sonnet, and is transformed by reading it. He decides he doesn’t want to study agriculture at all, and we see him become a professor of literature…It is a story of intellectual determination and the ability of a man to find love simply in what he does. It is a book about love of learning…To me, Stoner is almost the perfect novel. It is very little known but anyone who reads it is completely captivated by it.” Read more...
Simon Winchester, Journalist
Interviews where books by John Williams were recommended
The Best Campus Novels
Life in an academic institution can be a curiously intense experience. As a result, the hot-house atmosphere of a university campus or boarding school presents a fitting backdrop for novels exploring ambition, power dynamics, crushes, and sexual crises. Here, we’ve pulled together a list of campus novels that have been recommended on Five Books over the years, via our interviews with literary scholars, bestselling authors and book prize judges.
The Best American Stories, recommended by Simon Winchester
Modern America is a story of expanding frontiers, says bestselling author Simon Winchester. He tells us about five novels that shed light on the social history of his adopted homeland, from the late 19th century to the Great Depression.
Forgotten Classics: The Best B-Side Books, recommended by John Plotz
New books are constantly being published. Sometimes they slip by unremarked; sometimes their impact is so enormous as to divert the flow of literature altogether. But what of those books that made a splash on arrival, but have long since disappeared from view? John Plotz, the literary scholar, has spent five years resurfacing these forgotten classics: the ‘B-side books’ that have fallen from the public consciousness.
