In the novels and short stories listed below, stories are told through things.  Some make intermittent appearances, like the key in Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment; while, some, like the miniature paintings in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, play a dominant role in the plot.  In every case, design in the largest sense of the word is central to the way these authors see the worlds of their characters. With very different prose styles, they reveal how objects and places reflect our most cherished values and beliefs. Happy reading!

Kobo Abé (The Box Man)

Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake)

Paul Auster (In the Country of Last Things)

Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)

Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay)

Robert Coover (Pinocchio in Venice)

Umberto Eco (The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana)

Elena Ferrante (The Days of Abandonment)

William Gaddis (Carpenter’s Gothic)

Vladimir Nabokov (Speak, Memory)

Tim O’Brien (The Things They Carried)

Nicholas Baker (The Mezzanine)

Orhan Pamuk (My Name is Red)

Marcel Proust (Remembrance of Things Past)

José Saramago (The Cave)

W. G. Sebald (Austerlitz)

Lao She (“Attachments” in Blades of Grass: The Stories of Lao She)

Virginia Woolf (“Solid Objects,” “The New Dress” in A Haunted House and Other Short Stories)

-Susan Yelavich