The Man in the Window (31 page)

Suggestions for Further Reading

I
F WHAT
you enjoyed about
The Man in the Window
was the adroit mix of humor and poignancy, try:

It’s the early 1940s in Steve Kluger’s
Last Days of Summer
, and 12-year-old Brooklynite and baseball fanatic Joey Margolis—who’s badly in need of a father figure in his life—develops an improbable friendship with the N.Y. Giants star rookie Charlie Banks.

Don Robertson’s
The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread
introduces us to 9-year-old Morris Bird III (known by unkind classmates as Morris Bird the Turd) who decides, one day in 1944, to walk to the other side of Cleveland to visit a friend and, pulling his little sister in a wagon, comes face to face with history.

If you enjoyed looking at the world through the eyes of Louis and Iris, two outsiders, try:

In
The Dork of Cork
by Chet Raymo, Frank Bois, who’s 43 years old and 43 inches high, finds that nothing in his life is the way it was before he wrote a book about the night sky that, totally unexpectedly, became a best seller.

The title character in
Mendel’s Dwarf
by Simon Mawer is Dr. Benedict Lambert, a geneticist with an abiding interest in his own condition, who finds that his love affair with a shy librarian changes their lives in quite unexpected ways.

In Elizabeth McCracken’s
The Giant’s House
, a spinster librarian finds companionship and love with a teenage boy who suffers from a growth disorder that eventually makes him the tallest person in the world.

Thirty-year-old Lyman, the main character in Joe Coomer’s
The Loop,
spends his days driving Fort Worth’s loop road picking up road kill for the county and his evenings taking one class after
another at the community college. But all that changes when first a parrot, and then a young woman (another librarian!), enter his life.

In Sonia Gernes’s
The Way to St. Ives
, the deaths of her overbearing mother and only brother give Rosie Deane, a middle-aged spinster, the chance, at last, to blossom.

For those who enjoyed meeting an assortment of quirky characters in
The Man in the Window
, try:

Tim Winton’s
Cloudstreet
is the story of two families—the Pickles and the Lambs—who are brought together at first by the hard times in Australia following World War II and at last by a marriage.

Timothy Schaffert’s
The Coffins of Little Hope
features quirky characters, humor, compassion, and insight into human strengths and foibles. The narrator, 83-year-old Essie Myles, copes with the numerous complications of family and work as she writes the obituaries for the
County Paragraph
, her grandson Doc’s small-town Nebraska newspaper.

When Quintus Horatius Flaccus, the eponymous main character in
Horace Afoot
by Frederick Reuss, tries to seal himself off from the rest of world by moving to a small town called Oblivion, he finds the task much harder than he expected.

And Jon Cohen suggests these novels for readers who enjoyed
The Man in the Window
:

T. R. Pearson’s
A Short History of a Small Place
is a marvelous celebration of small town eccentrics.

Nicholson Baker’s
The Mezzanine
illustrates how even the smallest bit of the world, acutely observed, can fill the soul; very similar to the way Louis observes the minutiae of his world.

Karen Russell’s
St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
is a celebration of the very off-kilter (as are her next two works of fiction:
Swamplandia!
and
Vampires in the Lemon Grove
).

Rainer Maria Rilke’s
Letters to a Young Poet
are meticulously sensitive letters that Louis Malone might have written to the world.

John Green’s
The Fault in Our Stars
gives an unflinching view of illness and disability, but still chooses to embrace life and is darkly humorous. This is the world as Iris Shula would see it.

About the Author

Photo by Andy Shelter

J
ON
C
OHEN,
a former critical care nurse, wrote his first novel between hospital shifts and raising two children. After receiving a creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, he turned to writing full time. His two novels, both critically acclaimed, are
The Man in the Window
and
Max Lakeman and the Beautiful Stranger
. Setting his sights on Hollywood, he purchased a “how-to” book on screenwriting. He has since written numerous screenplays for Fox, Warner Bros. and Sony, and is the cowriter of
Minority Report
, directed by Steven Spielberg. Jon lives with his wife outside of Philadelphia and is currently working on a new novel.

About Nancy Pearl

N
ANCY
P
EARL
is a librarian and lifelong reader. She regularly comments on books on National Public Radio’s
Morning Edition
. Her books include 2003’s
Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason
; 2005’s
More Book Lust: 1,000 New Reading Recommendations for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason; Book Crush: For Kids and Teens: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Interest
, published in 2007; and 2010’s
Book Lust To Go: Recommended Reading for Travelers, Vagabonds, and Dreamers
. Among her many awards and honors are the 2011 Librarian of the Year Award from
Library Journal
; the 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association; the 2010 Margaret E. Monroe Award from the Reference and Users Services Association of the American Library Association; and the 2004 Women’s National Book Association Award, given to “a living American woman who… has done meritorious work in the world of books beyond the duties or responsibilities of her profession or occupation.”

About Book Lust Rediscoveries

B
OOK
L
UST
R
EDISCOVERIES
is a series devoted to reprinting some of the best (and now out of print) novels originally published between 1960–2000. Each book is personally selected by Nancy Pearl and includes an introduction by her as well as discussion questions for book groups and a list of recommended further reading.