Famous Authors' Guilty Pleasures

And Finally, a List!

For fine literature, Aidan Higgins' Langrishe, Go Down and Flotsam and Jetsam. For mystery buffs, Patrick McGinley's funny and gruesome Donegal stories. For the new wave in American literature, Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. For riveting political machinations, Rick Perlstein's Nixonland and Francisco Goldman's The Art of Political Murder. For keen pleasure, the Husain Haddawy translation of The Arabian Nights, enjoyed with Robert Irwin's The Arabian Nights, a Companion. For foreign literature, Ingo Schulze's 33 Moments of Happiness, Yousef Al-Mohaimeed's Wolves of the Crescent Moon, Robert Walser's Selected Stories and, for lovers of melodrama, Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind.

Proulx's next book is Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3, out in September