The Secret History
Donna Tartt, 1992
A California scholarship boy is taken up by a circle of Greek students at an elite Vermont college — and by the thing they have done. A novel about beauty, envy and the cost of belonging.
Donna Tartt
Feels like melancholy, identity and dread.
Start with The Secret History.
Tartt began The Secret History as an undergraduate at Bennington, where classmates read it in draft for years; it was published in 1992, when she was twenty-eight.
The idea that a life has one crack running down it, decided in advance.
DOES SUCH a thing as “the fatal flaw,” that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs. Books by Donna Tartt
The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt, 2013
A boy walks out of a museum bombing with a small Dutch painting, and it quietly shapes the next thirty years of his life.
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