The Golden Notebook

Anna Wulf is a writer who keeps four notebooks, each a different color, each reflecting a different part of her. The black one contains recollections of her youthful wartime years in West Africa, experiences that went into her first novel. In the red one she reflects on her later life in London's leftist and intellectual circles. The blue notebook analyzes her fraught relations with men. The yellow contains her fragmentary attempts at new fiction. With the fifth, the golden notebook, and with The Golden Notebook, Wulf/Lessing struggles to tie all the threads fearlessly back together again.

Snow Crash

Hiro Protagonist — yeah, that's his name — is a freelance hacker and unemployed pizza deliveryman lost in a post-lapsarian, hyper-capitalist future America in which the central government has withered away, leaving behind a landscape of gated communities and endless strip malls lined with cookie-cutter retail franchises. When a virulent computer virus (or is it a drug? or a religion?) called Snow Crash gets loose and somehow starts infecting humans, Hiro teams up with a sassy skateboard messenger to save both the real world and cyberspace.

Gravity's Rainbow

No, it is not unreadable. For most of its 700-plus pages it's so crazily, scarily, sumptuously readable that you hate to put it aside even as the last paragraph thunders down on your head. The unsummarizable plot centers, to the extent that it centers at all, on Tyrone Slothrop, an American who comes to the attention of British intelligence during World War II when a map indicating the locales of his sexual encounters with London women shows that they correspond with the places struck by German V-2 missiles.

Pale Fire

A bizarre, three-legged race of a novel, Pale Fire is composed of a long, narrative poem followed by a much longer set of footnotes written by an obsessive, increasingly deranged annotator. Charles Kinbote, a gay professor at a small New England college, may or may not be a noble-born expatriate from the exotic Eastern European principality of Zembla. He may or may not have stolen the manuscript he's annotating, which he is convinced is really all about him. He is unquestionably unhealthily obsessed with John Shade, the placid, Robert Frost-like poet who composed the poem. Beyond that all bets are off, and the questions ramify without end.

The Future of Finance: A New Model for Banking and Investment

Financial markets have always promised, and often delivered, prosperity. But, during the last decade, the structure and behavior of financial markets themselves helped create the conditions for an economic implosion that resulted in a banking crisis, recession, and wholesale loss of investor confidence.