June 2, 2025, 3:08pm

This week, Wes Anderson’s newest concoction, The Phoenician Scheme, hits screens. And due to this newest work from a pointillist who loves his reference texts, I’m excited about Anderson’s prop books.

Wes has romanticized the literary arts for nearly his complete profession. His Salinger obsession exhibits in The Royal Tenenbaums, which owes one thing to Franny and Zooey. The Grand Budapest Resort was brazenly impressed by Austrian author Stefan Zweig’s The Society of the Crossed Keys. And Jacques Cousteau’s Diving for Sunken Treasure fueled oceanic obsession in each Max Fischer (of Rushmore) and Steve Zissou (of, The Life Aquatic).

All of this could account for the rising syllabus of novels, non-fiction, and performs to be present in Anderson’s personal canon. After all, not all homages are created equal. So right here’s a ranked record of the (finest) books within the Wes-iverse.

Learn ’em, then scheme.

12. Raleigh St. Clair, Dudley’s World 

I’ve methodology questions on this wander-y pop-psych challenge, analyzing a younger boy’s mysterious medical situation. (Its obscure entry-point resembles that of St. Clair’s earlier work, The Peculiar Neurodegenerative Inhabitants of Kazawa Atoll.) We by no means get a way of the why, the how, or the what-to-do about Dudley. Simply quite a lot of othering description.

St. Clair’s prolonged digressions additionally convey an actual scorn for his poor topic. I imply, mocking the hat? It strains medical ethics.

11. Burris & Burris, Disappearance of The Sixth Grade

This Kafkaesque tackle public training type of talks to Louis Sachar’s (actual) Sideways Tales from Wayside Faculty. However this allegedly YA property is way headier. So heady, in truth, that this grownup bought misplaced within the metaphor. Neither Burris clarifies whether or not its the category or the assemble that has, lastly, “disappeared.”

10. Eli Money, Previous Custer 

On its launch, most critics disparaged this bloated historic effort from the love (and dope-)sick Eli Money. Consensus went out of its strategy to name this posturing Neo-Cowboy, who struggled to put himself someplace within the McMurtry-McCarthy-Stegner idiom, “not a genius.”

However I’m a easy girl, and a sucker for a transparent log-line. In any case, everybody already is aware of Custer died at Little Bighorn. The revisionist presupposition that “possibly he didn’t” is drama, outlined.

9. Max Fischer, Heaven and Hell

Although definitely an enchancment on his freshman (12 months) effort—a watery, unofficial adaptation of Peter Maas’ Serpico—Heaven and Hell does endure from cliche. The high-octane battle thriller is enjoyable to think about staged, however dialogue tends to be overwrought. Particularly within the predictable denouement.

(However I observe that is simply one pupil journalist’s opinion.)

8. Isaac Clarke, The Woman From Jupiter

Is that this one slightly spinoff of a lesser Asimov? Certain! However the artwork work on this sci-fi spec a couple of stranded Jupiterian is actually gasp-worthy. Positively would absorb my runaway’s suitcase.

7. Etheline Tenenbaum, Household of Geniuses 

This boastful survey is, on the one hand, very readable. The prose describing this uncommon however compelling household dynamic is clipped and clarion. And in the long run, I do purchase Tenenbaum’s argument. These children are fairly gifted.

That stated, one will get the sense that the writer is lacking one thing key by failing to seize any of the kids’s interiority.

6. Gertrude Worth, The Francine Odysseys 

A private favourite, this out-of-print gem captures the distinctive poignance of an inter-species friendship with grace and gravitas. Would additionally absorb my runaway’s suitcase.

5. Edited by Arthur Howitzer Jr., A Hundred French Dispatches: An Anthology

Together with world-class reporting from the likes of New Journalist superstars Lucinda Krementz, J.Okay.L. Berenson, and Roebuck Wright, this rangy anthology is a must have for any critical journal fan.

However a few of the items right here collected stand the check of time higher than others. My favourite contributions on this dense however rewarding doorstop are from Wright. Krementz’s glib observations on a nascent counter-culture (“Revisions to a Manifesto”) might come off dismissive to a contemporary revolutionary.

4. Henry Sherman, Accounting for All the things

Stuffed with terribly sensible recommendation, this helpful handbook is probably not essentially the most gripping learn, however it’s going to put your messy home so as. In Mr. Sherman’s succesful arms, I bought a heat fuzzy feeling of security. Like each promise can be stored, each bother washed away.

3. Margot Tenenbaum, Three Performs

By turns visceral and acidic, these dramas discover tamped craving and the price of thwarted lust. I observe a curious distinction right here between creator and creation. The dialogue in Erotic Transference is as bloody because the writer—a notoriously eccentric recluse—is dry.

2. Conrad Earp, Asteroid Metropolis

Of the three dramatists on this record, Earp is clearly essentially the most developed. This later work from an American hero is a confidently unusual, surrealist puzzle-box, and stands in sharp distinction to the maestro’s early melodramas. Is it a chook, is it a aircraft? A ebook? Or a tv particular? These questions gasoline a story that places a “publish” earlier than fashionable.

1. Our Nationwide Treasure, The Grand Budapest Resort

This fantastically advised, intently noticed chronicle of an “elegant previous spoil” captures a bygone previous world. The prose is lush, the characters are compelling, and all the eye to element is on level. Could also be one of the best banana within the bunch.

(P.S. Extra on the Moonrise titles could be discovered right here.)