Browsing through the sublime West Village bookstore, Three Lives & Company, last month, I came across Stoner, a recent addition to the superb New York Review of Books Classics Series. I made a mental note to see if our library owned it (and indeed we do).

The story is simple enough: William Stoner grows up on a farm, goes to college to study agriculture, changes his major to English, decides to continue school and get his Ph.D., marries the first woman with whom he falls in love, has a kid, teaches at the university of forty years, then dies soon to be forgotten by pretty much everyone. But this novel is so much more than its simple story; Stoner is an extraordinarily well-told story of a seemingly ordinary life.

Williams writes what he describes in a 1981 interview in Ploughshares as "plain" style. His prose is unadorned and spare, yet makes for addictive reading. Viking Press published the book in 1965 to virtually no acclaim and modest sales.

When the book was published in Britain in 1973, shortly after Williams had won the National Book Award for Augustus, reviewer C.P. Snow asked, "Why is this book not famous?" I wondered the same thing upon stumbling across this book over 40 years after its publication. NYRB has brought the book back in print, your local library owns it, and now you can discover this gem of a book for yourself. Please make room on your list of what to read next for Stoner by John Williams.