Moby-Dick

Service95 Recommends is the home of the books we love and reviews from our contributors. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville is a classic American novel set in the backdrop of the 19th-century whaling industry.

What Ocean Says: “I have always felt that Melville was the writer who enacted Whitman’s decree for American multiplicity in ways far richer and complex than Whitman did himself. A book that simply refuses to compromise, that employs the autobiographical gaze to suggest radical modes of queerness, polytheism as progressive self-knowledge, expansive meditations on whiteness, both in regards to the whale’s purity and to race, Moby-Dick forges the allegory of the hunt as a doomed American quest for self-knowledge...”

What They Say: “It’s a tribute to Melville’s imagination that his book remains so strongly in ours. He may have done for the whale what Peter Benchley’s Jaws did for the shark – recreating the animal as an icon of otherness. He invests cetaceans with their own intrinsic beauty and in doing so, he pre-empted our conception of animals we know to be highly sentient and entirely matriarchal, expressing their own culture through their sonar clicks”— The Guardian

Available on Bookshop.org, Waterstones and Barnes & Noble

For more book recommendations, subscribe to our newsletter

Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese American writer, professor, photographer, and author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous