Liste stupova književne povijesti

Liste najboljih, temeljnih književnih djela svih vremena često su predvidljive i zamorne, no ove osobne liste objavljene na blogu Big Other zanimljive su jer uključuju i mnoga manje poznata djela, a izbornici uglavnom imaju nekonvencionalan ukus. Iako će se tu naći i Dante i Shakespeare, važnije je, barem meni, pojavljivanje autora kao što su primjerice Flann O'Brien, Barry Hannah, Gary Lutz, Michael Martone, David Markson, Patrik Ourednik... te čak nekih stripova.

William Walsh

After examining three bookshelf walls in our home—one in the living room and two in the basement (one on the “finished” side of the basement and one of the side of the basement with the boiler and the washer/drier), here’s a list of fifty books that pillar my reading and writing life:

1. Success by Martin Amis
2. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
3. Leviathan by Paul Auster
4. The Fermata by Nicholson Baker
5. 60 Stories by Donald Barthelme
6. The Watch by Rick Bass
7. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
8. Among the Thugs by Bill Buford
9. The Most Beautiful Woman in Town by Charles Bukowski
10. The Stranger by Albert Camus
11. Cathedral by Raymond Carver
12. Spanking the Maid by Robert Coover
13. Samuel Johnson is Indignant by Lydia Davis
14. White Noise by Don DeLillo
15. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
16. The White Album by Joan Didion
17. American Tabloid by James Ellroy
18. Zeroville by Steve Erickson
19. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
20. Rock Springs by Richard Ford
21. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
22. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
23. Reasons to Live by Amy Hempel
24. Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson
25. Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones
26. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
27. Dubliners by James Joyce
28. Ulysses by James Joyce
29. Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game by William Kennedy
30. Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer
31. Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson
32. Cruel Shoes by Steve Martin
33. Michael Martone by Michael Martone
34. Lila + Spence by Bobbi Anne Mason
35. Anagrams by Lorrie Moore
36. The Moons of Jupiter by Alice Munro
37. The Only Good Things Anyone Has Ever Done by Sandra Newman
38. My Father’s Son by Frank O’Connor
39. The Four Ways of Computing Midnight by Francis Phelan
40. Slow Learner by Thomas Pynchon
41. A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
42. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
43. To Absent Friends by Red Smith
44. The Palm at the End of the Mind by Wallace Stevens
45. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
46. American Genius by Lynne Tillman
47. Killings by Calvin Trillin
48. Collected Stories by Eudora Welty
49. Birdsong by James P. White
50. The Collected Poems by W.B. Yeats

 Tim Horvath

The Top Five:

As widely as my tastes ebb and flow, these five remain, stalwarts, five friends I want with me on my desert island with little to unite them except each’s brash individuality.

1. Mating by Norman Rush. My Everest, slopes of anthropology, ethics, politics, psychology slowly traversed by the path of character

2. The Periodic Table by Primo Levi. All the more significant since I was abysmal at chemistry.

3. Cosmicomics/TZero by Italo Calvino. The oyster of the universe.

4. Visible Worlds by Marilyn Bowering. A book I’ve had to read several times, since the plot is so intricate, but whose language glimmers like an ice field.

5. The Atlas by William T. Vollmann. A stunning array of styles and places for inveterate and would-be wanderers—travels in the possibilities of narrative.

These next couple were highly significant when I was a teenager and remain so:

6. Saints and Strangers by Angela Carter. Just quoted “The Fall River Ax Murders,” last week.

7. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. Every Saturday for a year or so I had detention for an accumulation of small offenses, and I’d slip off to Bombay for the duration.

I Inherit a Box:

A guy who shared an apartment with my dad, Mark Johnson, a great writer and reader, left behind a box with a bunch of amazing things—a timely package.

8. Island People by Coleman Dowell. In simple garb, boundless refractions of reality.

9. RE/Search #11: Pranks Introduced me to the notion that a prank can be a work of art.

10. The Houses of Children by Coleman Dowell. Each story redefining what the genre could do for me. I still don’t understand what Dowell is up to.

11. Ah Pook Is Here by William Burroughs. Not the most well known, but what was in the box was in the box.

12. Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautremont.

From Paul West’s Sheer Fiction—gateway book par excellence, which sent me to seek out many other books:

13. Sheer Fiction by Paul West

14. The Case Worker by George Konrad

15. The City Builder by George Konrad

16. A Certain Lucas by Julio Cortázar (and from there on to Blow Up and Beyond)

17. The American Woman in the Chinese Hat by Carole Maso

18. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa

College discoveries, some from classes and some from the parallel education of avoiding work:

19. The Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche. I swear that for one night I became Nietzsche for a project, even if no tangible trace remains.

20. The Collected Dialogues of Plato.

21. The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests by Paul West. Language tethered to voice and amplified to carry across the desert.

22. Pitch Dark by Renata Adler. Found for a dollar at the Strand, it became the subject of my thesis. I loved in particular its borrowings, which I in turn borrowed for an aesthetic: “The world is everything that is the case. And in the second place because.” The first is from Wittgenstein, the second Nabokov. For a while this conjunction felt like enough.

23. Speedboat by Renata Adler. Discovered and read this one later, and it turns out to have been her greatest book.

24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. I’m glad I didn’t think of myself as a writer at that time, so I could surrender to this work fully as a reader.

25. Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn

Short Story Collections:

All of these I read in David Huddle’s class “The American Short Story,” and the collections, together, became a sort of color palate from which I could draw, forming, loosely, a template in my mind for the possibilities of the short story, one which is, of course, under continual renovation.

26. How It Was for Me by Andrew Sean Greer

27. Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett

28. Drown by Junot Díaz

29. Close Range by Annie Proulx

30. Birds of America by Lorrie Moore

31. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

32. Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson

Single Stories that I Taught that Have Had an Inordinate Impact on Me Far Given their Slight Lengths:

33. “Driving the Heart” by Jason Brown

34. “The Drowning” by Edward Delaney

35. “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff

36. “Marry the One Who Gets There First” by Heidi Julavits

37. “Demonology” by Rick Moody

Recent Pillars. Things I’ve Discovered in this Millennium:

38. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. His greatest, I think, and at the time it influenced me overwhelmingly.

39. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

40. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

41. The Collected Stories by Vladimir Nabokov

42. Carpenter’s Gothic by William Gaddis

43. The Great Man by Kate Christensen

44. Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler

45. The Ask by Sam Lipsyte

46. Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto by Joshua Cohen

47. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko

48. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

49. The Human Stain by Philip Roth

50. The Tesseract by Alex Garland

Dan Wickett

If this were truly an honest list, there’d be around 34 Dzanc titles and the other 16 titles would have a healthy sprinkling of Dzanc imprint titles. I’m going to hold those off the list though. Mostly.

1. One Penny Black by Edwin Palmer Hoyt – it’s a book on stamp collecting, which I was into back in the second grade. I believe the record will show in the P.D. Graham Elementary School Library that I might have checked this book out for a couple of consecutive school years, showing early signs of some of the literary obsessions I’d show later on.

2. The Great Brain by John Fitzgerald – another book from that time period, one that I probably read a couple hundred times.

3. World’s End by T. C. Boyle – the first of his work that I read, shortly after a write-up in Rolling Stone. If this isn’t his best novel, it’s right up in the top 2 or 3, and remains my favorite to this day.

4 and 5. Best American Short Stories 1987 and Norton Critical Anthology of Short Fiction – I’m lumping these two together because they were the two “text” books for two classes I took in the Fall of 1988 and because of them (and my lack of memory at what authors were from which title) discovering authors like Ralph Lombreglia, Mark Costello, Elizabeth Tallent, Madison Smartt Bell, Robert Coover and many others.

6. Pricksongs & Descants by Robert Coover – Spinning from reading “The Babysitter” most logically from the aforementioned Norton anthology, I found the collection from which it was published and reading through was eye-opening as to what fiction could be, how it could stretch, etc.

7. Keeneland by Alyson Hagy. Honestly, it’s not my favorite of her works, though I like it a lot. It’s here because without that novel, there was no Emerging Writers Network, without the EWN, I never meet Steven Gillis and we have no Dzanc Books that I’m a part of.

8. Animal Farm by George Orwell. Undoubtedly the book that I’ve read more times as an adult than any other.

9. Dune by Frank Herbert. In 7th grade I was plowing through books in a Science Fiction & Fantasy class and the teacher sent me to the librarian with a note–please find something challenging for Mr. Wickett to read and Dune is what she gave me and it was a solid choice–so many storylines and layers that over the next five to ten years I probably read it, and the subsequent (Frank Herbert authors at-least) Dune titles and maybe, just maybe by the last time understood everything Herbert was trying to do.

10. Erasure by Percival Everett. Again, it might not be my favorite of Everett’s work, but Mike Magnuson damn near demanded I read it, and in doing so unleashed a fervor on my part to find and read everything Everett has written, which is now up around 20 titles when you include the poetry collections. Thank goodness Erasure was as good as it was as it allowed me into this wonderful world of writing.
11. The All-Girl Football Team by Lewis Nordan. I’m very thankful for Gary Fisketjon and those Vintage paperbacks of the late 80′s which allowed me to discover some great books that had been published just prior to my becoming a much more voracious reader. To fall into Sugar Mecklin’s Arrow Catcher, Mississippi was a wonderful thing–truly one of the masters at combining humor and sorrow in the same sentence and getting away with it.

12. Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Another that I’ve read many times and somehow find something new in it each time to love.

13. The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake. In an undergraduate writing class, the professor told me one of my stories reminded her of this author’s work. A) She was nuts, but B) incredible for letting me know this author’s work existed. The writing is spare and powerful and mesmerizing and it’s beyond unfortunate that this would be the only work of his that would ever be completed.

14. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. My dad gave me this when I was in high school I think and I believe on attempt number ten or eleven, sometime after college, I finally (think) understood how to read this incredibly put together novel.

15. Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America by Steve Almond. One, I love chocolate myself, but two, this was one of the first non-fiction books that I read that took an author’s focus on one single thing that he/she was obviously fascinated by. It’s a genre that I have come to love, finding some great books on topics I’d never have considered interesting that were indeed stunningly so. This still is one of the best in my opinion.

16. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. Settle down all of you whose blood just went up a degree or two. I’ve written a blog post on this in the past–this book got my then eleven year old daughter into reading in a huge way. First it was just this and the sequels, but then it was Jane Austen, and Emily Bronte,and Leo Tolstoy.

17. If I Don’t Six by Elwood Reid. A book by somebody I knew, and not a former teacher, but a former classmate. And finding this book and getting back in touch with Elwood led to him leading me to authors like Mike Magnuson,and Brady Udall, and Dean Bakopoulos, and Tom Franklin, and William Gay, and those led me to Lee K. Abbott, and Barry Hannah, and Beth Ann Fennelly, and Chad Simpson,and Jeremy Chamberlin and Natalie Bakopoulus and so on and on.

18 Child of God by Cormac McCarthy. In MQR, Madison Smartt Bell called this the best American novel about necrophilia ever written. This may say something about me, but I had to find a copy. This led to me reading those first five McCarthy novels well before All the Pretty Horses made McCarthy the much bigger name he is today. It’s still a tough call for me today on which of those first five is my favorite–I think it changes every time I pick one of the up.

19. A Plague of Dreamers by Steve Stern. Wow, you can do a lot with a novella and with a trio of them, even more. Stern’s mix of magic realism, southern/midwestern Jewish life, humor, yiddish, etc. is wild, entertaining, incredibly well written and packs an emotional punch as well. Damn.

20. Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor. Another one that I think I honestly have to say I had damn near no clue what I was reading the first time or two with it–well worth the additional efforts though.

21. The Singing Fish by Peter Markus. I heard Peter read from this while at a reading I attended to see somebody else. It’s one of the only times I’ve rushed my way through a crowd after a reading to get to the table–I simply couldn’t wait to find out how to get a copy of what he had just read aloud. This also led to my asking him if he had anything new to publish, which also led to him suggesting both Robert Lopez and Pamela Ryder, two others writers Dzanc has had the pleasure of publishing.

22. The Seed Thieves by Robert Fanning. a) I really like Robert’s poetry, and b) I had gone to see Robert read when I “discovered” (can you discover somebody with three books out already?) Peter Markus.

23. Pafko at the Wall by Don Delillo. The original novella as published by Harper’s, later the prologue of Underworld, and then again put out as a hardcover novella. This is the single best piece of fiction I’ve read. To this date. And I expect it to hold that spot for some time. I finished it the day I bought the issue of Harper’s, probably thought about it for a couple of weeks and then re-read it. Re-read it again when I read Underworld, and have read it a time or two since. Ridiculously powerful.

24. The Cider House Rules by John Irving. Not my favorite of his (probably A Prayer for Owen Meany), but maybe the novel that has most proven to me to stick through something I may not be fully enjoying but am not hating. I struggled through the early 50 to 70 pages of that novel but once I hit a certain point probably finished it in one very fast sitting.

25. Christine by Stephen King. I had avoided all things Stephen King up to the point this was out in paperback. I picked it up one afternoon in my parents’ house (they’d read everything by him at that point), opened it up to see just what it was that they loved, and a few hours later, sitting in a mostly dark, dusk-filled room, turned the last page. Still not exactly my cup of tea on a regular basis, but the guy can tell a story. He can hook you in.

26. The Open Curtain by Brian Evenson. This one I’m almost positive Aaron Burch told me to read. And then we tried to talk about it and it would have made the WORST podcast ever. Two guys so blown away we had no words to truly speak beyond starting hackneyed sentences and having the other say “Right!?!” over and over. This opened my world to another one of those writers that I’ve tried to read everything they’ve published (and he makes it difficult).

27. Tenorman by David Huddle. Probably the first time I’d spent close to full book money for what I originally considered half a book–this novella was the first time I’d read a stand-alone novella that I didn’t care how much I’d paid for it. He’s a writer many more should be reading.

28. Unsaid IV. I do indeed realize this is not a book, per se, but this might be the single best issue of a literary journal ever published. It’s the one I’ve had the best time reading–the discovery of writers I’d not read before (Peter Christopher, though I realize had I been wise enough to more regularly have been reading The Quarterly 25 years ago I’d have made that discovery then, among others) and great work from those I already liked (Evenson, and Markus to name two). It’s a brick of an issue and damn near every work shines.

29. The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall. The first time one of my book reviews was snagged by a newspaper. With a little bit of editing, The Capital Times took the review I had written of this incredibly well done debut novel. Definitely one of my favorite books since I’ve started the EWN.

30. Smonk by Tom Franklin. I don’t know that this will make many top anything lists besides top offensive characters lists but I loved this book. It’s funny as hell, dark, violent, energetic. Almost seemingly written in a rush, like Franklin felt the need to get Smonk the character out of his system as fast as possible so he could get back to ‘real’ writing, but this one is as real as it gets.

31. Family Men by Steve Yarbrough. A book I special ordered simply due to an ad in The Georgia Review. I didn’t have internet access or any great ideas on where to find new authors but really enjoyed that journal and so assumed they must only advertise books they’d be interested in, etc. (a little naive, no?). His debut was a great collection and has led me to reading over half a dozen great reads over the last decade or so.

32. Cerebus by Dave Sim. 300 monthly issues of his comic from 1977 to sometime in the 2000′s going from a Conan the Barbarian parody (with an aardvark protagonist) to a look at class, politics, religion, love, obsession, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, gender warfare, and one of the most unique (and sometimes maddening) blendings of Christianity, Judaism, and Muslimism put together. Before Scott Snyder almost single-handedly gave me reason to be buying more than a few comics a month again, for a few years this was the sole reason I’d hit my local store every few weeks. There are definitely chunks I simply do not get, but the artwork, the lettering, the dedication, and a huge swatch in the middle that is simply brilliantly done and funny and entertaining, etc. An achievement.

33. Demon Theory by Stephen Graham Jones. Read it because a) it was a LitBlog Co-Op selection and b) because MacAdam/Cage published it. Not my typical drink of water–a trilogy of horror movies written in something between fictional and screenplay form, with a TON of footnotes (mostly about horror movies,but many about hair metal bands of the 80′s. Maybe a third of the way through the first “film,” and I was hooked. Who the hell was this SGJ guy and had he written anything else? Bad question to ask unless you’ve got some time on your hands–novels, story collections, stories galore, and in every single style and topic you could imagine–nothing done more than once (though some sequels to his more horror/fantasy-ish novels are in the works now). A guy who knows how to plot a freaking story.

34. Garner by Kirstin Allio. The first time the LitBlog Co-Op has me nominate a title and it was selected by those peers to be the LBC Read This! for that quarter. More of a naturesque book than I’ve ever enjoyed. Something about Allio’s writing completely caught me off guard, pulled me in and entranced me until the mystery of the book was semi-solved–it was never the point though.

35. AM/PM by Amelia Gray. Somehow I had missed the fact that there was an Amelia Gray out there publishing simply wicked stories in the world. At least until this book was published. Sometimes liking a publisher and trying most of what they publish, even when you don’t know what you’re getting into, leads to great discoveries and this was one of those. Now Amelia Gray is one that I search for, hope to find and devour every word I can track down from.

36. Daddy’s by Lindsay Hunter. Same deal as number 35 and wow, same publisher (Featherproof Books). Lindsay’s a fearless writer and a pretty badass reader as well.

37. The Compression of Scars by Kellie Wells. Purchased most likely because it won the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award, one that I look forward to every year, and rarely am disappointed by, but possibly because I’d read a story of hers in the Kenyon Review and was amazed by it. A book that might have been more likely to see itself published by FC2 than by the University of Georgia Press. Chances taken and succeeded with.

38. By the Light of the Jukebox by Dean Paschal. A short story collection that I routinely list as one of five I’d take to that mythical (we hope) desert island. Similar to the Wells listed above in that Paschal’s starting points are often wild: a story from the pov of a deranged, wild dog stumbling through a neighborhood; another from the mind of the run of a litter, from his position in the owner’s freezer; an emergency room surgeon heavily considering letting a repeat alcohol abuser die on the ER table (if not actually giving him a nudge); and more. And I’m happy to say that Dzanc has brought this one back to life in our rEprint series.

39. The Baby Tree by Erin McGraw. I went to see Nancy Zafris read at the Thurber House in Columbus, OH and Erin read with her. I picked up her novel after the reading and was just blown away–it’s another on the mythical desert island list (I think all five are now on this list)–it’s a fantastic book, short but full, and maybe one of the best examples I can think of on how to approach tricky religious issues from a fictional standpoint.

40. The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills. Mills has created almost a sub-genre within literary fiction that he’s still the only person writing in. This is the first of his amazing string of novels in which protagonists are seemingly normal, working-class, blokes that get caught up in something of a circular nature, be it work, or relationship, or their homes, etc. Each is incredibly readable, funny, and difficult to put down once picked up, and this is the one that launched me fully into his output.

41. Other Electricities by Ander Monson. What in the hell is this? Short stories? A novel? All jammed into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Radio frequencies. Stories set up by temperatures. Same events occurring in more than one story. Sometimes maybe with subtle differences. The first Monson I read, and basically the first of everything he’s written as he’s got a unique mind when it comes to telling his “stories,” and one that I want to watch continue to develop over the years.

42. Loose Balls edited by Terry Pluto. I believe it’s the first book I read written in the Oral History method–interviews with many people. It’s about the American Basketball Association and has given me hours of entertainment over the years. The chapter on the Spirit of Memphis would alone be worth the price you’ll have to pay to read this on your kindle if you have one.

43. The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon by Charles Jensen. If I remember right, this was not quite eligible for the New Michigan Press chapbook contest due to being too short by a page or two, but it intrigued their editors there enough to get it published. Thank goodness. What a strange, enticing, interestingly done work from Jensen. One that truly sticks with you while you’re reading the next three or four books you’ll read, often questioning, I wonder how Jensen would have brought this aspect into the story.

44. The Law of Strings by Steven Gillis. It’s just coming out now as this list is hitting the world thanks to Atticus Books, but I’ve had the pleasure of reading these stories as they were written, then again when they hit individual journals and now am re-reading them all with book covers around them and it helps me realize how lucky I am to get to work with this guy on a daily (hourly?) basis.

45. Cataclym Baby by Matt Bell. MudLuscious Press is putting out some of the best books around today–certainly some of the most inventive. Another one that I remember reading many of the individual pieces as they were seeing the light of day, but all at once, together in one wonderful novel(la)-y read? Another that I’m happy to say was penned/typed by a very good friend.

46. All Things, All at Once by Lee K. Abbott. A New & Selected brick of a story collection from one that I consider one of the masters of the short story? Has to be here. funny, sad, masculine and not. Sentences I’d never ever ever try to diagram but would love to see the result of such work. Abbott is a wonder and it was about time somebody large (Norton) put out such a collection.

47. The Journal of Antonio Montoya by Rick Collignon. The first of a quarter (so far) of titles set in Collignon’s fictional, Guadalupe, New Mexico. A mix of realism and magic realism. The creation of a city and families and ghosts and myths, Collignon puts you into a dreamlike trance as you read through and his debut truly set the stage well.

48. Orphans by Charles D’Ambrisio. The book that let me know it was okay to read essay collections. Didn’t matter if I was interested in the topic or not. Not if the author wrote about his topics this well.

49. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. I use this book in every author interview I do. And I truly enjoyed it the few times I’ve read it.

50. All Over by Roy Kesey. I know, I know, I said I wasn’t going to fill this up with Dzanc Books titles. This though, it was our first. It’s one I read in manuscript form probably six times. I read it in galley form, again in final form. I’ve picked it up dozens of times since we published it in late 2007 and read a story or two. I’m amazed every single time I pick it up just how incredible it is. How varied.

 Derek White

1. Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You—Frank Stanford
2. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts—Amos Tutuola
3. Anti-Oedipus—Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari
4. The Sound and the Fury—William Faulkner (& As I Lay Dying)
5. Don Quixote—Miguel Cervantes
6. Hero With a Thousand Faces—Joseph Campbell
7. Man and His Symbols—Carl Jung
8. The World as Will and Representation—Arthur Schopenhauer
9. Wittgenstein’s Mistress—David Markson
10. Codex Seraphinianus—Luigi Serafini
11. Finnegans Wake—James Joyce
12. The Age of Wire and String—Ben Marcus
13. The Selfish Gene—Richard Dawkins
14. On Growth and Form—D’Arcy Thompson
15. Frankenstein—Mary Shelley
16. Stories in the Worst Way—Gary Lutz (& his others)
17. The Odyssey—Homer
18. Cathedral—Raymond Carver (& his others)
19. Motorman—David Ohle
20. Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine—Stanley Crawford
21. Dreams of a Robotic Dancing Bee—James Tate (& his others)
22. The Feynman Lectures on Physics—Richard Feynman
23. The Crying of Lot 49—Thomas Pynchon (& also V.)
24. Journey to the End of the Night— Céline
25. Collected Fictions—Jorge Luis Borges
26. A Humument—Tom Phillips
27. Silence—John Cage
28. Archive Fever—Jacques Derrida (& generally his opus)
29. Excitability—Diane Williams
30. Blood Meridian—Cormac McCarthy
31. For Whom the Bell Tolls—Ernest Hemingway
32. Creative Evolution—Henri Bergson (& Matter and Memory)
33. Canto General—Pablo Neruda
34. The Singing Fish—Peter Markus
35. In Watermelon Sugar—Richard Brautigan
36. Black Elk Speaks—John G. Neihardt
37. Tropic of Cancer—Henry Miller
38. Blindness—José Saramago
39. The Fountainhead—Ayn Rand
40. One Hundred Years of Solitude—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
41. A History of the Imagination—Norman Lock
42. Kamby Bolongo Mean River—Robert Lopez (& others)
43. Garden State—Rick Moody
44. White Noise—Don Delillo
45. Envisioning Information—Edward Tufte
46. The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard (& The Drowned World)
47. The Wild Boys—William Burroughs (& Naked Lunch)
48. The Catcher in the Rye—J.D. Salinger
49. The Stranger—by Albert Camus (& others)
50. The Popol Vuh
51. The I Ching
52. Grimm’s Fairy Tales—the brothers Grimm

Amber Sparks

In no particular order:

Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

Le Morte D’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory

The Auroras of Autumn and Harmonium by Wallace Stevens

Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

Absalom, Absalom! By William Faulkner

Hamlet and King Lear by William Shakespeare

The Waves by Virginia Woolf

The Theatre and Its Double by Antonin Artaud

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Ada or Ardor and Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China by Lu Xun

War and Peace and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

The Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson

The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Endgame, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable by Samuel Beckett

A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata by August Strindberg

Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen

The World of Ten Thousand Things by Charles Wright

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery

Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein

The Hothouse by Harold Pinter

The Maids by Jean Genet

Beowulf

In Parenthesis by David Jones

John Donne’s poems

Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves

Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce

The Garlic Ballads by Mo Yan

The Theban plays by Sophocles

The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

The Tower by W.B. Yeats

The poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Cantos by Ezra Pound

The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz

Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen

Little, Big by John Crowley

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov

Invisible Cities and Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human and The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus

Pastoralia by George Saunders

Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard

Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey

 Janey Smith

1. AA Bronson, File Magazine, Queer Zines (with Phillip Aarons).
2. Adam Parfrey, Apocalypse Culture, The Manson File.
3. Alfred Jarry, Adventures in ‘Pataphysics: Collected Works 1
4. Andy Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries.
5. Bob Flanagan, Slave Sonnets, Fuck Journal.
6. Brandon Stosuy, Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 (with Dennis Cooper & Eileen Myles).
7. Burgo Partridge, A History of Orgies.
8. Cookie Mueller, Ask Dr. Mueller: The Writings of Cookie Mueller.
9. Dennis Cooper, Little Caesar series, the George Miles Cycle.

10. Diter Rot, 246 Little Clouds.
    11. Dominique Laporte, History of Shit.
    12. Eileen Myles, Cool For You, Not Me, The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art.
    13. Garth Williams, Baby Farm Animals.
    14. Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye, Blue of Noon, The Accursed Share, Vol.1, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939
    15. Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century.
    16. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle.
    17. Harriet Ann Watts, Three Painter Poets: Arp, Schwitters, Klee.
    18. Harry Matthews & Alastair Brotchie, Oulipo Compendium.
    19. Jacques Derrida, Futures: Of Jacques Derrida.
    20. Jaycee Dugard, A Stolen Life: A Memoir.
    21. Jean Cocteau, My Contemporaries.
    22. John Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance.
    23. John Marr, Murder Can Be Fun #13 – Death at Disneyland
    24. Kathy Acker, Great Expectations, Blood & Guts in High School, Don Quixote, Hannibal Lecter, My Father.
    25. Kenneth Koch, Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?: Teaching Great Poetry to Children.
    26. Mark Ryden & Marion Peck, Sweet Wishes.
    27. Marquis De Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings.
    28. Mike Echols, I Know My First Name Is Steven.
    29. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology.
    30. Paul Virilio, Pure War, Speed and Politics, Popular Defense and Ecological Disasters.
    31. Peter Kurten, Peter Kurten: A Study in Sadism (George Godwin), The Sadist (Karl Berg), The Monster of Dusseldorf: The Life and Trial of Peter Kurten (Margaret Seaton Wagner).
    32. Peter Sotos, Pure.
    33. Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant.
    34. Ray Johnson: The Paper Snake, How Sad I Am Today.
    35. Ron Jacobs, The Way The Wind Blew.
    36. Samuel R. Delany, Hogg.
    37. Scott O’Hara, Exit the Rubberman.
    38. Sebastian Horsley, Dandy in the Underworld: An Unauthorized Autobiography.
    39. Shel Silverstein, The Giving Tree, The Missing Piece.
    40. Stewart Home, Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War.
    41. Stewart Swezey, Amok Journal Sensuround Edition.
    42. Tom Comiita, O, The City of Nature, soUNDtext User’s Manual.
    43. Tony Duvert, Strange Landscape.
    44. Trevor Brown, My Alphabet.
    45. V. Vale & Andrea Juno, Research RE # 4/5, RE # 6/7.
    46. Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto.
    47. William J. Higginson, The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Teach, and Appreciate Haiku.
    48. William S. Burroughs, Exterminator!, The Job, The Wild Boys.
    49. Yoko Ono, Grapefruit.
    50. Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers, Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Complete Writings of Yves Klein.

Christine Schutt

The books listed come in order of memory and recent courses taught at high school and college levels; in both instances, pleasure. Every year: Shakespeare, Dickinson, Lowell, Bishop, Frost. I like many living writers, too, but I have decided to interpret the assignment as listing writers whose work I read again and again.

1. Shakespeare’s plays, particularly: Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Richard III, Twelfth Night, Richard II. Lines come back that make me cry. Lear’s “Never, never, never, never, never.”

2. Emily Dickinson
One of the astonishments is how many great poems there are—too many. The titles may not be rightly capped but these tumble out:
I Felt a Funeral in My Brain
The Bustle in the House
Twas Just this Time last Year I Died
The Distance that the Dead have Gone .
I heard a Fly Buzz when I Died
Just Lost When I was Saved
Because I could not stop for death
Pain has an element of Blank
A Certain Slant of Light Winter Afternoons
My Life it Stood a loaded Gun
The Soul Selects her own Society
I could not Live with you it would be Life

3. Robert Frost, especially “Home Burial”

4. Elizabeth Bishop, especially the poem “Crusoe in England”

5. Robert Lowell, especially the last book, Day by Day

6. Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights and the essays

7. W. G. Sebald, Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants

8. William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

9. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

10. Homer, Just the epithets are colossal. . .Hector, Breaker of Horse

11. Virginia Woolf, especially To the Lighthouse and The Waves

12. William Faulkner, especially As I Lay Dying

13. Flannery O’Connor, especially the stories and their endings

14. Louise Gluck, Averno

15. Denis Johnson, Angels, Jesus’ Son, Train Dreams

16. Herman Melville, especially Billy Budd and “Bartleby the Scrivner”

17. Nathaniel Hawthorne, especially The Scarlet Letter

18. John Cheever, especially the drum roll endings

19. Henri Cole, especially Blackbird and Wolf, Middle Earth

20. Barry Hannah, especially Airships, Ray, and Hey Jack!

21. Cormac McCarthy, especially Child of God

 

Davis Schneiderman

In honor of William Gass’s birthday, here is a list of some of my own touchstones (at least of the moment).

1. Proust. All of In Search of Lost Time. Any translation.
2. Naked Lunch. Not Burroughs’ absolute best, but his best known…and the most important for historical reasons.
3. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass. Feed your head.
4. Empire of the Senseless, Kathy Acker.The ultimate post-colonial fantasy.
5. The Castle. Kafka saved my life.
6. Omensetter’s Luck. Not Gass’ best-known, but it’s one the best books I’ve every read twice. Period.
7. VAS: An Opera in Flatland, Steve Tomasula. One of my partners at &NOW, but one of my idols for making this book.
8. Geek Love, Katherine Dunn.We told you we had living, breathing monstrosities.
9. Calendar of Regrets, Lance Olsen. Bosch and Dan Rather.
10. Moby Dick. My children pretend to be Queequeg.
11. A Novel of Thank You, Gertrude Stein. Thank you very much.
12. The Silent Cry, Kenzaburo Oe. Two brothers return to their ancestral home…
13. Incest, from a Journal of Love, Anais Nin.Better than Miller.
14. Funeral Rites, Jean Genet. Eating a cat.
15. Double or Nothing, Raymond Federman. The voice in the closet.
16. The Lost Ones, Samuel Beckett. The only humorless Beckett work? Federman’s favorite, from when derives the phrase “The twofold vibration.”
17. Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino. Marco. Polo.
18. Liberty’s Excess, Lidia Yuknavitch. Now I know how Joan of Arc felt.
19. The Process, Brion Gysin. The most perfect novel you’ve never read.
20. The Sheltering Sky/Let it Come Down/The Spider’s House: 3-way tie. Tea in the Sahara.
21. Pinocchio in Venice, Robert Coover. He is the fox and the cat.
22. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, Hunter S. Thompson. Nixon = funny.
23. NOX, Anne Carson. You unfold this book; it enfolds you.
24. Reality Hunger, David Shields. Not the first to say these things, and that’s the point.
25. The Melancholy of Anatomy, Shelley Jackson. You put your inside out…
26. Keyhole Factory, William Gillespie. Limited edition from Spineless; forthcoming from Soft Skull. Unbelievably fantastic.
27. The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano. Tales of the disappearing duo.
28. The Atrocity Exhibition, J.G. Ballard. The expanded edition includes the interior of a human chest.
29. Peter Doyle, John Vernon.An out-of-print gem about Walt Whitman’s lover and Napoleon’s penis.
30. The Jiri Chronicles and Other Fictions, Debra Di Blasi. With adfictions and products galore!
31. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami.Toru Okada’s cat runs away.
32. Is it Sexual Harassment Yet?, Cris Mazza. Well, is it?
33. Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann. Not The Magic Mountain. Which is why I like it so much.
34. Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison. Not her most innovative novel, linguistically, but the one I teach again and again for the way it immediately resonates with undergraduates.
35. The Crying of Lot 49. Thomas Pynchon. Not Gravity’s Rainbow. Which is why I like it so much.

36-49: 14 other Burroughs books to read

1. The Third Mind, with Brion Gysin. Try to find a copy of this cut-up manifesto.
1. Cities of the Red Night. The beginning of the late-career renaissance.
2. The Place of Dead Roads. Part 2 of the above.
3. The Western Lands. Part 3.
4. Queer. The birth of the routine.
5. The Soft Machine. The human body, get it?
6. The Ticket that Exploded. The win that’s a loss.
7. Electronic Revolution. Take it to the streets.
8. Nova Express. Break through in Grey Room.
9. The Job (with Daniel Odier). And again.
10. Ghost of Chance. Lemurs, lemurs, everywhere.
11. The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead. Chicago 1968 set in another galaxy.
12. Port of Saints. Wild Boys 2, with more Wild Boys.
13. The Burroughs File. A selection of the small-press and little magazine text experiments.

50. The next book.

 John Reed

Animal Farm, George Orwell
The Purple Crayon, Crockett Johnson
Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle
Ulysses, James Joyce
Stephen Hero (The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), James Joyce
Batman
Superman
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, René Descartes
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
The Night Before Christmas, Clement Clarke Moore
Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak
The Giving Tree, Shel Silverstein
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Hardy Boys, Franklin W. Dixon
Little Peewee or, Now Open The Box
Babar, Jean de Brunhoff
Curious George, H. A. Rey
Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev
Less Than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach
Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder
Paul Revere’s Ride, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Christiane F, Christiane F and Susanne Flatauer
The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Clifford the Big Red Dog, Norman Bridwell
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
All Things Great and Small, James Harriet
The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling
Henry V, William Shakespeare
The Ugly Duckling
The Little Engine that Could, Watty Piper
Old MacDonald Had a Farm
Baby Farm Animals
Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
Nightmare of Reason, Ernst Pawel
The Basketball Diaries, Jim Carroll
Junkie, William Burroughs
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
The Story of George Washington Carver (70s scholastic biography)
Helen Keller (70s scholastic biogrpahy)
The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe

 Nick Potter

1. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
2. All Fall Down – Mary Caponegro
3. A Prank of Georges – Thalia Field & Abigail Lang
4. As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
5. Asterios Polyp – David Mazzucchelli
6. At Swim-Two-Birds – Flann O’Brien
7. Autumn of the Patriarch – Garbriel García Márquez
8. Berg – Ann Quin
9. Big Questions – Anders Nilsen
10. Bone – Jeff Smith
11. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
12. Dies: a Sentence – Vanessa Place
13. Epileptic – David B.
14. Europeana – Patrik Ourdenik
15. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
16. Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
17. Hey, Wait… – Jason
18. Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
19. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
20. Jimmy Corrigan – Chris Ware
21. Labyrinths – Jorge Luis Borges
22. Memories of My Father Watching T.V. – Curtis White
23. Minor Angels – Antoine Volodine
24. Molloy – Samuel Beckett
25. Motorman – David Ohle
26. Pedro Páramo – Juan Rulfo
27. 60 Stories – Donald Barthelme
28. Sleepers Awake – Kenneth Patchen
29. Souls of the Labadie Tract – Susan Howe
30. Stories in the Worst Way – Gary Lutz
31. Take Five – D. Keith Mano
32. Tender Buttons – Gertrude Stein
33. The Age of Wire and String – Ben Marcus
34. The Art Lover – Carole Maso
35. The BFG – Roald Dahl
36. The Dead Father – Donald Barthelme
37. The Epileptic Bicycle – Edward Gorey
38. The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
39. The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman – Lawrence Stern
40. The Log of the SS Mrs Unguentine – Stanley Crawford
41. The Magic Kingdom – Stanley Elkin
42. The People of Paper – Salvador Plascencia
43. The Regular Man – Dina Kelberman
44. The Stranger – Albert Camus
45. The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien
46. The Tin Drum – Günter Grass
47. The Wavering Knife – Brian Evenson
48. Ulysses – James Joyce
49. Underworld – Don DeLillo
50. Wittgenstein’s Mistress – David Markson

David Peak

I am only listing books I have read—so a lot of very important books are getting left out. I’m aware of this. Also, I’m also leaving out the Bible because I shouldn’t have to explain why. These are simply the 50 books that have shaped my understanding of the written word, my place in the world, and how I perceive everything around me. I am not saying anything more than that. I am no authority.

1. Beowulf by Anonymous (???)

This book is pure fucking heavy metal. I’ve found that it’s best to read Beowulf while listening to a band like Blind Guardian. For some reason, I was obsessed with this story when I was a kid. For a long time, I thought the Goya painting “Saturn Devouring His Son” was Grendel eating some dude. I was wrong, obviously.

2. The Odyssey by Homer (8th Century BC)

Again, more heavy metal. Why are so many older books so heavy metal? I think it’s because life was much harder back then and you had to be good at sailing and swinging a sword in order to survive and mate. I probably wouldn’t have lasted long. Also, this book gave us the phrase “the wine-dark sea” which is just pure awesome.

3. The Republic by Plato (380 BC)

This whole book is worth reading just for “The Allegory of the Cave.” This is a book that keeps on giving. Once you read it, your whole world perception is affected. It’s like when Neo starts seeing the Matrix. You will begin to recognize the signs that life is showing you.

4. Poetics by Aristotle (c. 335 BC)

I found this in the communal laundry room of my first apartment building after moving to Chicago. I was nineteen years old. I had no internet and no television that whole year. After I read it, I started thinking critically about the way writing was classified, or the terms we use to describe the tradition, which has since turned into a huge problem for me. Now I can’t have fun while reading ☹

5. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (Early 14th Century)

Dante’s ambition is astounding and his language is as thick and taut as a rope, always pulling you forward along with him for the ride. I’ve found that reading a single canto each day is a good way to digest this without getting worn out.

6. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (Mid-14th Century)

Non-stop fucking, scheming, plotting and gossiping—this book is the precursor for modern television. It’s a slog to get through all one hundred stories, but the framework devised around their telling is nothing short of brilliant. Also, the descriptions of the Black Death in the beginning are seriously heavy metal. This book signifies the beginning of what would later come to be known as the structured novel.

7. Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare (Mid-to-Late 16th Century)

This book is way better than Hamlet, which always seemed overrated to me. I never felt like I had a handle on Gertrude or what her actual feelings for Claudius were. Oh, well. There’s no whiny prince in Titus Andronicus, just a ton of pretty disgusting violence and plans for revenge. I think of it as the 16th Century’s “I Spit on Your Grave.” It’s pretty great. More than almost any other play by Shakespeare, I feel that Titus has had a lasting influence—an influence we might not want to acknowledge. It was hated for centuries, but like a bad stain, it never went away—and there’s a reason for that. Bloodlust, as much as we might try to ignore it, has always fed creation.

8. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

Not much to say about this book. It’s really funny and it gave us the term “yahoo.” For that reason alone, it makes the list. Holds up really well even to this day and marks the first book on this list that could be considered a book of “grotesques.”

9. The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling by Henry Fielding (1749)

Okay, full disclosure, I never made it through this book, but I really, really want to. For its time, the book had a wildly conceptual structure. Basically, the story is told in mirroring themes, so the beginning of the book has themes that relate to the end of the book, the middle sections of the book mirror one another, etc. There’s a scene pretty early on where a woman gets accosted in the graveyard outside of the local church. It turns into a huge brawl and someone winds up getting clubbed with a thigh bone. Fight scenes—or crowd scenes—don’t get much better than this one.

10. The Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe (1833-1849)

It’s difficult to recognize now, but Poe essentially re-defined the way we tell stories, ratcheting the tension up one notch at a time. It’s powerful stuff—gruesome too. He even wrote a story about a murderous gorilla named Erik who dresses up in people clothes. It’s adorable.

11. Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard (1843)

One of the few books of philosophy I can really wrap my head around. I agree with almost none of it. Articulating that disagreement helped me better understand myself.

12. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (1847)

One of my favorites. I love everything about this book: the framing device, the characters, the cruelty, the location, and the use of weather. There’s a lot to be learned here. I’ve read this book more times than any other book.

13. Moby Dick by Herman Melville (1851)

This is probably the greatest book ever, in my opinion. By the time you’re done with it, you understand about all the different types of harpoons, and the rigging on ships. God, it’s so fucking awesome.

14. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1860-1861)

I love Dickens. His dialogue is hilarious, his characters are all different and memorable. Plus, there’s this. If you haven’t seen them, David Lean’s film adaptions from the 1940s are spot on.

15. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866)

I’ve read this book four times. At one point, I owned almost ten different versions of it. The Russians—namely Dostoyevsky—perfected the psychological novel. That’s fact. It will never get better than the Russians—and this book in particular.

16. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne (1870)

It has a giant squid in it. What else do you need to know?

17. The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche (1872)

The way it was taught to me, The Birth of Tragedy illuminates why, as spectators, we’re drawn to the pain of suffering of others. I’ve been obsessed with horror films since I can remember and reading through this book has helped me better understand the roots of that obsession. When considered alongside Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” this book takes on much more complicated and rewarding dimensions, offering an explanation of how images and symbols to convey messages and meaning in the first place. Which leads me into the next book on this list…

18. Matter and Memory by Henri Bergson (1896)

I was taught this book in a class called “The Philosophy of Film” or something like that. We watched movies like “Battleship Potemkin,” “Intolerance,” and “The Sacrifice.” Since then, Bergson’s writing has had a permanent influence on the way I perceive images and understand my place in the universe. It’s heavy stuff. Sometimes when I get drunk I talk about it too much and then I am embarrassed then next day when I wake up. If this kind of stuff suits you, I recommend moving on to Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 by Gilles Deleuze.

19. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (1914-1915)

To me, this book is the perfect balance of language-intensive interior monologue, stream of consciousness, and readability.

20. The Golem by Gustav Meyrink (1914)

Can you imagine hating your father so much that you cut open the arteries in your arms and stick them in holes you dug over his grave to give him back your bad blood? Can you imagine a better way to kill off a character? I can’t. This is another one of those books that’s echoed in popular culture over and over again. It’s written beautifully.

21. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (1919)

I am from the Midwest. All Midwesterners are exactly like the people in this book. It’s no joke. We love bottling everything up, breaking down, and staring at people through windows. Yet another book of “grotesques,” and one of the best at that, Winesburg’s influence over American literature can’t be overstated.

22. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein

I love any book that’s later tarnished by its author. This is another book that I only understand on my own terms—I was never formally taught it—so I won’t go any further with an explanation of why it’s important. Plus, Gass already had it on his list and did a better job than I ever could. So I’ll just retype the final proposition offered by Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

23. Franz Kafka’s Diaries (1923)

Kafka at his most pure.

24. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

I struggled with this book because I really wanted to read it fast and get it over with but it kept forcing me to read it slowly. The book won. I had to respect that. I had to respect the book. It was an important lesson for me. Respect the book. Meet it on its own terms. Learn from it. There’s a lot happening with point of view here that’s way, way beyond any other book before it. This is about as good as books get.

25. At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft (1936)

The finest example of what would later come to be known as “cosmic horror,” it’s impossible to conceive of speculative and dark fiction without Lovecraft’s influence. This is perhaps his most fully realized and accomplished story.

26. Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner (1942)

Really, any book by Faulkner could have been picked for this list, but Go Down, Moses is my favorite. Faulkner does an incredible job of balancing a truly massive cast of characters—seriously, check out this family tree—and recreating a time and place in American history with a perfect ear and eye for detail. “The Bear” is one of my all-time favorite short stories.

27. Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte (1944)

An account of the atrocities committed in World War II, written by one of Mussolini’s detractors. I’m going to let this one speak for itself. Here’s an excerpt of Malaparte describing a group of dead horses being freed from the ice by soldiers:

“Some fifty carcasses were heaped crossways on the sledges; they were no longer stiff, but limp, swollen; their long manes freed by the thaw were floating. The eyelids hung on their watery swelling eyes. The soldiers broke the ice crust with mattocks and axes and the horses floated upturned on the dirty whitish water filled with air bubbles and spongy snow. The soldiers roped the carcasses and dragged them to the shore. The heads dangled over the sides of the sledges. The artillery horses scattered through the forest and neighed, smelling that sweet and heavy odor, and the horses hitched to the shafts of the sledges answered with long lamenting neighs.”

28. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (1944)

Do you remember the end of “Hellraiser 2?” That huge maze was awesome.

29. Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann (1947)

This book took me nearly a year to finish, so I’m putting it on this list just to show off. But seriously, the descriptions of writing music that Mann pulls off are astounding. It’s a seemingly impossible task to write about a musician possessed by brilliance, without being a brilliant musician yourself. Mann succeeds here, and this book should be required reading for anyone dumb enough to try to write a novel about an artist.

30. Molloy by Samuel Beckett (1951)

I am in my apartment. It’s I who live there. I don’t know how I got there. Perhaps in a subway car, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. There’s this man whose books I read one time. They were good. I gave money for them and got the books. I read them. They affected my writing for several years in a negative way. I eventually grew out of it.

31. Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor (1952)

This is the first of three books on this list that have the word “blood” in the title. Wise Blood is a slim book that hits hard. It looks at Christianity—or religion in general—in way that no other book I’ve ever read has ever managed: it’s awed by it, disgusted by it, enthralled by it, fascinated by it.

32. The Soft Machine by William Burroughs (1961)

Of all of Burroughs’ cut-up novels, this is the one I read over and over again. It just works on a higher level. Something about it just clicks. Plus, “the Soft Machine” was the name of a band that Robert Wyatt was in and Robert Wyatt is pretty great. It’s rare that something so self-consciously “experimental” can be so effective.

33. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962)

The fake poem at the beginning of Pale Fire, titled “Pale Fire” is probably better than any real poem written by any real person. That’s what I would call a “literary feat.” The rest of the book is pretty good, too.

34. Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. (1964)

I read this whole book in a single sitting. I’ve only done that with a handful of books. It’s a special thing. Has a voice you’d be scared to get drunk with.

35. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)

This is thesecond of three books on this list that have the word “blood” in the title. In Cold Blood gave name to the “non-fiction novel,” which spawned a million poor imitations and the lurid, yet ever-fascinating true-crime genre. Again, this brings me back to humankind’s fascination with awful things that happen to other people. This book should be required reading.

36. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1966-1967)

There is a giant, talking cat named “Behemoth” in it. Funniest book ever, no contest.

37. It Happened in Boston? by Russel H. Greenan (1968)

One of the few books I’ve read twice, back to back. The story is about a failed master painter who begins serial killing in hopes of gaining counsel with God—so he can kill him. This book has it all: pigeons who are actually spies, Satan, cross-eyed cats, art forgery, strychnine poisonings, and a sock puppet named Sebastian. It gets pretty deep into the need for artistic expression, the painterly techniques employed by masters such as Leonardo, and how a person might be driven insane by the futility of mastering something as seemingly simple as a brushstroke.

38. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (1968)

So “Blade Runner” is probably the greatest movie of all time and it’s largely based around this novel. It’s going on the list.

39. The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard (1970)

A book of obsession filtered through cold, clinical, detached language and hyper-structured texts. I wish very, very badly that I’d written this book. Another book whose influence cannot be overstated.

40. Imaginary Magnitude by Stanislaw Lem (1973)

Introductions and forewords for books that don’t exist. The best part is a series of lectures delivered by a military AI supercomputer named Golem XIV who has gained consciousness. This story is sort of like having two TVs next to each other so you can watch “Solaris” and “Terminator 2” at the same time.

41. A School for Fools by Sasha Sokolov (1976)

It seems like not a lot of people have read/heard of this book. It’s a real shame. Essentially, it’s a stream of consciousness exploration through a nameless, schizophrenic kid’s mind. Works best when read aloud.

42. Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)

This book had descriptions of the internet before most people could even conceive of the internet. It’s the sci-fi book to end all sci-fi books—pure prophecy. It’s an intense read.

43. White Noise by Don Delillo (1985)

Sometimes, when I’m about to fall asleep, I hear myself say “Toyota Celica.”

44. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985)

This is the third of three books on this list that have the word “blood” in the title. Of the three, it’s also likely to contain the most blood. This is a violent book, an unforgiving book—and an essential depiction of the westward expansion of the United States.

45. The Rainbow Stories by William T. Vollmann (1989)

A collection stories spanning both the color spectrum and the history of human knowledge as we know it, The Rainbow Stories makes so many other, lesser books seem unambitious and flat-out boring. This is a book that concerns itself with the aspects of life we’d probably rather ignore. So goes the “motto” of the collection, given to readers at the end of the preface: “The prettiest thing is the darkest darkness.”

46. The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus (1995)

I didn’t read this until a few years ago. When I first started it, I thought I was reading it wrong or that something was wrong with me. When I was done, I remember actually being upset that so much of my life had passed before I’d found it. This is a perfect book.

47. The Tunnel by William Gass (1995)

It took me nine months to read this book and I loved every single second of it. A master-work.

48. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996)

Reading Infinite Jest is the most fun I’ve ever had reading a novel. A few years ago I participated in Infinite Summer, reading 15 pages a day, five days a week, for three months. It was a really special way to read a great, great book. I love this book the same way I love cities and spaces that I’ve filled for years of my life. There’s a weird familiarity and comfort in these pages that’s nothing short of magic.

49. Stories in the Worst Way by Gary Lutz (1996)

Everyone’s read this, right? Good. Then I don’t have to say anything. I’m getting really tired and I’ve been listening to the same album over and over again since I started putting this list together and it’s making me feel kind of crazy.

50. Cronenberg on Cronenberg ed. Chris Rodley (1997)

One of the greatest minds of our time discussing his work. You’d have to be a dick to not want to read this. I take back what I said earlier about “Blade Runner” being the best movie ever. “Videodrome” is the best movie ever. Or, depending on my mood, “eXistenZ” is the greatest movie ever. Cronenberg’s musings on technology’s dominance of our consciousness, body horror, and scientific reasoning are disturbing reflections of the world we occupy today.

Lance Olsen

1. Petronius, Satyricon (1st century A.D.)

2. Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605, 1616).

3. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759-67)

4. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

5. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (1884)

6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Gods (1889)

7. Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (1915)

8. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

9. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

10. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930)

11. Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones (1944)

12. Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style (1947)

13. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953)

14. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

15. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy (1957)

16. William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959)

17. Samuel Beckett, How It Is (1961)

18. Carlos Fuentes, Aura (1962)

19. Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch (1963)

20. Thomas Pynchon, Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

21. Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

22. John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse (1968)

23. Robert Coover, Pricksongs & Descants (1969)

24. J. G. Ballard, Atrocity Exhibition (1970)

25. Peter Handke, The Goalie’s Anxiety Before the Penalty Kick (1970)

26. Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing (1971)

27. Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren (1975)

28. Guy Davenport, Da Vinci’s Bicycle (1979)

29. Gilbert Sorrentino, Mulligan Stew (1979)

30. Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories (1981)

31. Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School (1984)

32. Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984)

33. Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985)

34. Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (1986-7)

35. Carole Maso, Ava (1993)

36. William Gass, The Tunnel (1995)

37. Ben Marcus, Age of Wire and String (1995)

38. David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996)

39. Young-Hae Chang, Traveling to Utopia (ca. 2000)

40. Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (2000)

41. Joe Wenderoth, Letters to Wendy’s (2000)

42. Laird Hunt, The Impossibly (2001)

43. Patrik Ourednik, Europeana (2001)

44. Gary Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way (2002)

45. Steve Tomasula, Vas (2003)

46. David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004)

47. David Markson, The Last Novel (2007)

48. David Clark, 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (2009)

49. J. M. Coetzee, Summertime (2009)

50. Anne Carson, Nox (2010)

 Kyle Minor

1. American Pastoral, Philip Roth

2. “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” Katherine Anne Porter

3. Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson

4. Bats Out of Hell, Barry Hannah

5. Selected Poems, Wislawa Szymborska

6. Child of God, Cormac McCarthy

7. The King James Bible

8. The Stories of J F Powers

9. The Collected Works of William Shakespeare

10. Going to Meet the Man, James Baldwin

11. “Lust,” Susan Minot

12. The Never Ending, Andrew Hudgins

13. Sabbath’s Theater, Philip Roth

14. The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery O’Connor

15. Desires, John L’Heureux

16. The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

17. Questions for Ecclesiastes, Mark Jarman

18. The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton

19. Seventeen & J, Kenzaburo Oe

20. “The Paperhanger,” William Gay

21. All Things, All at Once, Lee K. Abbott

22. The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

23. In the Lake of the Woods, Tim O’Brien

24. The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, Frank Stanford

25. Suttree, Cormac McCarthy

26. For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Nathan Englander

27. Airships, Barry Hannah

28. Open Secrets, Alice Munro

29. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera

30. The Collected Stories of William Trevor

31. Selected Stories, Andre Dubus

32. All Aunt Hagar’s Children, Edward P. Jones

33. Friend of My Youth, Alice Munro

34. Knockemstiff, Donald Ray Pollock

35. Nightwork, Christine Schutt

36. Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate., Johannes Goransson

37. The Necropastoral, Joyelle McSweeney

38. Train Dreams, Denis Johnson

39. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

40. Mao II, Don DeLillo

41. The Dew Breaker, Edwidge Danticat

42. Rabbit Tetralogy, John Updike

43. “The Apology,” Stephen Dixon

44. 60 Stories, Donald Barthelme

45. How They Were Found, Matt Bell

46. American Salvage, Bonnie Jo Campbell

47. The Human Stain, Philip Roth

48. “Good Old Neon,” David Foster Wallace

49. The Collected Self-Published Volumes of Bill Knott

50. “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” Wallace Stevens & “In a Station of the Metro,” Ezra Pound

 Robert Lopez

Three Novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett
The Complete Short Prose, Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
The Collected Stories, Stephen Dixon
Wittgensteins’ Mistress, David Markson
Reader’s Block, David Markson
60 Stories, Donald Barthelme
Typical, Padgett Powell
Stories in the Worst Way, Gary Lutz
I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, Leonard Michaels
Reasons to Live, Amy Hempel
Ray, Barry Hannah
Airships, Barry Hannah
Pedro Paramo, Juan Rulfo
Collected Stories, Grace Paley
Letters to Wendy’s, Joe Wenderoth
Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Voice Imitator, Thomas Bernhard
Young Adam, Alexander Trocchi
In the Heart of The Heart of The Country, William H. Gass
Walden, Henry Thoreau
Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver
The Tales, Anton Chekhov
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
The Collected Poems, Wallace Stevens
Poems and Letters, John Keats
Complete Poems, Emily Dickinson
Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne
The Stranger, Albert Camus
The Caretaker, Harold Pinter
The Homecoming, Harold Pinter
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard
The Complete Stories, Franz Kafka
Selected Poems, Czeslaw Milosz
Selected Poems, Pablo Neruda
Collected Poems, William Carlos Williams
Spanking the Maid, Robert Coover

Michael Leong

4.48 Psychosis, Sarah Kane

The Anchored Angel, Jose Garcia Villa

Altazor, Vicente Huidobro

Anthology of Concrete Poetry, Emmett Williams (ed.)

Ark, Ronald Johnson

The Auroras of Autumn, Wallace Stevens

The Black Riders and Other Lines, Stephen Crane

Breathturn, Paul Celan

The Bridge, Hart Crane

The Cantos, Ezra Pound

Dictee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Dialectic of the Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

The Eclogues, Virgil

Eureka, Edgar Allan Poe

The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser

Finnegans Wake, James Joyce

Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot

I, the Worst of All, Estela Lamat

Illuminations, Walter Benjamin

Illuminations, Arthur Rimbaud

Impressions of Africa, Raymond Roussel

The Inventor of Love, Gherasim Luca

Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance, Stéphane Mallarmé

Leaves of Grass (1860), Walt Whitman

The Magnetic Fields, André Breton and Philippe Soupault

Margins of Philosophy, Jacques Derrida

The Matrix, Norman Pritchard

Memories, Guy Debord (with Asger Jorn)

Men and Women, Robert Browning

Metamorphoses, Ovid

Milton, William Blake

Mythologies, Roland Barthes

Naked Lunch, William Burroughs

The Narrow Road to the Interior, Matsuo Bashō

Oulipo Compendium, Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie (eds.)

Oxford English Dictionary, J. Simpson and E. Weiner (eds.)

Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov

Paradise Lost, John Milton

The Poetry of Surrealism, Michael Benedikt

The Single Hound, Emily Dickinson

Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord

Solar Throat Slashed, Aimé Césaire

Spring and All, William Carlos Williams

Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein

Trilce, César Vallejo

The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett

Vathek, William Beckford

The Waves, Virginia Woolf

White Album, Kitasono Katue

Brian Kiteley

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
Isaac Babel, Collected Stories
J.G. Ballard, Crash
Donald Barthelme, City Life
Samuel Beckett, Proust
Walter Benjamin, Reflections
Jane Bowles, My Sister’s Hand in Mine
Jane Brox, Here and Nowhere Else
Italo Calvino, Baron of the Trees
Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power
Willa Cather, The Professor’s House
Julia Child, My Life in France
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture
Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination
Elizabeth David, A Book of Mediterranean Food
Don DeLillo, Americana
Anita Desai, In Custody
Isak Dinesen, Winters Tales
E.L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel
M.F.K. Fisher, Gastronomical Me
Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire (a trilogy)
William Gass, On Being Blue
Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land
Robert Glück, Jack the Modernist
Vivian Gornick, In Search of Ali Mahmoud
John Graves, Goodbye to a River
Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time
Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley
Susan Howe, The Birth-Mark
Washington Irving, Mohammad (a biography)
Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes
Primo Levi, Periodic Table
Alphonso Lingis, Trust
Jennifer Moxley, The Middle Room
Vladimir Nabokov, Details of a Sunset
Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
Alifa Rifaat, Distant View of a Minaret
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust
Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children
Sigrid Nunez, A Feather on the Breath of God
Grace Paley, The Little Disturbances of Man
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North
Bruno Schulz, Street of the Crocodiles
Frederic Tuten, The Adventures of Mao on the Long March
Paul Valery, Monsieur Teste
Robert Walser, Selected Stories
William Carlos Williams, Imaginations
Christa Wolf, No Place on Earth
P.G. Wodehouse, Laughing Gas

 

Paul Kincaid

1: English Music by Peter Ackroyd
There was a time, almost impossible to imagine nowadays, when Peter Ackroyd seemed to be one of the most important of contemporary English novelists. From Hawksmoor on, his work was inventive, daring, fresh, engaging. Most of the delight, of course, came down to an enjoyment of his skill at mimicry, tied in with a precise and detailed knowledge of London at various stages in its history. The high water mark, for me, was English Music, which really was Ackroyd doing the police, and everyone else, in different voices. Unfortunately, everything he has done since then has been a falling off. But I’ve read English Music several times, with real pleasure every time.

2: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
I’m not really a fan of Atwood, I’ve not actually read very much of her work. But I was a judge for the first Arthur C. Clarke Award, when this novel won, and of all the winners since then this is still the book that stands out most vividly for me.

3: The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
I have now no idea what made me first pick up this book. I’d not heard of the author, but I’d presumably seen a review somewhere that sparked my interest. But I just loved the cleverness of it right from the start. He’s not been able to keep that up, and his best work since then has all been very different in tone and affect. But that first book was just a brilliant one-off that taught me a lot about what you could with story.

4: Tiger, Tiger by Alfred Bester
When this book was written it was the early 50s. Science fiction was at its most conservative, both politically and artistically. And along came this guy who played with the shape of the words on the page, who just put the most extraordinary literary invention at the service of the most traditional of sf stories (culled quite openly from The Count of Monte Christo), and in the process he produced the one truly classic sf novel of the entire decade.

5: Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
I love short stories. I think I love them mostly because of Borges. I can read them over and over again (my copy of this book is falling apart), and they always stun me.

6: The New Confessions by William Boyd
There seemed to be something of a vogue at one point for sprawling novels that encompassed the whole of the twentieth century, and often seemed to use film as their guiding metaphor: Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess, Star Struck by Nigel Williams, Days Between Stations by Steve Erickson. I’m not sure The New Confessions is the best of the bunch, I’m not sure it is the best thing Boyd has done (I slightly prefer The Blue Afternoon), but this was the novel that somehow confirmed him as a writer I wanted to follow.

7: 2001, A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
I had just seen the film. I was taking my O-Levels, and after the last of my exams needed something to read before school ended. There are times when the circumstances in which we read a book matter every bit as much as anything actually in the book. This was one of them. But it is still an amazing book.

8: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
So, back in the 80s I was reviewing regularly for the late, lamented Fiction Magazine, and at one point I was sent a bunch of first novels by new American writers. They were mostly technically competent but rather uninspiring. Flash forward a few years and everyone is suddenly talking about this book. I pick it up and realise that Chabon was actually one of those new American writers. Still don’t think The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is up to much, (though in retrospect I see much of his fascination with the fantastic), but this one excited me and introduced me to a writer I now read assiduously.

9: The Solitudes by John Crowley
10: Love and Sleep by John Crowley
11: Daemonomania by John Crowley
12: Endless Things by John Crowley
Is this a cheat? I could have listed these under one title, Aegypt (see Lawrence Durrell and Gene Wolfe below), because they do form one closely interwoven sequence. But they were written over 20 years and encountered not as one work but as four separate volumes. Anyway, this is my list so I can structure it how I want. There are some who will tell you that Crowley’s Little, Big is the finest work of contemporary fantasy, they could be right, but for me it is these four books that really work. The writing is gorgeous, the subtle interplay of themes is magnificent, and over four volumes there’s the space to really let the slow, insistent quality of the books work their magic on you. These probably come close to being the most essential books on my list.

13: Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
Is this science fiction’s Finnegans Wake? A broken, disorienting narrative that loops back around on itself, episodes that arise and disappear, unexplained occurrences that separate the city from the country that surrounds it. My first encounter with science fiction that wasn’t just full of wonders but that was genuinely wonderful.

14: The Jewel-Hinged Jaw by Samuel R. Delany
This was the first work of criticism that I read for pleasure. I’d written reviews before this (my first-ever review was, coincidentally, of Delany’s Triton), but it was this book that probably turned me into a critic.

15: Now Wait for Last Year by Philip K. Dick
There had to be one novel by Dick on this list, the question was: which one? I could have gone for the obvious, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep or Ubik, I could have been deliberately perverse and chosen one of the posthumously published non-sf novels (I have a great affection for The Broken Bubble and Mary and the Giant), but in the end I opted for one of the novels that tends to be, I think, overlooked by the critics. It’s probably not the best thing he wrote, but it has all the archetypal Dick tropes in there, and for me this one worked as well as any of his books.

16: My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
I can’t think of any book that has made me laugh out loud as much as this one has. And I laugh just as uproariously every time I re-read it.

17: The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
The impossible Larry in My Family and Other Animals was my first encounter with Lawrence Durrell. Shortly after reading Gerry’s book for the first time we were on a family holiday in the Lake District, and in a small bookshop there I found a copy of The Alexandria Quartet. I bought it, read it, fell in love with it, and I have probably re-read it at least as many times as My Family and Other Animals, though for very different reasons. It is lush, it is over-written, it exoticises the East, and it is still beautiful.

18: Selected Poems by T.S. Eliot
19: The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot
Ten Twentieth Century Poets was one of our O-Level set books, but we were only studying five of the poets, and they bored me. So I started reading the five we weren’t supposed to read. One of the poems I came across was ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Not long after, on a school trip to Manchester University, I picked up these two volumes. I became a poet by trying to write like Eliot. I quote his work still, often unconsciously. In terms of what made me a writer, I probably owe more to these books than any other.

20: Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison
When I first started reading sf seriously, in the late-60s, early-70s, I wasn’t aware that the literature had any no-go areas, political or sexual. But the writers clearly felt that, and this groundbreaking collection was the result. It has the usual overblown introductions from Ellison, and not all the stories work, but in sum it shows how refreshing writers can be when they are kicking against the pricks.

21: Tours of the Black Clock by Steve Erickson
Another writer who made me fall in love with his work with his very first book, and I have read him assiduously ever since. A diptych of essays I wrote on his first four books that appeared in Foundation was, I believe, among the first pieces of criticism his work ever received.

22: The Civil War by Shelby Foote
I was ill, with a particularly acute form of gastric flu, and I really couldn’t do anything except watch the box. Fortunately, this coincided with the first episode of Ken Burns’s series on The Civil War. Two things happened. One: I became a devotee of the war, so much so that the first full-length book to bear my name was on the Civil War. Two: I fell in love with Shelby Foote’s voice. Of course I had to go out and buy his three-part Narrative History, which is brilliant (much better, I think, than his novels which I’ve also read).

23: Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler
There are far too few women on this list, but the ones I have picked mean a great deal. This novel in particular, which follows a mysterious silent woman through the American West in the late-19th century, is just unforgettably good.

24: The Magus by John Fowles
Not, by any means, his best book (I might just pick The Ebony Tower over The French Lieutenant’s Woman), but it was my introduction to Fowles, and I was already in love with Greece (which I had recently visited for the first time), and the magic of the book just worked for me. When I met Fowles, years later at a party at Livia Gollancz’s home, he put up with me gushing over him all afternoon with what, from his Journals, must have been unusually good grace.

25: The Stone Book Quartet by Alan Garner
When we first got together, my wife insisted that I must read everything by Alan Garner. She was right, he is brilliant. But it was this book, made up of four slim volumes that each lightly fictionalised pieces of his family history, that caught me up far more than his more famous novels.

26: Free Fall by William Golding
27: The Spire by William Golding
28: Pincher Martin by William Golding
I couldn’t pick just one book by Golding, these novels meant too much to me (maybe I should add The Inheritors, and I have a great affection for The Scorpion God). These three are indelibly inscribed in my memory. The opening of Free Fall always makes me think of my grandmother’s home; the ending of Pincher Martin is probably the most devastating conclusion to any novel; and the whole sense of life invested in the ambition of The Spire is just so powerful. And they gain on each re-reading.

29: Lanark by Alasdair Gray
I resist hype. So when everyone was going on about how good this book was, it actually put me off. So it was a long time later when I finally got around to it. I’m so glad I did, though, the curious combination of complexity and joy, the mundane and the fantastic, makes this sui generis. He has written good books since then (and having met Gray it is impossible to read his books without hearing that characteristic soft purring accent), but nothing comes close to this devastating achievement.

30: The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison
Like Philip K. Dick, there’s a real problem in knowing what to choose. Any of the Viriconium books should make the list; and since Harrison is often at his best in short fiction what about a collection like The Ice Monkey? But in the end this novel of devastation and disappointment is both the most affecting and the most characteristic of his books, and it shows off why I think he is perhaps the finest craftsman working in English fiction today.

31: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
I think there was one point where I read this book five times in one year. I couldn’t get enough of it. It’s a long time since I re-read it, but that doesn’t diminish its hold on me.

32: Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
Another of the great sui generis novels in the English language (or, at least, a version of it). It is set where I live, it takes as its guiding metaphor a wall painting in Canterbury Cathedral that I have seen any number of times, and it demands to be read aloud. Brilliant.

33: North Wind by Gwyneth Jones
For some reason, the middle volume in the Aleutian Trilogy is the one that stands out for me, though the whole work is one of the great achievements of post-colonial sf. One of the curious things about her work is that I think she’s at her best when she’s most difficult. Not sure what that says about her, or about me.

34: The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
During the Protestant Worker’s Strike in Northern Ireland in 1974 I was studying for my finals, which is how I ended up re-reading parts of this by candle light. That seems appropriate. I don’t agree with Kant; there are whole essays of disagreement scribbled in fading pencil in the margins of my copy, but it shaped the way I think.

35: Report to Greco by Nikos Kazantzakis
I first started reading Kazantzakis on my first visit to Greece, and the two are now inextricably merged in my mind. This ‘autobiography’, which seems to bear only a passing relationship to the truth, is the book I found myself responding to most readily.

36: A Century of Science Fiction edited by Damon Knight
I encountered this anthology around the time I was first discovering sf, and there are stories in here (‘Another World’ by J-H Rosny, ‘The First Days of May’ by Claude Veillot, ‘Sail On! Sail On!’ by Philip Jose Farmer) that are still incredibly vivid in my memory even 40 years later.

37: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
Okay, opinion seems to be divided over whether this or The Dispossessed is Le Guin’s best book. I choose this one simply because what it says about gender combined with that awesome journey across a frozen world make this a book I just cannot get out of my head.

38: The Last Days of Socrates by Plato
This is actually a collection of four short dialogues put together by Penguin Classics. I read it in that strange interregnum between finishing my A-Levels and leaving school. It was my first encounter with philosophy. I’m not sure what I expected, but this was different. It was the reason why I opted to take a module in philosophy when I went to university a couple of months later.

39: The Affirmation by Christopher Priest
I’m possibly too close to both the novel and the author to have anything very sensible to say here. Let me just say that, for me, this is one of the few genuinely indispensable novels.

40: The King Must Die by Mary Renault
More Greece (do you detect a theme?); I went through a phase of reading and re-reading all of Renault’s historical novels with immense pleasure. Their evocation of the time is still one of the measures I use in judging how good a historical novel is. They were also, incidentally, perhaps the first books I encountered in which homosexuality was not presented negatively but in a straightforward neutral way.

41: The Chalk Giants by Keith Roberts
Keith Roberts was the first writer who responded positively to one of my reviews, the first writer I interviewed (by post), and the subject of my first extended piece of critical writing. He was, therefore, crucially important in my own development as a critic. It helps that he was one of the best writers in the genre, and this, I think, was his most powerful work.

42: Queen of the States by Josephine Saxton
I love Jo, and I love this book. There’s not much else to say.

43: Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg
I suspect this is Silverberg’s best book, but the reason it stands out for me is that it was perhaps the first book I’d read which blurred the distinction between sf and the mainstream. That set me thinking on lines that I am still pursuing today.

44: Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
I suppose there had to be one of the ‘classics’ in here, but I love this book because of how many rules it breaks, with what glee it distorts everything we understand a novel to be.

45: Warm Worlds and Otherwise by James Tiptree Jr
It is possible that ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ is the single most important story ever published in sf. It is certainly one of the most thought-provoking, one that, having encountered it, you simply cannot leave alone. But then, for a while there before her identity (Alice Bradley Sheldon) was revealed, Tiptree was consistently turning out wonderful stories that challenged the way we thought about sex.

46: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
Science fiction has been called the archetypal literature of the twentieth century, but I’m coming to the conclusion that the defining texts were all written in the 19th century. In a series of five novels — The Time Machine, The Island of Dr Moreau, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The First Men in the Moon (the last published in 1901) – Wells laid out a groundwork that the genre has been struggling and failing to emulate ever since. The Time Machine is as close to a perfect work of science fiction as we have ever got.

47: The History of Mr Polly by H.G. Wells
And after setting out his scientific romances (which he himself could never again live up to) he then wrote a series of wonderful social novels, the last and best of which, in my mind, was this one. Another book I first read at school, and that I continue to cherish.

48: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein
49: Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein
When I came upon Wittgenstein’s work during my philosophy degree, it became what the subject was all about. I still quote from the Tractatus endlessly, but I think it was the Investigations that has most shaped my thinking, and that crops up in my more theoretical critical work.

50: The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
This is one of the heights to which neither the genre nor Wolfe have been able to return since. But it is a book to relish, to surrender yourself to, while at the same time it is a book to doubt and to question at every turn.

Jamie Iredell

Fiction

1. On the Road, Jack Kerouac: I read this as a freshman in college and it was the book that made me decide I was going to be a writer. I had some pretty romantic ideals about my own group of friends and when I saw that someone else had written about his friends, and it was a great read, I figured I could do the same thing, since Sal and his buddies reminded me of me and mine.
2. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner: This was one of those books I was told I was supposed to read in college and when I first tried to I didn’t understand it and I couldn’t even get past Benjy’s section. Later, though, I read it again and something clicked and it was all very clear, and all very brilliant. The direct relation of images, events, and ideas to the reader, without much narratorial intervention, was hugely influential.
3. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy: Another book everyone says you should read. I did and once I got in I didn’t want to get out. What’s amazing is how rich Tolstoy’s characters are and how your allegiances shift throughout the novel. One minute you’re thinking that Prince Andrei’s a total dick, and 200 pages later you’re in love with him.
4. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville: I didn’t order these in any specific way and only wrote them down as they came to me and I could probably have a whole section of books that are about here’s what you can do with fiction that you never thought you could do until you read this. Moby-Dick is up there as one of my favorite novels. It’s formally crazy, incorporating multiple genres. It’s a prose poem, a really long one.
5. Collected Stories, Flannery O’Connor: Really, if you want to learn how to write a short story you ought to just read everything that Flannery O’Connor ever wrote.
6. Ray, Barry Hannah: Another whoa you can do that? book. Ray is downright fun. The shifts from the somewhat realistic setting of the majority of the novella into the Civil War scenes are particularly magical.
7. Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy: I really love westerns, although I haven’t read many of them. But this is a western I can read and re-read. As with all McCarthy, I’m overcome with love for his use of language. His sentences somersault around with lovely details and rich music, even when he’s describing Native American babies’ heads being smashed against boulders. This book was important to my own novels, which I would say are westerns, those that are set at The Lake.
8. Suttree, Cormac McCarthy: Here’s a great novel about . . . nothing. It’s like a proto-Seinfeld, but at the same time funnier and more serious. The amazing thing McCarthy pulls off with this plotless novel is how as a reader you feel like things are going to happen continuously, like you’re moving from one place to another, but nothing does happen, and you never get anywhere. But at the novel’s end you feel oddly satisfied with what you’ve read. I don’t know how he did that.
9. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck: I could have a whole other sub-category of novels that are what I‘d call “road novels,” novels about characters traveling. The great thing that Steinbeck pulls off here is on the one hand telling a very personal story about a family’s survival in the face of terrible misfortune, and on the other hand showing us in pure poetry the conditions of millions of people all struggling through the Great Depression.
10. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf: Mostly what I love about this book is the lesson about what a novelist can do with time. She can stretch out the events of a morning to cover hundreds of pages, or she can compress ten years into thirty. Also, what writer doesn’t like a good novel about creating art?
11. Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson: My first creative writing professor gave me her copy of this book not long after it came out and it was another of those, hey, people write about people like me and my friends books. If it’s not already super obvious, Jesus’ Son was a big influence on my first book.
12. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner: The shifting perspectives and story-like quality of each chapter here were important in my development. I wrote a novel in stories that has never been published, and each story is told from a different family member’s point of view, much like this book.
13. The Tales of Tahoe, David J. Stollery: I LOVED this book as a kid. I read the tales over and over. No one will have heard of this book. It’s a collection of pieces written in the 1950s and 60s by Stollery for the Tahoe City World, a now-defunct newspaper. The tales tell Washoe Indian legends about the creation of the lake, how the skunk got his stripes, etcetera. This book is the backbone of my own novel, The Lake (a book that’s coming out from Aqueous Books in 2014).
14. Wittgenstein’s Mistress, David Markson: The structure of this book was important for me, as the titular character—who seems either to be the only person alive on earth or someone who’s gone insane—meanders back and forth from topic to topic: everything from art and philosophy to history and personal reflection. Her logic loops around these ideas and makes somehow a novel.
15. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Magical realism. I guess you got to learn about it at some point, and it’s probably not bad to go through a phase of attempting to write it, like I did. After doing that you’ll say screw the rules and just do whatever you want.
16. The Piazza Tales and Other Prose, Herman Melville: I could just say “Everything that Herman Melville ever wrote” on this list. In this book is of course the amazing “Bartleby the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno,” but also included is his “The Encantadas,” an amazing essay.
17. Lolita, Valdimir Nabokov: Another road novel. But what I love about this book is how Nabokov takes a hideous narrator and makes him likeable. I actually feel sorry for Humbert when he tells us about the girl he loved when he was twelve or whatever and she died, even though I know that he’s probably working the prose in such a way to induce sympathy in me, and oh, yeah, there’s actually Nabokov who wrote the novel of Humbert writing the novel. It’s just brilliant.
18. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain: Probably my favorite novel. Another road narrative. Funny, I love those kinds of books and I’ve never really written a road narrative myself. This and Lolita are excellent novels for studying what an unreliable narrator can do for your book.
19. In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust: Ironically, this book, among the longest novels ever written, was hugely influential on my Prose. Poems. a Novel. book. That book contains all these very short, compressed snippets that, when taken together, form a novel-like experience. It’s autobiographical, just like Proust. But where Proust can go on for thirty pages about thinking of his mother downstairs in the dining room while he’s upstairs in his bed for the night wishing he could be there with her, I did similar things in paragraphs.
20. Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson: This is what I would call a mood novel. I associate the color blue with it. I feel the presence of mountains and wildflowers. I think it’s a ghost story. If I could ever write something that would make a reader feel this way I would consider myself successful.
21. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Lawrence Sterne: I guess here is the beginning of the English novelist saying I’m going to fuck with you and it works. My favorite part is when he’s talking about the direction his narrative has taken and there are a bunch of squiggly lines drawn onto the page. The book goes nowhere. It’s really funny.

Nonfiction

1. Walden, Henry David Thoreau: I love that each chapter takes us through different subjects and through different parts of the year. I would have preferred to have listed even more Thoreau here, like Faith in a Seed and Wild Fruits. What’s really astounding is Thoreau’s ability to find so much right in his backyard. That attitude is key to the nonfiction writer.
2. Winter, Rick Bass: This book made an impression on me when I first read it in college. Similar to Walden this book chronicle’s Bass’s move into a remote valley in Montana, and his adjusting to the rural life there, in particular, the rigors of wintertime. I’m not much of a nature writer, but if I were I’d want to be like Rick Bass.
3. Essays by Emerson: I don’t think I’ve ever taken so many notes while reading anything so much as I did when reading Emerson. I have notebooks filled with my questions and thoughts on reading essays like “The Over-soul” and “Self-Reliance” and “The Poet.” Emerson sits at the forefront of what would become “American” literature. He was, in many ways, the first truly American writer, and he called for that distinct American-ness to pervade our future letters.
4. The Journals of Henry David Thoreau: Thoreau’s journal is like a loose version of his books. His books really came out of his journals through revision and re-writing. The glimpse of the man’s genius is a white light. I think if Thoreau had not died of tuberculosis when he did there would be two naturalists that we’d credit for the advent of modern science: Charles Darwin and Henry David Thoreau.
5. Of Mules and Men, Zora Neale Hurston: Hurston plays investigative journalist in a way, getting down to the folk ways and traditions of the people in her native Eatonville, Florida. It’s an amazing collection of folk tales and you see Hurston as anthropologist/folklorist at work.
6. About a Mountain, John D’Agata: I debated cutting this from the list because it’s so contemporary, but it really has been a big influence on me because of D’Agata’s insistence that nonfiction is art, too, just like fiction or poetry, and that the absolute truth is not as important as artistic truth.

Poetry

1. Rat Jelly, Michael Ondaatje: This was the first single author collection of poetry I ever bought and I did so for a poetry workshop where I had to read and review such a collection. I really loved the titular poem. Some of the poems are all about gross-out details, or kind of Halloweenish images. Spiders. I like.
2. The Wellspring, Sharon Olds: I read this fairly early on as a poet and while I think there are better Sharon Olds books, this one has a special place for me because it was among the first collections of poetry I ever bought. Olds also—as is typical—writes about things like giving blowjobs, so that’s interesting, especially when I was like nineteen.
3. Slouching in the Path of a Comet, Mike Dockins: Dockins is my buddy, so I guess I’m rubbing his back pretty good here, but still I often return to this book to read the poems and see what poems can do. It contains multitudes.
4. Collected Poems, Wallace Stevens: I was reading this when I met my wife. Some people don’t like Wallace Stevens. I think maybe he’s too Modernist for them. He’s very much an idea poet. I like that. At the same time I also like Williams’s “no ideas but in things.” So there.
5. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: You really can’t get through a list like this without including Shakespeare. I don’t think I have to say much more beyond that.
6. Alcools, Appolinaire: When I think about poetry that veers off the realist path I start with Appolinaire. This book is so strangely engrossing you cannot put it down. Absurdism at its best.
7. Paris Spleen, Baudelaire: Prose poems. This book is hardly important to me at all.
8. Howl and Other Poems, Allen Ginsberg: Since I started on the Beats with Kerouac it was inevitable that I’d read Ginsberg as well, and Howl certainly had its impact on my poetry. Take this and On the Road together and you get what was my first attempt at a book of poetry, a book I title “Line Feeds Fender,” which was some cheap kind of metaphorical way of looking at the lines painted on the side of the road while you’re driving and it looks like the fender is constantly eating it. I guess. Long rambling lines.
9. Complete Poems of John Keats: Kind of the same thing as Shakespeare.
10. The Bedbug and Selected Poetry, Vladimir Mayakovsky: Like Appolinaire, to know how American poets arrived at the New York school you have to read Mayakovsky. For anyone who’s been stuck in a strictly realist interpretation of the world Mayakovsky’s poems make poetry fun again.
11. The Epic of Gilgamesh: I guess this should be here under poetry? I suppose what’s most important to me is that while growing up as a Catholic I of course thought that the world’s oldest stories were those in the Old Testament, so it was pretty earth-shattering for me when I encountered The Epic of Gilgamesh and learned that it was at least 2,500 years older. Plus, Enkidu and Gilgamesh kicking monsters’ asses for no logical reason? It’s great.
12. Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman: Not sure how any American poet could get through a “pillars” list without including this. It’s the first poetry I ever read that told me that I didn’t have to employ traditional rhythm and rhyme.
13. Where the Sidewalk Ends, Shel Silverstein: I read this as a kid, along with Dr. Seuss, and I’ll still pick up this book and read poems from it to remind me of the pure joy that poetry ought to be.
14. The Norton Anthology of Poetry: I read this (yes, the whole goddamn thing) while studying for my PhD. exams in poetry. The introductory materials alone make owning the book worthwhile, as they explain in very clear detail the foundations of verse. Then there’s the 1,000 years + of poems.
15. The Rooster’s Wife, Russell Edson: I could really say everything that Russell Edson’s ever written, but I’m narrowing it down to this book, which I picked up from the library. Edson’s America’s prose poem Appolinaire, or perhaps Kharms.

???

1. Today I Wrote Nothing, Daniil Kharms: These are books that don’t have a specific genre, or they cross genres. Kharms is one of the great absurdist I-don’t-know-what-you-call-him-other-than-awesome. He has short little stories that aren’t stories; they’re almost more like jokes that both are and are not funny.
2. Imaginations, William Carlos Williams: This book incorporates five of Williams’s experimental books: Spring and All, Kora in Hell, The Descent of Winter, The Great American Novel, and A Novelette and Other Prose. It’s full of weirdness, and fun, though at times depressing like New Jersey.
3. The Old and New Testaments: I think if more people read the Bible as a literary text they would see it as one of the craziest and most interesting novels ever written. Plus, I reference it directly and indirectly all the time.

Craft of Writing

1. Living by Fiction, Annie Dillard: Great chapters on time and point of view in this one.
2. The Writing Life, Annie Dillard: I like the sections where she’s talking about chopping wood and thinking of whatever it is she’s not writing, but realizes that she is writing because she’s chopping wood.
3. On Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner: Perhaps my favorite part of this is when gardner compares Melville’s prose from, I think, Typee to that of Moby-Dick, and he scans the “metrics” and shows what a careful and lyrical prose stylist Melville had grown into. This really shows what kind of attention a serious literary novelist pays to his work.
4. The Poet’s Companion, Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux: This is a great book, whether you’re starting out or just dabbling at writing poetry, or you’ve been writing it for years. It’s easy to read, and it’s full of great writing ideas. You could easily mine this for exercises and write multiple books from them alone.
5. The Triggering Town, Richard Hugo: This is a craft book but it’s so much more than that, too. It’s nonfiction about the state of mind of the writer. It’s invaluable and beautiful and strangely scary as hell.

 

Jamie Iredell

Fiction

1. On the Road, Jack Kerouac: I read this as a freshman in college and it was the book that made me decide I was going to be a writer. I had some pretty romantic ideals about my own group of friends and when I saw that someone else had written about his friends, and it was a great read, I figured I could do the same thing, since Sal and his buddies reminded me of me and mine.
2. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner: This was one of those books I was told I was supposed to read in college and when I first tried to I didn’t understand it and I couldn’t even get past Benjy’s section. Later, though, I read it again and something clicked and it was all very clear, and all very brilliant. The direct relation of images, events, and ideas to the reader, without much narratorial intervention, was hugely influential.
3. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy: Another book everyone says you should read. I did and once I got in I didn’t want to get out. What’s amazing is how rich Tolstoy’s characters are and how your allegiances shift throughout the novel. One minute you’re thinking that Prince Andrei’s a total dick, and 200 pages later you’re in love with him.
4. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville: I didn’t order these in any specific way and only wrote them down as they came to me and I could probably have a whole section of books that are about here’s what you can do with fiction that you never thought you could do until you read this. Moby-Dick is up there as one of my favorite novels. It’s formally crazy, incorporating multiple genres. It’s a prose poem, a really long one.
5. Collected Stories, Flannery O’Connor: Really, if you want to learn how to write a short story you ought to just read everything that Flannery O’Connor ever wrote.
6. Ray, Barry Hannah: Another whoa you can do that? book. Ray is downright fun. The shifts from the somewhat realistic setting of the majority of the novella into the Civil War scenes are particularly magical.
7. Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy: I really love westerns, although I haven’t read many of them. But this is a western I can read and re-read. As with all McCarthy, I’m overcome with love for his use of language. His sentences somersault around with lovely details and rich music, even when he’s describing Native American babies’ heads being smashed against boulders. This book was important to my own novels, which I would say are westerns, those that are set at The Lake.
8. Suttree, Cormac McCarthy: Here’s a great novel about . . . nothing. It’s like a proto-Seinfeld, but at the same time funnier and more serious. The amazing thing McCarthy pulls off with this plotless novel is how as a reader you feel like things are going to happen continuously, like you’re moving from one place to another, but nothing does happen, and you never get anywhere. But at the novel’s end you feel oddly satisfied with what you’ve read. I don’t know how he did that.
9. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck: I could have a whole other sub-category of novels that are what I‘d call “road novels,” novels about characters traveling. The great thing that Steinbeck pulls off here is on the one hand telling a very personal story about a family’s survival in the face of terrible misfortune, and on the other hand showing us in pure poetry the conditions of millions of people all struggling through the Great Depression.
10. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf: Mostly what I love about this book is the lesson about what a novelist can do with time. She can stretch out the events of a morning to cover hundreds of pages, or she can compress ten years into thirty. Also, what writer doesn’t like a good novel about creating art?
11. Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson: My first creative writing professor gave me her copy of this book not long after it came out and it was another of those, hey, people write about people like me and my friends books. If it’s not already super obvious, Jesus’ Son was a big influence on my first book.
12. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner: The shifting perspectives and story-like quality of each chapter here were important in my development. I wrote a novel in stories that has never been published, and each story is told from a different family member’s point of view, much like this book.
13. The Tales of Tahoe, David J. Stollery: I LOVED this book as a kid. I read the tales over and over. No one will have heard of this book. It’s a collection of pieces written in the 1950s and 60s by Stollery for the Tahoe City World, a now-defunct newspaper. The tales tell Washoe Indian legends about the creation of the lake, how the skunk got his stripes, etcetera. This book is the backbone of my own novel, The Lake (a book that’s coming out from Aqueous Books in 2014).
14. Wittgenstein’s Mistress, David Markson: The structure of this book was important for me, as the titular character—who seems either to be the only person alive on earth or someone who’s gone insane—meanders back and forth from topic to topic: everything from art and philosophy to history and personal reflection. Her logic loops around these ideas and makes somehow a novel.
15. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Magical realism. I guess you got to learn about it at some point, and it’s probably not bad to go through a phase of attempting to write it, like I did. After doing that you’ll say screw the rules and just do whatever you want.
16. The Piazza Tales and Other Prose, Herman Melville: I could just say “Everything that Herman Melville ever wrote” on this list. In this book is of course the amazing “Bartleby the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno,” but also included is his “The Encantadas,” an amazing essay.
17. Lolita, Valdimir Nabokov: Another road novel. But what I love about this book is how Nabokov takes a hideous narrator and makes him likeable. I actually feel sorry for Humbert when he tells us about the girl he loved when he was twelve or whatever and she died, even though I know that he’s probably working the prose in such a way to induce sympathy in me, and oh, yeah, there’s actually Nabokov who wrote the novel of Humbert writing the novel. It’s just brilliant.
18. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain: Probably my favorite novel. Another road narrative. Funny, I love those kinds of books and I’ve never really written a road narrative myself. This and Lolita are excellent novels for studying what an unreliable narrator can do for your book.
19. In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust: Ironically, this book, among the longest novels ever written, was hugely influential on my Prose. Poems. a Novel. book. That book contains all these very short, compressed snippets that, when taken together, form a novel-like experience. It’s autobiographical, just like Proust. But where Proust can go on for thirty pages about thinking of his mother downstairs in the dining room while he’s upstairs in his bed for the night wishing he could be there with her, I did similar things in paragraphs.
20. Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson: This is what I would call a mood novel. I associate the color blue with it. I feel the presence of mountains and wildflowers. I think it’s a ghost story. If I could ever write something that would make a reader feel this way I would consider myself successful.
21. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Lawrence Sterne: I guess here is the beginning of the English novelist saying I’m going to fuck with you and it works. My favorite part is when he’s talking about the direction his narrative has taken and there are a bunch of squiggly lines drawn onto the page. The book goes nowhere. It’s really funny.

Nonfiction

1. Walden, Henry David Thoreau: I love that each chapter takes us through different subjects and through different parts of the year. I would have preferred to have listed even more Thoreau here, like Faith in a Seed and Wild Fruits. What’s really astounding is Thoreau’s ability to find so much right in his backyard. That attitude is key to the nonfiction writer.
2. Winter, Rick Bass: This book made an impression on me when I first read it in college. Similar to Walden this book chronicle’s Bass’s move into a remote valley in Montana, and his adjusting to the rural life there, in particular, the rigors of wintertime. I’m not much of a nature writer, but if I were I’d want to be like Rick Bass.
3. Essays by Emerson: I don’t think I’ve ever taken so many notes while reading anything so much as I did when reading Emerson. I have notebooks filled with my questions and thoughts on reading essays like “The Over-soul” and “Self-Reliance” and “The Poet.” Emerson sits at the forefront of what would become “American” literature. He was, in many ways, the first truly American writer, and he called for that distinct American-ness to pervade our future letters.
4. The Journals of Henry David Thoreau: Thoreau’s journal is like a loose version of his books. His books really came out of his journals through revision and re-writing. The glimpse of the man’s genius is a white light. I think if Thoreau had not died of tuberculosis when he did there would be two naturalists that we’d credit for the advent of modern science: Charles Darwin and Henry David Thoreau.
5. Of Mules and Men, Zora Neale Hurston: Hurston plays investigative journalist in a way, getting down to the folk ways and traditions of the people in her native Eatonville, Florida. It’s an amazing collection of folk tales and you see Hurston as anthropologist/folklorist at work.
6. About a Mountain, John D’Agata: I debated cutting this from the list because it’s so contemporary, but it really has been a big influence on me because of D’Agata’s insistence that nonfiction is art, too, just like fiction or poetry, and that the absolute truth is not as important as artistic truth.

Poetry

1. Rat Jelly, Michael Ondaatje: This was the first single author collection of poetry I ever bought and I did so for a poetry workshop where I had to read and review such a collection. I really loved the titular poem. Some of the poems are all about gross-out details, or kind of Halloweenish images. Spiders. I like.
2. The Wellspring, Sharon Olds: I read this fairly early on as a poet and while I think there are better Sharon Olds books, this one has a special place for me because it was among the first collections of poetry I ever bought. Olds also—as is typical—writes about things like giving blowjobs, so that’s interesting, especially when I was like nineteen.
3. Slouching in the Path of a Comet, Mike Dockins: Dockins is my buddy, so I guess I’m rubbing his back pretty good here, but still I often return to this book to read the poems and see what poems can do. It contains multitudes.
4. Collected Poems, Wallace Stevens: I was reading this when I met my wife. Some people don’t like Wallace Stevens. I think maybe he’s too Modernist for them. He’s very much an idea poet. I like that. At the same time I also like Williams’s “no ideas but in things.” So there.
5. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: You really can’t get through a list like this without including Shakespeare. I don’t think I have to say much more beyond that.
6. Alcools, Appolinaire: When I think about poetry that veers off the realist path I start with Appolinaire. This book is so strangely engrossing you cannot put it down. Absurdism at its best.
7. Paris Spleen, Baudelaire: Prose poems. This book is hardly important to me at all.
8. Howl and Other Poems, Allen Ginsberg: Since I started on the Beats with Kerouac it was inevitable that I’d read Ginsberg as well, and Howl certainly had its impact on my poetry. Take this and On the Road together and you get what was my first attempt at a book of poetry, a book I title “Line Feeds Fender,” which was some cheap kind of metaphorical way of looking at the lines painted on the side of the road while you’re driving and it looks like the fender is constantly eating it. I guess. Long rambling lines.
9. Complete Poems of John Keats: Kind of the same thing as Shakespeare.
10. The Bedbug and Selected Poetry, Vladimir Mayakovsky: Like Appolinaire, to know how American poets arrived at the New York school you have to read Mayakovsky. For anyone who’s been stuck in a strictly realist interpretation of the world Mayakovsky’s poems make poetry fun again.
11. The Epic of Gilgamesh: I guess this should be here under poetry? I suppose what’s most important to me is that while growing up as a Catholic I of course thought that the world’s oldest stories were those in the Old Testament, so it was pretty earth-shattering for me when I encountered The Epic of Gilgamesh and learned that it was at least 2,500 years older. Plus, Enkidu and Gilgamesh kicking monsters’ asses for no logical reason? It’s great.
12. Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman: Not sure how any American poet could get through a “pillars” list without including this. It’s the first poetry I ever read that told me that I didn’t have to employ traditional rhythm and rhyme.
13. Where the Sidewalk Ends, Shel Silverstein: I read this as a kid, along with Dr. Seuss, and I’ll still pick up this book and read poems from it to remind me of the pure joy that poetry ought to be.
14. The Norton Anthology of Poetry: I read this (yes, the whole goddamn thing) while studying for my PhD. exams in poetry. The introductory materials alone make owning the book worthwhile, as they explain in very clear detail the foundations of verse. Then there’s the 1,000 years + of poems.
15. The Rooster’s Wife, Russell Edson: I could really say everything that Russell Edson’s ever written, but I’m narrowing it down to this book, which I picked up from the library. Edson’s America’s prose poem Appolinaire, or perhaps Kharms.

???

1. Today I Wrote Nothing, Daniil Kharms: These are books that don’t have a specific genre, or they cross genres. Kharms is one of the great absurdist I-don’t-know-what-you-call-him-other-than-awesome. He has short little stories that aren’t stories; they’re almost more like jokes that both are and are not funny.
2. Imaginations, William Carlos Williams: This book incorporates five of Williams’s experimental books: Spring and All, Kora in Hell, The Descent of Winter, The Great American Novel, and A Novelette and Other Prose. It’s full of weirdness, and fun, though at times depressing like New Jersey.
3. The Old and New Testaments: I think if more people read the Bible as a literary text they would see it as one of the craziest and most interesting novels ever written. Plus, I reference it directly and indirectly all the time.

 

Greg Hunter

Hamlet, William Shakespeare
“White Nights,” Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dubliners, James Joyce
Look Homeward Angel, Thomas Wolfe
Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett
Ulysses, James Joyce
The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien
Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor
Nine Stories, J. D. Salinger
A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Molly/Malone Dies/The Unnameable, Samuel Beckett
Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
Mythologies, Roland Barthes
Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov
A Separate Peace, John Knowles
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths, Ingri d’Aulaire, Edgar Parin d’Aulaire
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
The Talented Mister Ripley/Ripley Under Ground/Ripley’s Game, Patricia Highsmith
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
The Amazing Spider-Man #1-38, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko
The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
Bande à part, Jean-Luc Godard
Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick et al.
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
If on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino
Blade Runner, Ridley Scott et al.
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
Let it Be, The Replacements
Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders, L.M. Kit Carson, Sam Shepard
“The Death of Speedy,” Jaime Hernandez
Batman: Year One, Frank Miller and David Mazzuccelli
The Kids in the Hall
The Simpsons
Twin Peaks
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace
Assorted superhero comics, Grant Morrison
The Acme Novelty Library series, Chris Ware
Unlikely, Jeffrey Brown
“Cecil and Jordan in New York,” Gabrielle Bell
Remainder, Tom McCarthy
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
Skippy Dies, Paul Murray

Christopher Higgs

To build this list, I asked myself: “If somehow my brain was erased, what fifty books would be needed in order to restore it to my previous operating parameters?” Organized according to publication date, from oldest to newest.

Dante Alighieri – Inferno (1314)

The first work of capital-L Literature I ever read of my own volition, outside my required school reading, at the age of sixteen, because in the biography No One Here Gets Out Alive Jim Morrison is said to have been greatly influenced by it.

Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote (1605-1615)

In his book The Order of Things, Foucault identifies Don Quixote as the pivot point in the historical transformation of mimesis from imitation to representation. An important idea to me. While Edith Grossman’s translation is more “readable,” I favor Tobias Smollett’s translation because of the strangeness of his language.

Immanuel Kant – Critique of Judgment (1790)

My perspective on aesthetics arises from my continued engagement with Kant’s Third Critique.

Mary Shelley – Frankenstein (1818)

The birth of the monster. A true heartbreaker of a novel. I read it for the first time when I was thirty-one years old.

Comte de Lautréamont – Les Chants de Maldoror (1869)

For me, the most potent combination of beauty and evil where the line between human, animal, plant and spirit collapses. Beware of Paul Knight’s translation: it’s awful. Look for Alexis Lykiard’s translation, which captures the poetry of the prose.

J.K. Huysmans – À rebours (1884)

Misanthropy, decadence, isolation, and elitism mingle in a way that makes me some days think I happened to be born at the turn of the wrong century.

Friedrich Nietzsche – On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

Nietzsche is my skeleton key. I could’ve listed a dozen of his books. This one is important to me because of the way it elaborates on the power of the affirmative (active) and the weakness of the negative (reactive).

Alfred Jarry – Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician (1911)

’Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, the science of the particular rather than the general, the gateway to my deep appreciation for and interest in all types of anomalies.

Gertrude Stein – Tender Buttons (1914)

I decide to include only one book per author. Otherwise, I would’ve loaded this list with Stein. She is probably my all-time favorite writer and Tender Buttons is probably my all-time favorite book (along with Deleuze & Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus).

James Joyce – Ulysses (1922)

As much as I love Finnegans Wake, and I really do, Ulysses holds a special place in my heart, because my wife and I got engaged while we were in Ireland on a research grant studying Bloomsday. Having actually walked the paths of Bloom and Daedalus, from the Martello Tower down in Sandycove where Stephen is summoned to the roof by Buck Mulligan, all the way up to the cemetery in Howth where Leopold proposed to Molly, this book has become a part of me.

William Carlos Williams – Spring & All (1923)

Williams makes a cake of T.S. Eliot and his weak-ass (or should I say Pound’s weak-ass) Waste Land in this tour de force of awesomeness that opens with apocalypse and cleanses the whole wide world only to recreate it in the image of the American imagination rather than the European tradition.

Virginia Woolf – The Waves (1931)

I almost swapped this title for the “Time Passes” part in To the Lighthouse where the book becomes uninhabited by humans. I love so many of Woolf’s books, but this one is so singularly peculiar, so extravagantly unmoored, the first time I read it I was convinced the children were spirits or robots. I still can’t shake the notion that this book is best described as sci-fi.

Max Ernst - Une semaine de bonté (1934)

Could’ve included Breton’s Mad Love or Nadja. Could’ve included any of Dalí’s fictional memoirs. Could’ve included a gang of Surrealist materials I love, but this wordless novel consisting of monsters made of animal and man where Victorian and Modern cultures collide in grotesque fashion is in a league of its own.

Henry Miller – Tropic of Cancer (1934)

Miller says it isn’t a book, it’s “a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty…what you will.” I couldn’t love it any more than I do, I don’t think. A guidebook for becoming inhuman.

Djuna Barnes – Nightwood (1936)

A theme has arisen already in this list, I’m sure. The boundary between human and animal collapses, and my interest and attraction commences. Blood and dreams and repetition. The poetry of Paris at night.

Antonin Artaud – The Theatre & Its Double (1938)

How to rearrange your thinking, how to become the body without organs. The Theater of Cruelty, the Balinese Theater, There Are No Masterpieces. So much head spinning, rearrangement doesn’t even begin to explain it.

Jean Genet – Our Lady of the Flowers (1943)

Imagination, incarceration, sexual fixation. The feeling of murder. The way so many voices live inside us. This haunting carnivalesque shows us the way we escape the body is to create the drag queens lingering in the dark corners of our locked cells.

Samuel Beckett – Watt (1953)

I love everything Beckett produced, but this is the one with which I’ve spent the most time. My theory is that Watt can’t remember because he’s not human. Of course, I tend to think Beckett’s overall project is predicated on a deep misanthropy and that his “characters” have little if anything to do with humanity and everything to do with robots and animals: the inhuman.

William Barrett – Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)

At 18 years old, like so many people at that age, I fell under the spell of existentialism. This book, along with Walter Kaufmann’s Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, and Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, got me hooked on philosophy.

William Burroughs – Nova Trilogy (1961-64)

This is a cheat, since it is three books (Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, The Soft Machine), but they go together like french-fries and coleslaw. Time travel, aggressive sex, colors and bugs and reptiles and mutants and oppressive forces and homosexual porn and drugs and Mayan prophesies, just to name a few of the remarkable things inside this triptych. For what it’s worth, Francis Bacon painted one of my favorite paintings (his triptych Three Studies for a Crucifixion) in 1962 – smack dab in the middle of Burroughs’s triptych.

Alain Robbe-Grillet – For a New Novel (1963)

First read this when I was 16 years old. The effect was profound. Had I not read it when I read it, perhaps my life would be very different.

Yoko Ono – Grapefruit (1964)

Conceptual art meets literature. Yoko Ono is a hero of mine, for so many reasons. This book and the albums she made with John Lennon (and John Lennon’s books as well) are bedrock for me.

Sylvia Plath – Ariel (1965)

One of the most compelling writers I’ve ever encountered, and one of the most intense books I’ve ever read. I named the online art gallery I curate after a line from her poem “Years,” which wasn’t in Plath’s original manuscript version of Ariel but was added later by Ted Hughes.

O God, I am not like you
In your vacuous black,
Stars stuck all over, bright stupid confetti.
Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.

Susan Sontag – Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)

Willem De Kooning said in an interview, “Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It’s very tiny – very tiny, content.” Oscar Wilde wrote in a letter, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” Sontag ends the titular essay by suggesting, “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” I say yes, yes, yes. Sontag is another hero of mine.

Jacques Derrida – Writing and Difference (1967)

Along with Stein’s work, Derrida’s work means the world to me. This is the book with “Play Structure Sign” and his essay on Artaud and so many other hits. But I could’ve put a dozen of his books on this list, from Glas to The Animal Within to Dissemination to so many others. He is a main pillar for me, by a long shot.

Richard Brautigan – In Watermelon Sugar (1968)

“There is nothing like Richard Brautigan anywhere. Perhaps, when we are very old, people will write ‘Brautigans,’ just as we now write novels. This man has invented a genre, a whole new shot, a thing needed, delightful, and right,” wrote an unidentified reviewer or the San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle. I love this book like tweens love Bieber.

Jean-Luc Godard – Godard on Godard (1968)

Along with Stein and Derrida, Godard is a central influence on my thinking and my creations. To me, the films he made between 1961 and 1967 are the most powerful and significant artistic creations ever created. His writing about himself is a guidebook for becoming awesome.

Robert Coover – The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968)

To live in one’s mind. To confuse fantasy with reality so totally as to see no point in reality beyond its relationship to fantasy. I see this book as the postmodern twin of Genet’s Our Lady of Flowers. It’s also a heartbreaker, like Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Claude Simon – Conducting Bodies (1971)

The most kaleidoscopic novel I’ve ever encountered, by which I mean it offers the sensation of looking through a kaleidoscope, a moment refracted and jagged reappears slightly altered only to scrabble and scramble and realign and disjoin endlessly.

Gabriel García Márquez – The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975)

How many sentences in this novel, six or seven? Could’ve listed One Hundred Years of Solitude, could’ve included Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World or Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch or Cronopios and Famas, Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers, I love all of those books. But something about Autumn of the Patriarch persists in my memory, sticks with me, rears its head every so often. I remember reading it at LAX in 1999.

Andy Warhol – The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975)

Compiling my pillars, we have at the apex Stein, Derrida, Godard, and now add Warhol. “Ideas are nothing.” “Everything is nothing.” “Two people kissing always look like fish.” Warhol embodies Wilde’s valorization of the surface, to which I am greatly attracted.

Samuel Delany – Dhalgren (1975)

Delany in Silent Interviews: “Dhalgren has outsold Gravity’s Rainbow — by about 100,000 copies: we share a mass market publisher and statistics leak. But Gravity’s Rainbow is a fantasy about a war most of its readers don’t really remember, whereas Dhalgren is in fairly pointed dialogue with all the depressed and burned-out areas of America’s great cities. To decide if Gravity’s Rainbow is relevant, you have to spend time in a library, mostly with a lot of Time/Life books, which are pretty romanticized to begin with. To see what Dhalgren is about, you only have to walk along a mile of your own town’s inner city. So Dhalgren’s a bit more threatening–and accordingly receives less formal attention.” I love so many of Delany’s books, especially the early sci-fi ones. But this book is a monster and reading it is a vertiginous experience unlike all other experiences – especially unlike the experience of reading Gravity’s Rainbow, which pales in comparison to Dhalgren in my estimation.

Clarice Lispector – The Hour of the Star (1977)

A slim volume with a haunting narrator. Lispector resonates with me, and this was the first of her books that I read. Like Unbearable Lightness of Being, this is a novel of ideas. She died shortly after writing this book, if memory serves, of cancer. Unlike Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wallace, and so many other writers who died while in the middle of writing a book, Lispector got to finish her last one. The sad thing is that she didn’t know it was going to be her last book. Markson got to finish his last book, and he pretty much knew it would be his last. I wonder about these things a lot. I wonder if I’ll die in the middle of writing a book?

Alan Harrington – The Immortalist (1977)

Speaking of dying, I accidently grabbed this book at a book sale in Cheyenne, Wyoming when I was 18 years old and that happy accident has had a profound impact on my way of thinking. The premise is basically an argument for why humanity should focus its collective powers on solving the problem of death. As Harrington says, at this point in our historical development, considering our technological achievements, there is no valid reason why we should die. Unlike some people, I want to live forever so this book really appeals to me.

Kathy Acker – Blood and Guts in High School (1978)

Toward the end Acker writes, “A Human is a being halfway between an alligator and a bird who wants to be a bird. The ancient books say there are ways humans can become something else. The most important book on human transformation is hidden with the corpse Catullus in the Saba Pacha Cemetery in Alexandria because all books were written by dead people.” I often wonder what it would be like if all writers possessed Acker’s moxy and creative imagination.

Italo Calvino – If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979)

A book that brings the reader into the book unlike any other. A narrative matryoshka doll. I learned why narrative matters from this book.

Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman – No One Here Gets Out Alive (1980)

This is where books began for me. If it were not for this book, there would be no other books on this list because I only began reading literature after I discovered that Jim Morrison did it. I was fifteen years old. Before this book, before discovering Morrison’s infatuation with poetry and prose, I had no interest in books.

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari – A Thousand Plateaus (1980)

Stein, Derrida, Godard, Warhol, and Gilles Deleuze make up my five fundamental pillars. This book was my first encounter with Deleuze, and thus it holds an incomparable position. Along with Tender Buttons, this is probably my all-time favorite book. Of course there’s also Guattari to acknowledge, whose work is also gobsmacking, but my frequency resonates most strongly with Deleuze. This is where they outline their concept of the rhizome, deterritorialization, etc. While the other four of my main five pillars have certainly affected me tremendously, I think Deleuze is the writer I feel has contributed the most to my personal perspective, my creative approach, and my pedagogy.

Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

A novel of ideas, which I read directly after returning to the U.S. following my brief stint in the Peace Corps in West Africa.

Georges Bataille - Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (1985)

Something by Bataille must be on this list, and this collection contains his essay on “The Pineal Eye,” which is amazing, all his stuff is amazing, anarchic, and important.

Jeanette Winterson – Written on the Body (1992)

The poetics of an unknowable gender. What is love and how does it manifest through the body? I don’t think I ever really thought seriously about the role of gender in literature before reading this book.

Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory 1900-2000 (1992)

Without this book I would be lost.

Laurie Anderson – Stories from the Nerve Bible (1993)

My first encounter with the potentiality of the intersection between art and literature. Came across it at some bookstore in Denver when I was sixteen years old and bought it because it looked strange.

Carole Maso – Ava (1993)

Her book Break Every Rule is also extremely valuable to me, but this book marries formal creativity and the reality of death in such an unfamiliar and unmatched way, I can’t say my brain would be the same brain if it had not spent time with this book.

Leslie Scalapino – Defoe (1995)

More and More I am growing to consider Scalapino one of the most interesting American writers of the late twentieth century, because of the way she manipulated words and sentences unlike anyone else.

Bret Easton Ellis – Glamorama (1998)

The first five books Ellis published all mean a great deal to me, because they were the books I soaked myself inside while I was going through the first two years of film school. I hear people talk about the greatness of Don Delillo especially White Noise as it pertains to encapsulating the 80s in America. For me, Glamorama is stronger, more intense, as is American Psycho for that matter, at capturing a certain aspect of the American 80s experience.

David Markson – The Author Quartet (1996-2007)

Like Burroughs’s Nova Trilogy, this one is a cheat. Reader’s Block (1996), This Is Not a Novel (2001), Vanishing Point (2004), and The Last Novel (2007). To quote myself, Walter Benjamin imagined a whole book made entirely of quotes. And in a way, this is that book. In another way, this is not that book. Conceptual experimental, the novel as assemblage. Repetition. With the kind of center that Derrida describes as both present and absent, as Stein described Oakland “There is no there there.” These books granted me permission to explore the outskirts of formal acceptability.

Ben Marcus – The Age of Wire & String (1998)

I first read it around 2004, at a time when I really needed it, at a time when I was constantly being harassed in creative writing workshops, hearing over and over that my writing was both illegitimate and a waste of time because it was “experimental.” Marcus helped give me confidence that it was okay to pursue the strangeness.

Mary Ann Caws, ed. – Manifesto: A Century of Isms (2000)

Indispensable.

Blake Butler – EVER (2009)

How is it I have nothing on this list by Hélène Cixous or Luce Irigaray? Or Emerson or Whitman or Poe? How are Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé absent? No Baudrillard, no Philip K. Dick? No comic books? Fifty pillars just aren’t enough. Blake Butler’s EVER, however, is the perfect book to end the list with, because it represents for me a great tipping point.

Christopher Higgs fluctuates between the roles of writer, arts & culture critic, independent curator and educator. He authored the novelistic text The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney (Sator Press), and assembled the collaborative text ONE with Blake Butler and Vanessa Place (forthcoming from Roof Books).

List minus annotations:

Dante Alighieri – Inferno (1314)
Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote (1605-1615)
Immanuel Kant – Critique of Judgment (1790)
Mary Shelley – Frankenstein (1818)
Comte de Lautréamont – Les Chants de Maldoror (1869)
J.K. Huysmans – À rebours (1884)
Friedrich Nietzsche – On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
Alfred Jarry – Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician (1911)
Gertrude Stein – Tender Buttons (1914)
James Joyce – Ulysses (1922)
William Carlos Williams – Spring & All (1923)
Virginia Woolf – The Waves (1931)
Max Ernst – Une semaine de bonté (1934)
Henry Miller – Tropic of Cancer (1934)
Djuna Barnes – Nightwood (1936)
Antonin Artaud – The Theatre & Its Double (1938)
Jean Genet – Our Lady of the Flowers (1943)
Samuel Beckett – Watt (1953)
William Barrett – Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)
William Burroughs – Nova Trilogy (1961-64)
Alain Robbe-Grillet – For a New Novel (1963)
Yoko Ono – Grapefruit (1964)
Sylvia Plath – Ariel (1965)
Susan Sontag – Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
Jacques Derrida – Writing and Difference (1967)
Richard Brautigan – In Watermelon Sugar (1968)
Jean-Luc Godard – Godard on Godard (1968)
Robert Coover – The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968)
Claude Simon – Conducting Bodies (1971)
Gabriel García Márquez – The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975)
Andy Warhol – The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975)
Samuel Delany – Dhalgren (1975)
Clarice Lispector – The Hour of the Star (1977)
Alan Harrington – The Immortalist (1977)
Kathy Acker – Blood and Guts in High School (1978)
Italo Calvino – If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979)
Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman – No One Here Gets Out Alive (1980)
Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari – A Thousand Plateaus (1980)
Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
Georges Bataille – Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (1985)
Jeanette Winterson – Written on the Body (1992)
Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory 1900-2000 (1992)
Laurie Anderson – Stories from the Nerve Bible (1993)
Carole Maso – Ava (1993)
Leslie Scalapino – Defoe (1995)
Bret Easton Ellis – Glamorama (1998)
David Markson – The Author Quintet (1996-2007)
Ben Marcus – The Age of Wire & String (1998)
Mary Ann Caws – Manifesto: A Century of Isms (2000)
Blake Butler – EVER (2009)


 

Tina May Hall

1. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll: This is the first book I remember in any detail. My father read it to me when I was three and it opened up wild spaces in my head.

2-4. Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery; Little Women, Louisa May Alcott; Trixie Belden books, Julie Campbell Tatham: My mother bribed me with these books to go to school when I was in the first grade, so I credit them with keeping me from becoming an elementary-school-dropout.

5. Mansfield Park, Jane Austen: This was the first book that I read by Austen and I read it when I was too young to realize it was witty. Later, in college, one of my English professors, a renowned Austen scholar, would bemoan my affection for the book, decrying Fanny Price as a “vampire.”

6. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë: Also read when I was too young to really understand it, but I was not too young to be insensible to the gothic allure of the tragic Brontë siblings. I teach this book all the time now and am always stunned anew at how beautifully it is constructed.

7. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad: Is this book problematic in its treatment of race? Yes, of course. Should it be read alongside Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (number 8) and then for fun, alongside a marathon viewing of Apocalypse Now Redux? Yes, of course. But it also should be read for the sheer elegance of the construction. I had to read it in high school and then about a dozen more times for various college classes, and now, my students claim they have never encountered it. I find it is a good book to assign to my budding fantasy writers who are working out the concept of the hero’s journey.

9. Beloved, Toni Morrison: In high school and college I started finding books that completely changed my understanding of what literature could do. This was one of the first of these. The chokecherry tree, the milk, the patches of color—all breaking the hell out of my previous notions of how a novel worked.

10. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez: A gorgeous history that taught me about the elasticity of the sentence.

11. A Light in August, William Faulkner: So magical that it is no stretch to see why Morrison and García Márquez count Faulkner as an influence. Any Faulkner will do, but I love the toothpaste in the closet as primal scene here.

12. The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino: Terrifically charming introduction to Calvino.

13. The Passion, Jeanette Winterson: It is hard to believe Winterson was in her early twenties when she wrote this. This is one of those books where every sentence makes me more and more joyful.

14. The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter: The stories here are creepy and uncanny in the best ways. Those ways include lots of girls claiming their inner beasts, beautiful and savage play with blood imagery, and lovely unearthing of the sexuality of fairy tales.

15. Dracula, Bram Stoker: Since we’re talking about blood… I love teaching this novel. The structure is surprisingly complex and symmetrical, and it stands as a perfect container of so many cultural anxieties and fantasies that it is a literature professor’s dream. This book, along with Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (number 16), is essential context for my students who are coming out of adolescence on waves of paranormal young adult fiction.

16. Orlando, Virginia Woolf: Another book that completely transformed my ideas of what is possible in fiction. Amazing work with conveying the passage of time here.

17. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein: Sure, I love the jouissance of The Making of the Americans but intelligible Stein is so delightfully gossipy. Read it alongside Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and be simultaneously charmed and repulsed by the egotism of authorship.

18. Ava, Carole Maso: The obvious inheritor of Woolf and Stein’s mantles, Maso is ruthless. I love all of her books, but this one in particular blows apart the shell of the novel.

19. Blood and Guts in High School, Kathy Acker: At this point, I feel I must mention Kathy Acker who is shock fiction at its best. I have a friend who burned this book on his propane grill after being forced to read it in graduate school. This is a great book to test one’s ideas about what makes narrative and fiction. I like to teach it alongside Donald Barthelme and Chuck Palahniuk, and I just cross my fingers that the students won’t take it home for spring break, thus prompting a cascade of emails from parents who glimpsed the pages and pages of badly-doodled penises.

20. The Famished Road, Ben Okri: A fever dream of a book that seems larger than the space it takes up. Plus, it inspired a Radiohead song.

21. White Noise, Don DeLillo: There is so much that is good and funny and self-reflexive about this book. This is a nice quick read for my students who think fiction writers are all flaky artists who know nothing about literary theory.

22. Skin, Shelley Jackson: Novel in progress written via tattoos on volunteers’ skin. It may be a bit gimmicky, but it is a great exercise in thinking about the dissemination of literature, especially in combination with electronic publishing and the dematerialization of the book.

23. Lark and Termite, Jayne Anne Phillips: Phillips’ most recent novel is the culmination of a career of beautiful fiction. This book is shockingly lovely from the first sentence to the last.

24. Hell, Kathryn Davis: The architecture of her books is amazing, especially this one. A gorgeous book that maps the weird and wild twists and turns of longing.

25. Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler: Really, anything Butler wrote is strange and wonderful and worth reading. This one is great because of its positioning of a young girl as the hero on a quest.

26. Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood: It is hard to think of anyone contemporary who does female characters more wittily.

27-50. My husband and I have a game where we list “perfect” stories. We don’t have any criteria for this designation; we just rely on a feeling, the intuitive force with which a “perfect” story strikes one and makes itself unforgettable. And thus I present them in no particular order with no individual commentary. Strangely (considering that our tastes in fiction diverge rather strongly), we are nearly always in agreement over the designation. Warning to you youngsters flirting madly in your workshops: this is what counts for entertainment in an alliance between two fiction writers.

“A Family Supper” Kazuo Ishiguro

“Car Crash While Hitchhiking” Denis Johnson

“A Good Man is Hard to Find” Flannery O’Connor

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” Joyce Carol Oates

“Cathedral” Raymond Carver

“St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” Karen Russell

“The Thing in the Forest” A.S. Byatt

“Open Secrets” Alice Munro

“The Fall of the House of Usher” Edgar Allen Poe

“La Mayonette” Lily Tuck

“Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot” Robert Olen Butler

“I’m Your Horse in the Night” Luisa Valenzuela

“The Things They Carried” Tim O’Brien

“Saint Marie” Louise Erdrich

“Paper Lantern” Stuart Dybek

“White Angel” Michael Cunningham

“The Colonel” Carolyn Forché

“Limestone Diner” Trudy Lewis

“Sagittarius” Greg Hrbek

“How to Talk to a Hunter” Pam Houston

“Hear that Long Train Moan” Percival Everett

“The Metamorphosis” Franz Kafka

“The Management of Grief” Bharati Mukherjee

“Why the Sky Turns Red when the Sun Goes Down” Ryan Harty

Rikki Ducornet

(I attempted to list the very special books that were the potencies behind my thinking as a child and young adult, and the books that both inspirited and inspired my writing years later. For example, my first four novels were written under the spell of Gaston Bachelard; Moby-Dick was my companion when I wrote The Fountains of Neptune; Lolita breathed in my ear throughout the waking dream that became The Fan Maker’s Inquisition. Omensetter’s Luck was the book that made it impossible not to become a writer; Borges, Kafka and Detienne’s beautiful study on Adonis have never left my side.)

1. Carroll: Through The Looking Glass

2. Swift: Gulliver’s Travels

3. Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel

4. Cervantes: Don Quixote

7. Dalí: Fifty Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship

8. The Brothers Grimm: Collected Fairytales

9. Dinesen: Seven Gothic Tales

10. The Arabian Nights

11. Tsao Husueh-Chin: The Dream of the Red Chamber

12. Laotse: Tao Te King

13. Melville: Moby-Dick

14. Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain

15. Ovid: The Metamorphoses

16. Kafka: The Castle

17 Kafka: The Trial

18. Kafka: The Complete Stories

19. Jonas: The Gnostics

20. Sartre: La Nausée

21. Camus: The Stranger

22. Hedayat: The Blind Owl

23. Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling

24. Sade: Justine

25. Reage: Histoire d’O

26. Baldwin: Giovanni’s Room

27. Flaubert: Madame Bovary

28. Proust: Swann’s Way

29. Breton: Nadja

30. Nabokov: Lolita

31. Hawkes: Love, Death and the Traveller

32. Coover: Pricksongs and Descants

33. Gass: Omensetter’s Luck

34. Gass: In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

35. Asturias: The Mulatta

36. Borges: Fictions

37. Maturin: Melmoth

38. Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude

39. Calvino: Cosmicomics

39. Calvino: Six Memos for the Next Millennium

40. Bachelard: Earth and the Reveries of Repose

41. Bachelard: Water and Dreams

42. Bachelard: The Poetics of Space

43. Baltrusaitis: Aberrations

44. Detienne: Les Jardins d’Adonis

45. Verdier: Facons de dire, Facons de Faire

46. Miller: For Your Own Good

47. Mabille: Le Miroir du Merveilleux

48. Harbison: Eccentric Spaces

49. Pliny: Natural History (This is cheating!)

50. Shikibu: The Tale of Genji

Claire Donato

(Compiled intuitively and without explanation as non-hierarchically as possible. Reflective of the now with some of then, only the tip of the iceberg. I am potentially cheating by numbering my list, which could go on forever.)

1. Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H., Hour of the Star, Near to the Wild Heart, Stream of Life, Crônicas, and, most recently, A Breath of Life
2. Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker
3. Rosmarie Waldrop, Curves to the Apple
4. David Jhave Johnston’s digital poetry: glia.ca
5. Judd Morrissey and Mark Jeffrey, The Precession: An 80 Foot Long Internet Art Performance Poem
6. Ian Hatcher, Prosthesis
7. Jeff T. Johnson, Letters from the Archiverse
8. Lisa Robertson, Debbie: An Epic
9. Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl and The Melancholy of Anatomy
10. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
11. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
12. Roland Barthes, Mythologies
13. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
14. Stendhal, The Red and the Black
15. Robert Coover, “The Babysitter” (short story)
16. Ted Mooney, Easy Travel to Other Planets
17. C.D. Wright, Rising, Falling, Hovering
18. Gracie Leavitt’s unstoppable syntax (can’t wait for Monkeys, Minor Planet, Average Star)
19. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Fra Keeler
20. Marie Redonnet, Hôtel Splendid
21. Alice Notley, Grave of Light
22. Joan Didion, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live
23. Ronaldo V. Wilson’s virtuosic literary performances
24. Brenda Hillman, “Cascadia” (poem)
25. Lyn Hejinian, My Life
26. Vladmir Nabokov, Lolita
27. Juliana Spahr, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs
28. Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
29. Talan Memmott’s theory as theater
30. Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String
31. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
32. Against Expression (eds. Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith)
33. Marguerite Duras, The Malady of Death
33.33. Music could be its own list. Here are a few names: Joanna Newsom, Meg Baird, Judee Sill, Bill Callahan, Laura Marling, The Velvet Underground…
34. John Cayley’s brain
35. Hélène Cixous, The Third Body
36. Rachel Zolf, Human Resources
37. Inger Christensen, It
38. Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse
39. Caroline Bergvall, “Cropper,” “Ride,” and “Via”
40. Denise Riley, Selected Poems
41. Leslie Scalapino, Considering how exaggerated music is
42. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
43. The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara
44. Jenny Holzer, Truisms
45. Daisies (dir. Vera Chytilová)
46. Sans toit ni loi / Vagabond and Les glaneurs et la glaneuse / The Gleaners and I, Agnès Varda
47. Céline et Julie vont en bateau / Celine and Julie Go Boating (dir. Jacques Rivette)
48. Melancholia (dir. Lars Von Trier)
49. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (created by Joss Whedon)
50. Twin Peaks (created by David Lynch)

Vincent Czyz

1. Dhalgren, S.R. Delany
2. Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar
3. The Recognitions, William Gaddis
4. On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
5. Moby-Dick, Melville
6. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
7. Our Mutual Friend, Dickens
8. Da Vinci’s Bicycle, Guy Davenport
9. Tatlin! Guy Davenport
10. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Miller, Jr.
11. 1984, George Orwell
12. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
13. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
14. Rabbit, Run, John Updike
15. Rabbit Redux, John Updike
16. Ulysses, Joyce
17. Black Tickets, Jayne Anne Phillips
18. Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich
19. House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday
20. Grey Lamb, Black Falcon, Rebecca West
21. 100 Years of Solitude, G. G. Marquez
22. Love in the Time of Cholera, G. G. Marquez
23. Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, Dennis Overbye
24. On Heroes and Tombs, Ernesto Sabato
25. Friday Night Lights
26. The Place in Flowers where Pollen Rests, Paul West
27. Tar Baby, Toni Morrison
28. The Tunnel, William Gass
29. Habitations of the Word, William Gass
30. Sexus, Henry Miller
31. Desolation Angels, Jack Kerouac
32. The Book of Sand, J. L. Borges
33. Labyrinths, J. L. Borges
34. Black Elk Speaks, Black Elk
35. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown
36. The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin
37. The City in History, Louis Mumford
38. The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley
39. Pensées, Blaise Pascal
40. The Divided Self, R.D. Laing
41. Omensetter’s Luck, William Gass
42. The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, Robert Price
43. The Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
44. The Golden Bough, James Frazer
45. The White Goddess, Robert Graves
46. The Ethics, Spinoza
47. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
48. The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway
49. The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway
50. Zen Buddhism, Alan Watts

 j/j hastain

The Little Prince, Katherine Woods

TC Tolbert-Territories of Folding-Wandering, bridge-like. Narrative submerged, but also willing to be plucked up.

De LaGrace Volcano-Sublime Mutations-Oh gods, if you have not seen this just find it, please. Is like food and vision all at once. Barbell genitals, gently.

Leslie Feinberg-Stone Butch Blues-Initiation by lyric anyone? Then that scene in the bedroom with the lights low, and she knows, and she doesn’t know.

Joan Nestle-The Persistent Desire (A Butch Femme Reader)-Gritty bodies. The grit of our bodies.

Audre Lorde’s books.

Bell Hooks’ books.

Melissa Buzzeo-Face-Like some of her other works, but accentuated somehow. Perhaps that it was a transitional text toward what then came out as an underwater narrative?

Bhanu Kapil’s books-If the third eye were a gland that could be exposed on an unforeseen threshold between one kind of cream and another kind of cream.

Doug Rice-dream Memoirs of a Fabulist-Confessional atonal. Home base?

Nikos Kazantzamkis-The Last Temptation of Christ-Weeping. A heart of so many of the narratives and lyricisms that haunt.

Caroline Walker Bynum-Holy Feast Holy Fast-Kneel before and after. Slowly eat the ephemeral abbot.

Marguerite Duras’ books-A necessary pressure. Like the heat of the bath, when wrapping around you while you are in it, suddenly takes you from cold to sweating. Sudden awareness due to accumulations of press.

John Cage-Composition in Retrospect-Like Gertrude, sweet impetus to undo organic or return things to not-popular organics, not to dismantle it but to see what else of it could.

Bear Bergman-Butch is a Noun-Many sides of a double vision.

Robert Gluck- Margery Kempe-Also of non-dogmatic scriptural relevance. He wrote the scripts just tilted enough to…

Georges Bataille’s books.

William Burroughs-Junkie-Anal sex relating (in feeling) to the input or removal of a cork.

Alphonso Lingis’ books.

Monique Wittig’s books.

Julian Brolaski-Advice for Lovers-Cavalcade of hints.

Eileen Myles-Cool for you, Chelsea Girls.

He do the Gay Man in Different Voices-Stephen Mills-The various eroses of recollection, because recollection always occurs within the body.

Amy King’s books.

Hybrard’s-The Dead Girl in a Lace Dress.

Brenda Iijima’s books.

Julia Kristeva’s-Black Sun.

Kevin Killian’s books.

Marcel Duchamp’s.

Francesca Lia Block-Dangerous Angels.

Akilah Oliver’s books.

CA Conrad- A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon-A proposal of psychic rhythm. Of enlightenment incrementally, by awkward or strange actions.

Marthe Reed-Gaze-A woman is not necessarily a femme. Chewing the crimson petal.

Margaret Atwood-Oryx and Crake-Read this with my sweetheart aloud.

Hejinian’s-My Life-Destabilization at the same time as deifying (but without either as intent).

Kate Chopin’s.

Leslie Scalapino’s.

Elizabeth Robinson-Massaging (as with bread) the fine line between religious inclusion and dogma. Doing so in ways that allow lyricism to speak. Brilliant and energetic use of line breaks. Line breaks relate to sound. So, percussive?

Li-Young Lee-Rose.

Virginia Woolf’s-The Waves.

Sandra Sisneros’.

Gertrude Stein’s books.

Lispector’s-The Apple in the Dark, The Hour of the Star.

Mina Loy’s.

Adrienne Rich’s books-Not insular.

Helene Cixous’ books-White Ink. Regal and open. So, not inundated with regalia.

Djuna Barnes-I Could Never be Lonely Without a Husband.

Simone de Beauvoir’s.

H.D.-End to Torment, The Gift.

Tristan Tzara’s.

Anna Joy Springer’s-The Viscous Red Relic Love-A lovely modern conglomerate.

Lonely Christopher-The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse.

Karen Finley’s-A Different Kind of Intimacy.

Laynie Brown’s-Acts of Levitation-Spinning dynamism.


 

Jane Ciabattari

The books I treasure explore the nature of time and “reality,” integrate non-domestic external realities with the personal realm, startle readers with original language, innovate within the short story or novel form, or open doors to new ways of perceiving what fiction is. Telling truth through fiction has been a longtime goal of mine as a fiction writer, and I honor those who have met that challenge, including these 50 (including one poet):

My 50, in alphabetical order:

Chimamanda Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
Renata Adler, Speedboat
Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina
Margaret Atwood, Surfacing
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions
William Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Anton Chekhov, Short Stories
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Joan Didion, Salvador
E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime
Marguerite Duras, The Lover
Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
M.F.K. Fisher, As They Were
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Richard Ford, Rock Springs
Alyson Hagy, Ghosts of Wyoming
Hamilton, Edith, Mythology
8Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights
Joy Harjo, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
Amy Hempel, Reasons to Live
Sheila Kohler, Cracks
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Carson McCullers, Ballad of the Sad Cafe
N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn
Toni Morrison, Sula
Toni Morrison, Beloved
*Marnie Mueller, The Climate of the Country
Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories
Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?
Tim O’Brien, Things They Carried
Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Ann Patchett, Bel Canto
Jayne Anne Phillips, Black Tickets
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite
Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
*James Salter, Light Years
Greg Sarris, Grand Avenue
W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz
Robert Stone,Dog Soldiers
Alice Walker, Meridian
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf, The Waves