Stole this list from Amy from Luton. Thank you. What a great list. Did Donald Barthelme give this out at some course he taught? Where did this come from? Here’s the list (green, I own; blue, I’ve read previously; red, I’ve read since starting):
1. At Swim Two Birds – Flann O’Brien
2. The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien
3. Collected Short Stories – Isaac Babel
4. Labyrinths – Borges
5. Other Inquisitions – Borges
6. One Hundred Years Of Solitude – Garcia Marquez
7. Correction – Thomas Bernhard
8. Nog – Rudy Wurlitzer
9. Gimpel The Fool – Isaac B. Singer
10. The Assistant – Bernard Malamud
11. The Magic Barrel – Bernard Malamud
12. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
13. Under The Volcano – Malcom Lowry
14. Entire – Samuel Beckett
15. Hunger – Knut Hamsun
16. I’m Not Stiller – Max Frisch
17. Man In The Holocene – Max Frisch
18. Seven Gothic Tales – Dinesen
19. Gogol’s Wife – Tommaso Landolfi
20. V – Thomas Pynchon
21. The Lime Twig – John Hawkes
22. Blood Oranges – John Hawkes
23. Little Disturbances Of Man – Grace Paley
24. I, Etc., – Susan Sontag
25. Tell Me A Riddle – Tillie Olson
26. Hero With A Thousand Faces – Campbell
27. Henderson The Rain King – Bellow
28. The Coup – John Updike
29. Rabbit, Run – John Updike
30. The Paris Review Interviews – Various
31. How We Live – ed, Rust Hills
32. Superfiction – ed, Joe David Bellamy
33. Pushcart Prize Anthologies (no specific years given!)
The Pushcart Prize V
The Pushcart Prize IX
The Pushcart Prize XXV
34. The Writer On Her Work – ed, Sternburg
35. Manifestos Of Surrealism – Andre Breton
36. Documents Of Modern Art – ed, Motherwell
37. Against Interpretation – Susan Sontag
38. A Homemade World – Hugh Kenner
39. Letters – Flaubert
40. Sexual Perversity In Chicago – Mamet
41. The Changeling – Joy Williams
42. The New Fiction – ed, Joe David Bellamy
43. Going After Cacciato -Tim O’Brien
44. The Palm-Wine Drunkard – Amos Tutola
45. Searching For Caleb – Ann Tyler
46. Thank You – Kenneth Koch
47. Collected Poems – Frank O’Hara
48. Rivers And Mountains – John Ashbery
49. Tragic Magic – Wesley Brown
50. Mythologies – Roland Barthes
51. The Pleasure Of The Text – Barthes
52. For A New Novel – Robbe-Grillet
53. Falling In Place – Ann Beattie
54. In The Heart Of The Heart Of The Country – William Gass
55. Fiction And The Figures Of Life – Gass
56. The World Within The Word – Gass
57. Advertisements For Myself – Mailer
58. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
59. Journey To The End Of The Night – Celine
60. The Box Man – Kobo Abe
61. Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
62. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams – Peter Handke
63. Kaspar And Other Plays – Peter Handke
64. Nadja – Andre Breton
65. Chimera – John Barth
66. Lost In The Funhouse – John Barth
67. The Moviegoer – Walker Percy
68. Black Tickets – Jayne Anne Phillips
69. Collected Stories – Peter Taylor
70. The Pure And The Impure – Colette
71. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please – Carver
72. Collected Stories – John Cheever
73. I Would Have Saved Them If I Could – Leonard Michaels
74. Collected Stories – Eudora Welty
75. The Oranging Of America – Max Apple
76. Collected Stories – Flannery O’Connor
77. Mumbo Jumbo – Ishmael Reed
78. Song Of Solomon – Toni Morrison
79. The Death Of Artemio Cruz – Carlos Fuentes
80. The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting – Milan Kundera
81. The Rhetoric Of Fiction – Wayne C. Booth
P.S. The lists must stop!
