A Too-Brief, Incomplete, Unalphabetized List of Must-Read that You Might Not Have Been Taught or Otherwise Made to Read Novels and Short Story Collections Written in the 20th and 21st Centuries
Saul Bellow: Henderson the Rain King, Humboldt’s Gift, The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog
Grace Paley: Collected Stories
Flannery O’Conner: Collected Stories (especially the story from A Good Man is Hard to Find)
Evan Connell: Mrs. Bridge, Mr. Bridge
Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita, Pale Fire
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
Mary McCarthy: The Group, The Company She Keeps
Nathanael West: Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust
Eudora Welty: Collected Stories
Tess Slesinger: The Unpossessed
Dagoberto Gilb: The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna
Don DeLillo: End Zone, White Noise, Underworld
Cormac McCarthy: Suttree, All the Pretty Horses, The Road, Blood Meridian
Muriel Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Memento Mori, The Comforters, Aiding and Abetting
Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go, The Unconsoled
Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Donald Barthelme: Sixty Stories, Forty Stories
Thomas Pynchon: V, Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow
Padgett Powell: Edisto, Edisto Revisited, Aliens of Affection
Barry Hannah: Airships
Steven Millhauser: Edwin Mullhouse, Martin Dressler
Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist
Heidi Julavits: The Effects of Looking Backwards
John Cheever: The Stories of John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle
Judy Budnitz: Nice Big American Baby, Flying Leap
Lee K. Abbott: Love is the Crooked Thing
Angela Carter: The Company of Wolves
Raymond Chandler: The Long Goodbye, The Big Sleep
Elizabeth McCracken: The Giant’s House
James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket (essays)
Elizabeth Hardwick: American Fictions (essays)
Lionel Trilling: The Liberal Imagination (essays)
Charles Baxter: Burning Down the House (essays)
Walker Percy: The Moviegoer, Love in the Ruins
William Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom; Light in August; As I Lay Dying; Sound and the Fury
Willa Cather: My Antonia
David Gates: Jernigan
Paul Beatty: Slumberland
William Kennedy: Ironweed, Very Old Bones
E.L. Doctorow: Book of Daniel, Ragtime
Joanna Scott: The Manikin, Various Antidotes
Lorrie Moore: Self Help, Birds of America
Antonya Nelson: Female Trouble
Jonathan Ames: Wake Up, Sir
Wolf Whistle: Lewis Nordan
The Dogs of March: Ernest Hebert
Project X: Jim Shepard
The Good Soldier: Ford Maddox Ford
W.E.B. Dubois: The Souls of Black Folk
Ishmael Reed: Mumbo Jumbo
Willful Creatures: Aimee Bender
Chris Bachedler: U.S.!
Iris Murdoch: The Black Prince
Bastard out of Carolina: Dorothy Allison
George Singleton: Half Mammals of Dixie
Keith Lee Morris: The Dart League King
Alix Ohlin: Babylon
Denis Johnson: Jesus’ Son
Shirley Jackson: We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Richard Russo: The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool
Donald Antrim: The Hundred Brothers
Russell Banks: Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter
Margot Livesey: Criminals
Michael Griffith: Trophy
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum: Hempel Chronicles
Tom Drury: Black Brook
Frederick Exley: A Fan’s Notes
- compiled by Brock Clarke, author and English Professor at Bowdoin College