Unlike the wonderful William Gass, I am not a scholar, nor am I particularly well-versed in the language of literary criticism—and these books are all by writers (many, critics themselves) with a genius far beyond what I’ll ever possess. Gass’s original literary pillars are so masterfully described, so beautifully rendered that in comparison I feel ill-qualified, in fact I feel it impossible, to comment on these books without sounding like an unholy idiot. I’ll just say that after thirty years as a voracious and passionate reader, it was very difficult to winnow a list to fifty. These, then, are not only the books that are my favorites, but also the books that have shaped me, molded me, changed the way I write or think about writing, started a revolution in my head, books that have made their lasting mark on me as a writer and a performer and a reader and, perhaps most importantly, for the best of these, as a human being.
I admit there is a certain partiality on the list to poets and playwrights. This is my background—poetry and the theatre—so I can’t help but have been shaped by these first and foremost, before I found my way to fiction. I do read a lot of non-fiction and especially history and philosophy, but they haven’t impacted my writing as directly or as immediately. Also missing are works of fiction that I’ve loved a good deal but that haven’t necessarily impacted or changed my writing. Books by John Barth and Lydia Davis, for example, would fall into that category.
These are not all classics; in fact some are decidedly failures, inferior to other works the masters who wrote them may have produced. But in those cases that is usually precisely why I love them. I will choose a messy, hugely ambitious failure over a safe and well-crafted novel any day. I’ll choose experimentation over perfect symmetry. I’ll choose the excessive, the sprawling, over the Spartan sense of order.
(I also cheated, a little. There are a few more than fifty here in total.)
In no particular order, then:
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
Editor’s Note: This list is part of Big Other’s Tribute to William H. Gass’s 88th Birthday.
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