Larry McCaffery's "20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English Language Books of Fiction"

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McCaffery teaches American literature at San Diego State University. This is exactly the type of list that I find especially valuable, because prepared by someone who clearly has a broad literary knowledge and critical appreciation, and has the boldness to draw upon all of it. It’s so rare to find someone who’ll bring "genre" and underground literature into comparison with the received canon. [Webmaster’s note: this list was suggested by a user, and the wide range of authors on here makes it a pretty interesting list.]

Pages: 1

  1. 1.
    Pale Fire
    by Vladimir Nabokov

  2. 2.
    Ulysses
    by James Joyce

  3. 3.
    Gravity's Rainbow (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
    by Thomas Pynchon

  4. 4.
    The Public Burning (Coover, Robert)
    by Robert Coover

  5. 5.
    The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text
    by William Faulkner

  6. 7.
    The Making of Americans (American Literature Series)
    by Gertrude Stein

  7. 8.
    ?
    Three Novels: The Soft Machine, Nova Express, the Wild Boys
    by William S. Burroughs

  8. 9.
    Lolita, 50th Anniversary Edition
    by Vladimir Nabokov

  9. 10.
    Finnegans Wake (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
    by James Joyce

  10. 11.
    ?
    Take It or Leave It
    by Raymond Federman

  11. 12.
    Beloved
    by Toni Morrison

  12. 13.
    Going Native
    by Stephen Wright

  13. 14.
    Under the Volcano: A Novel (Perennial Classics)
    by Malcolm Lowry

  14. 15.
    To the Lighthouse
    by Virginia Woolf

  15. 17.
    JR (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
    by William Gaddis

  16. 18.
    Invisible Man
    by Ralph Ellison

  17. 19.
    Underworld: A Novel
    by Don DeLillo

  18. 20.
    The Sun Also Rises
    by Ernest Hemingway

  19. 22.
    The Great Gatsby (Scribner Classics)
    by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  20. 23.
    The Ambassadors (Penguin Classics)
    by Henry James

  21. 24.

  22. 25.
    Sixty Stories
    by Donald Barthelme

  23. 26.
    The Rifles (Seven Dreams)
    by William Vollmann

  24. 27.
    The Recognitions (Penguin Classics)
    by William Gaddis

  25. 28.
    Heart of Darkness (Hesperus Classics)
    by Joseph Conrad

  26. 29.
    Catch-22
    by Joseph Heller

  27. 30.
    1984 (Signet Classics)
    by George Orwell

  28. 31.
    Their Eyes Were Watching God
    by Zora Neale Hurston

  29. 32.
    Absalom, Absalom! The Corrected Text
    by William Faulkner

  30. 33.
    Dhalgren
    by Samuel R. Delany

  31. 34.
    The Grapes of Wrath (20th Century Classics)
    by John Steinbeck

  32. 35.
    ?
    The Four Elements Tetrology
    by Rikki Ducornet

  33. 36.
    Neuromancer
    by William Gibson

  34. 37.
    Tropic of Cancer
    by Henry Miller

  35. 38.
    On the Road
    by Jack Kerouac

  36. 39.
    ?
    Lookout Cartridge
    by Joseph McElroy

  37. 40.
    Crash: A Novel
    by J. G. Ballard

  38. 41.
    Midnight's Children (Everyman's Library)
    by Salman Rushdie

  39. 42.
    The Sot-Weed Factor (Anchor Literary Library)
    by John Barth

  40. 43.
    ?
    Genoa: A Telling of Wonders
    by Paul Metcalf

  41. 44.
    Brave New World
    by Aldous Huxley

  42. 45.
    A Passage to India
    by E. M. Forster

  43. 46.
    ?
    Double or nothing;: A real fictitious discourse
    by Raymond Federman

  44. 47.
    At Swim-Two-Birds (Irish Literature Series)
    by Flann O'Brien

  45. 48.
    Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
    by Cormac McCarthy

  46. 49.
    The Cannibal
    by John Hawkes

  47. 50.
    Native Son
    by Richard Wright

Pages: 1

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Created by Robot Co-op on Nov 30, 2005.
 

Comments

One the best classes... — 4 years ago

I have ever taken. Larry made me think about (post) modernism/meta-fiction in a whole new way. I had zero appreciation for forms like the graphic novel.. etc… and he made it all relevant and real for me. And meeting Federman in class was a life changer.




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