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luxperpetua's "Barthelme syllabus"

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a list of eighty-one books, the recommendations of Donald Barthelme to his students. Barthelme’s only guidance was to attack the books “in no particular order, just read them.”

  1. 1.
    At Swim-Two-Birds (John F. Byrne Irish Literature Series)
    by Flann O'Brien

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  2. 2.

  3. 3.
    The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel
    by Isaac Babel

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  4. 5.
    Other Inquisitions: 1937-1952 (Texas Pan American Series)
    by Jorge Luis Borges

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  5. 6.
    One Hundred Years of Solitude
    by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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  6. 7.
    Correction
    by Thomas Bernhard

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  7. 8.
    Nog
    by Rudy Wurlitzer

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  8. 9.
    Gimpel the Fool: And Other Stories
    by Isaac Bashevis Singer

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  9. 10.
    The Assistant: A Novel
    by Bernard Malamud

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  10. 11.
    The Magic Barrel: Stories
    by Bernard Malamud

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  11. 12.
    Invisible Man: A Novel
    by Ralph Ellison

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  12. 13.
    Under the Volcano: A Novel (Perennial Classics)
    by Malcolm Lowry

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  13. 14.
    Samuel Beckett (complete works)
    by Samuel Beckett

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  14. 15.
    Hunger
    by Knut Hamsun

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  15. 16.
    I'm Not Stiller (A Harvest Book)
    by Max Frisch

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  16. 17.
    Man in the Holocene
    by Max Frisch

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  17. 18.
    Seven Gothic Tales
    by Isak Dinesen

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  18. 19.
    Gogol's Wife and Other Stories
    by Tommaso Landolfi

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  19. 20.
    V. (Perennial Classics)
    by Thomas Pynchon

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  20. 21.
    The Lime Twig
    by John Hawkes

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  21. 22.
    The Blood Oranges
    by John Hawkes

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  22. 24.
    Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories
    by Grace Paley

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  23. 25.
    I, etcetera: Stories
    by Susan Sontag

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  24. 27.
    The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Mythos Books)
    by Joseph Campbell

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  25. 29.
    Fiction and the Figures of Life
    by William H. Gass

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  26. 30.
    The World Within the Word: Essays
    by William H. Gass

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  27. 31.
    Advertisements for Myself
    by Norman Mailer

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  28. 32.
    A Clockwork Orange
    by Anthony Burgess

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  29. 33.
    Journey To The End Of The Night
    by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

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  30. 34.
    The Box Man: A Novel
    by Kobo Abe

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  31. 35.
    Invisible Cities (A Harvest/Hbj Book)
    by Italo Calvino

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  32. 36.
    A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (New York Review Books Classics)
    by Peter Handke

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  33. 37.
    Kaspar and Other Plays
    by Peter Handke

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  34. 38.
    Nadja
    by Andre Breton

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  35. 39.
    Chimera
    by John Barth

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  36. 40.
    The Moviegoer
    by Walker Percy

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  37. 41.
    Black Tickets: Stories
    by Jayne Anne Phillips

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  38. 42.
    The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor
    by Peter Taylor

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  39. 43.
    The Pure and the Impure (Le Pur et L'Impur)
    by Colette

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  40. 44.
    Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?: Stories
    by Raymond Carver

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  41. 45.
    The Stories of John Cheever
    by John Cheever

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  42. 46.
    I Would Have Saved Them If I Could
    by Leonard Michaels

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  43. 47.
    The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
    by Eudora Welty

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  44. 48.
    The Oranging of America
    by Max Apple

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  45. 49.
    The Complete Stories
    by Flannery O'Connor

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  46. 50.
    Mumbo Jumbo
    by Ishmael Reed

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  47. 51.
    Song of Solomon
    by Toni Morrison

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  48. 52.
    The Death of Artemio Cruz: A Novel
    by Carlos Fuentes

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  49. 53.
    The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
    by Milan Kundera

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  50. 54.
    The Rhetoric of Fiction
    by Wayne Booth

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  51. 55.
    Henderson the Rain King (Penguin Classics)
    by Saul Bellow

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  52. 56.
    The Coup
    by John Updike

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  53. 57.
    Rabbit, Run
    by John Updike

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  54. 58.
    ?
    Paris Review interviews

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  55. 59.
    ?
    How We Live
    by ed. L. Rust Hills

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  56. 60.
    Superfiction
    by ed. Joe David Bellamy

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  57. 61.
    ?

  58. 62.
    The Writer on Her Work, Volume 1
    by Janet Sternberg

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  59. 63.
    Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor Paperbacks)
    by Andre Breton

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  60. 64.
    ?
    Documents of Modern Art
    by ed. Motherwell

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  61. 65.
    Against Interpretation: And Other Essays
    by Susan Sontag

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  62. 66.
    A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers
    by Hugh Kenner

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  63. 67.
    ?
    The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1857-1880
    by Gustave Flaubert

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  64. 69.
    ?
    The Changeling
    by Joy Williams

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  65. 70.
    The New Fiction: Interviews With Innovative American Writers
    by Joe David Bellamy

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  66. 71.
    Going After Cacciato
    by Tim O'Brien

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  67. 72.
    The Palm-Wine Drunkard
    by Amos Tutola

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  68. 73.
    Searching for Caleb
    by Anne Tyler

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  69. 74.
    ?
    Thank You and Other Poems
    by Kenneth Koch

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  70. 75.
    The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara
    by Frank O'Hara

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  71. 76.
    ?
    Rivers and Mountains
    by John Ashbery

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  72. 77.
    ?
    Tragic Magic
    by Wesley Brown

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  73. 78.
    Mythologies
    by Roland Barthes

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  74. 79.
    The Pleasure of the Text
    by Roland Barthes

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  75. 80.
    For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction
    by Alain Robbe-Grillet

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  76. 81.
    Falling in Place
    by Ann Beattie

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Created by luxperpetua on May 27, 2006.