Suggested Fiction

Two baker’s dozens of my favorite novels and short stories listed in alphabetical order according to author.  Some may say that my tastes are too 20th-century-dominated but, to them, I would say, “Back off, chief. They’re my lists.”  I am always up for further literary discussion so please ask questions, disagree with my choices, applaud my amazing taste, or let me know what your favorites are.

Novels:

Paul Auster, City of Glass

Roberto Bolaño, 2666

Don DeLillo, Underworld

William Melvin Kelley, A Different Drummer

Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia

Bernard Malamud, The Natural

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

John L. Parker, Once a Runner

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Philip Roth, Indignation

Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Short Fiction:

Sherwood Anderson, “I Want to Know Why” (The Egg)

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Gospel According to Mark” (Doctor Brodie’s Report)

Ernest Hemingway, “The Killers” (Men Without Women)

Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” (The Lottery and Other Stories)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” (Leaf Storm)

Denis Johnson, “Emergency” (Jesus’ Son)

Flannery O’Connor, “A View of the Woods” (Everything That Rises Must Converge)

Katherine Anne Porter, “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” (Flowering Judas)

Thomas Pynchon, “Entropy” (Slow Learner)

Salman Rushdie, “The Prophet’s Hair” (East, West)

John Updike, “Playing With Dynamite” (New Yorker Magazine)

Eudora Welty, “Flowers for Marjorie” (A Curtain of Green)

Tobias Wolff, “A Bullet in the Brain” (The Night in Question: Stories)