Favorite Books by One Hundred Authors
(A fairly random assortment of favorite books by authors whose bibliographies (in English) I’ve read to completion. If I’m missing a title, even one, I’ve excluded the writer—I’ve read all of James Agee’s prose, for instance, but I’m missing his poetry collection, so out he goes; I’ve fallen a book or two behind with Haruki Murakami, and now that he’s published a photo appreciation of his t-shirts, I’m not likely to catch up, so he’s off the list; etc. For obvious reasons, I’ve also excluded writers who have published only one book. Finally, I’ve disallowed books by former students of mine since I don’t want to cause hard feelings by choosing what any of them might consider to be the wrong book. I’ve arranged this list alphabetically by author.)
César Aira: Ghosts
Michal Ajvaz: The Other City
Donald Antrim: The Hundred Brothers
Chloe Aridjis: Book of Clouds
Anuk Arudpragasm: The Story of a Brief Marriage
J. G. Ballard: The Complete Short Stories
Peter S. Beagle: A Fine and Private Place
Aimee Bender: The Color Master
Kate Bernheimer: The Complete Tales of Merry Gold
Franny Billingsley: The Folk Keeper
Jonathan Blum: The Usual Uncertainties
Scott Bradfield: Greetings from Earth: New and Collected Stories
Judy Budnitz: If I Told You Once
Gesualdo Bufalino: The Plague Sower
Octavia Butler: Parable of the Talents
Dino Buzzati: The Tartar Steppe
Michael Byers: The Coast of Good Intentions
Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees
Peter Carey: The Fat Man in History
Ermanno Cavazzoni: Brief Lives of Idiots
Lan Samantha Chang: All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost
Éric Chevillard: Palafox
Ted Chiang: Exhalation
Susanna Clarke: Piranesi
Frank Conroy: Stop-Time
Jim Crace: Continent
Charles D’Ambrosio: Loitering: New and Collected Essays
John Darnielle: Wolf in White Van
Carys Davies: West
Emmanuel Dongala: Little Boys Come from the Stars
Doug Dorst: Alive in Necropolis
Tony Earley: Here We Are in Paradise
Alex Epstein: Blue Has No South
Brecht Evens: The City of Belgium
Jen Fawkes: Mannequin and Wife
Amanda Filipacchi: Love Creeps
Liana Finck: Passing for Human
Rivka Galchen: Atmospheric Disturbances
Yan Ge: Strange Beasts of China
Thomas Glave: The Torturer’s Wife
Tomás González: Difficult Light
Lauren Groff: Matrix
Donald Harington: The Cockroaches of Stay More
Nick Harkaway: The Gone-Away World
Donald Hays: The Dixie Association
Stefan Heym: The Wandering Jew
Jennifer A. Howard: You on Mars: Failed Sci-Fi Stories
Bohumil Hrabal: I Served the King of England
Jeremy Jackson: I Will Not Leave You Comfortless
David Jauss: Glossolalia: New and Selected Stories
Jonas Karlsson: The Room
Richard Kennedy: Collected Stories
Janusz Korczak: King Matt the First
Catherine Lacey: Nobody Is Ever Missing
Tomasso Landolfi: Gogol’s Wife and Other Stories
Rebecca Lee: Bobcat
Mario Levrero: The Luminous Novel
Kelly Link: Magic for Beginners
Valeria Luiselli: Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions
Rebecca Makkai: Music for Wartime
Luigi Malerba: What Is This Buzzing? Do You Hear It Too?
Giorgio Manganelli: Centuria: One Hundred Ouroboric Novels
William Maxwell: All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories
James Alan McPherson: Elbow Room
Lincoln Michel: The Body Scout
Lydia Millet: My Happy Life
Judith Claire Mitchell: A Reunion of Ghosts
Augusto Monterroso: Complete Works and Other Stories
Thisbe Nissen: Our Lady of the Prairie
Lewis Nordan: The Sharpshooter Blues
Ryan O’Neill: Their Brilliant Careers: The Fantastic Lives of Sixteen Extraordinary Australian Writers
Dexter Palmer: Version Control
Vikram Paralkar: The Afflictions
Alexander Parsons: In the Shadows of the Sun
Helen Phillips: And Yet They Were Happy
Charles Portis: True Grit
Marilynne Robinson: Housekeeping
Karen Russell: Vampires in the Lemon Grove
Ethan Rutherford: Farthest South
Adam Ehrlich Sachs: Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables & Problems
Luis Sagasti: Fireflies
Anne Serre: The Governesses
Ana Maria Shua: Microfictions
Bennett Sims: White Dialogues
Rob Magnuson Smith: Scorper
Trenton Lee Stewart: Flood Summer
Theodore Sturgeon: Argyll: A Memoir
Gonçalo M. Tavares: The Neighborhood
Alexandra Teague: Or What We’ll Call Desire
Miyamoto Teru: Phantom Lights
Walter Tevis: The Man Who Fell to Earth
Justin Tussing: The Best People in the World
Dennis Vannatta: Around Centralia Square
Vehlmann and Kerascoët: Beautiful Darkness
Ann Joslin Williams: Down from Cascom Mountain
Robert McLiam Wilson: Eureka Street
Tod Wodicka: The Household Spirit
Hanya Yanagihara: The People in the Trees
Charles Yu: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
Alejandro Zambra: The Private Lives of Trees
— October 27, 2021