My Favorite Forty Works of Prose Fiction
Discover 40 must-read prose fiction books in this curated list of favorite works. Explore timeless classics and hidden gems that every literature lover should experience.
Book
In Memoriam to Identity
by Kathy Acker
Kathy Acker's characteristically outrageous, lyrical, and hyperinventive novel concerns three characters who share an impulse toward self-immolation through doomed, obsessive romance. Teetering somewhere between the …
Book
Three Novels
by Samuel Beckett
Few works of contemporary literature are so universally acclaimed as central to our understanding of the human experience as Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett’s famous …
Book
The Savage Detectives
by Roberto Bolaño
The Savage Detectives is an exuberant, raunchy, wildly inventive, and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age. National Bestseller …
Book
Collected Fictions
by Jorge Luis Borges
For the first time in English, all the fiction by the writer who has been called “the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century” collected in …
Book
The Bloody Chamber, and Other Stories
by Angela Carter
A reissue of a collection of short stories first published ten years ago.
Book
Journey to the End of the Night
by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Louis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every page of this novel. Filled with …
Book
Life and Times of Michael K
by J. M. Coetzee
From author of Waiting for the Barbarians and Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee. J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from …
Book
The Public Burning
by Robert Coover
Vice-President Richard Nixon - the voraciously ambitious bad boy of the Eisenhower regime - is the dominant narrator in an enormous cast that includes Betty …
Book
Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s (LOA #173)
by Philip K. Dick
This Library of America volume brings together four of Dick's most original, mesmerizing, and surprising novels: "The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata …
Book
Bleak House
by Charles Dickens
Filled with dramatic constructions and poetic evocations, this 150th anniversary edition once again brings to life Dicken's tale about the suit of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce …
Book
Play It As It Lays
by Joan Didion
A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, "Play It As It Lays" captures the mood of an entire generation. Joan Didion chose …
Book
Our Ecstatic Days
by Steve Erickson
In the waning summer days, a lake appears almost overnight in the middle of Los Angeles. Out of fear and love, a young single mother …
Book
Sentimental Education
by Gustave Flaubert
Sentimental Education begins with the hero - Frederic Moreau - leaving Paris and returning to the provinces and his mother. Part love story, part historical …
Book
J R
by William Gaddis
At the center of this hugely comic tale of "free enterprise" America stands JR--an eleven-year-old capitalist, eagerly following the example of the grasping world around …
Book
Our Lady of the Flowers
by Jean Genet
Jean Genet's masterpiece, composed entirely in the solitude of his prison cell. With an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre. Jean Genet's first, and arguably greatest, novel …
Book
Neuromancer
by William Gibson
Case, a burned-out computer whiz, is asked to steal a security code that is locked in the most heavily guarded databank in the solar system, …
Book
Modern Classics Finnegans Wake
by James Joyce
A daring work of experimental, Modernist genius, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is one of the greatest literary achievements of the twentieth century, and the crowning …
Book
The Trial
by Franz Kafka
A brilliant translation of one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, revealing a tale that is as full of energy and power …
Book
On the Road
by Jack Kerouac
A reproduction of Kerouac's original 1951 scroll draft of "On the Road" offers insight into the writer's thematic vision and narrative voice as influenced by …
Book
Fatelessness
by Imre Kertész
At the age of 14 Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and without any particular malice, placed on …
Book
Moby-Dick, Or, The Whale
by Herman Melville
A classic of the sea, telling of the pursuit of Moby Dick, the white whale who defied capture.
Book
Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller
The account of a young writer and his friends in free-wheeling Paris.
Book
Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1955-1962 (LOA #88)
by Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita - Pnin - Pale Fire - Lolita: A Screen Play.
Book
In Search of Lost Time
by Marcel Proust
The first installment of the French author's multivolume autobiographical novel, originally published in 1913, in which he recalls his childhood and first infatuation.
Book
Gravity's Rainbow (Classics Deluxe Edition)
by Thomas Pynchon
A Penguin Classic Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half …
Book
Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson
In 1956, toward the end of his life, Reverend John Ames begins a letter to his young son, sharing the story of his life and …
Book
Austerlitz. English
by Winfried Georg Sebald
Shares the struggle of Jacques Austerlitz to uncover his identity as he follows the memory of his childhood back to the heart of war-torn Europe, …
Book
The Making of Americans
by Gertrude Stein
"Essential for all literature collections . . . Several of Stein's titles returned to print in 1995, but none more important than The Making of …
Book
Europe Central
by William T. Vollmann
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD A daring literary masterpiece of historical fiction that weaves together the gripping stories of those caught in the web …
Book
Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace
The story of an intelligent but zany dysfunctional family is set in a drug-and-alcohol addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy and follows such themes …
Book
Written on the Body
by Jeanette Winterson
The most beguilingly seductive novel to date from the author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. Winterson chronicles the consuming affair between the narrator, …
Book
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, The Waves
by Jane Goldman
Two of Virginia Woolf's most influential works, To the Lighthouse and The Waves reveal the quintessence of her experimentation with narrative technique in depicting the …