 | Hallucinations: or, The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando by Reinaldo Arenas
Buy new: $19.00 / Used from: $5.68 Magical Realism taken perhaps to its furthest extreme from the man many consider the best at it.
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 | Cloudsplitter: A Novel by Russell Banks
Buy new: $12.23 / Used from: $0.10 To say it's about fathers and sons is like calling "Anna Karenina," a little family trouble
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 | Drop City by T.C. Boyle
Buy used from: $0.16 Perhaps the coolest depiction of how the 60's failed the 70's that I have ever read
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 | The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Buy new: $9.36 / Used from: $4.50 "The Master and Margarita is a different book each time it is opened." Not my words, but I couldn't have put it better.
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 | Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Buy used from: $2.89 I know, I not supposed to like this racist. But this is a close as I've ever felt a writer's beating heart
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 | The Obscene Bird of Night (Verba Mundi) by Jose Donoso
Buy new: $12.89 / Used from: $11.97 I've always considered this One Hundred Years of Solitude's evil twin.
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 | The Brothers Karamazov (Everyman's Library) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Buy new: $17.16 / Used from: $9.69 I know you own it, but you might enjoy reading it.
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 | Light in August (The Corrected Text) by William Faulkner
Buy new: $10.17 / Used from: $2.98 Yes Hemingway is the most influential American writer of the 20th century. To Americans. For the rest of us it's Faulkner, the homo erectus of 20th century narrative. Marquez and Pasternak agree
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 | The Magus by John Fowles
Buy new: $7.99 / Used from: $0.01 I'm still trying to write something like this book.
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 | One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Buy new: $17.99 / Used from: $9.96 William Kennedy is right. There's the book of Genesis. Then there's this.
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 | The Thief's Journal by Jean Genet
Buy new: $11.90 / Used from: $1.65 Once read, you can never unread it.
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 | Darkness Visible: A Novel by William Golding
Buy used from: $1.00 Perhaps the most aptly titled book I've ever read. He won the Booker for Rites of Passage, but should have for this.
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 | The Power and the Glory (Penguin Classics) by Graham Greene
Buy new: $9.75 / Used from: $5.65 One of four books that made me want to write
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 | Dogeaters (Contemporary American Fiction) by Jessica Hagedorn
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $0.55 Ditto.
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 | Dubliners (Penguin Modern Classics) by James Joyce
Buy used from: $0.94 Ditto.
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 | Child of God by Cormac McCarthy
Buy new: $10.08 / Used from: $6.98 The last of the four. Unquestinably the darkest. This made me rethink what needs to be said and unsaid in fiction
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 | Song of Solomon (Oprah's Book Club) by Toni Morrison
Buy used from: $0.01 The first time I finished this I remembered thinking, this is the greatest thing I've ever read.
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 | Pnin (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics) by Vladimir Nabokov
Buy new: $12.24 / Used from: $10.99 Yes Lolita is a masterpiece, but it isn't funny.
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 | Guerrillas by V.S. Naipaul
Buy new: $11.25 / Used from: $0.38 Back when he still believed in stories, he was the best at writing them
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 | My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
Buy new: $10.85 / Used from: $4.25 Hands down my favourite novel of this young century and one of only two 21st century novels to make my list.
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 | Anna Karenina (Oprah's Book Club) by Leo Tolstoy
Buy new: $11.05 / Used from: $1.70 Yes, I know you know the first sentence. Now how about the second and third?
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 | The Solid Mandala (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) by Patrick White
Buy used from: $5.05 Take the sentimentality out of "Of Mice and Men" and you get this.
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 | Sexing the Cherry (Winterson, Jeanette) by Jeanette Winterson
Buy new: $10.08 / Used from: $3.70 My favourite book from my favourite (living) female writer
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 | Wide Sargasso Sea: A Novel by Jean Rhys
Buy new: $10.04 / Used from: $1.00 A huge influence on the book I'm writing now
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 | Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Buy new: $11.53 / Used from: $0.30 Just because.
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Listmania!
