A convenient volume that includes 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' (1968), the novel that inaugurates a new period in American fiction.

1970. A Holocaust survivor versus the counterculture. Bellow's best. Or second best.

1971. Elkin's best, perfectly suited to his talents. A marvelously comic anticipation of the talk radio craze.

1974. A historical novel of Gettysburg. Clears away the 'fog of war' and leaves a striking image of the battle in under 350 pages.

1976. Out of print. Where are the New York Review Classics when you need them? Why hasn't Michael Chabon pitched his ex-teacher? The astonishing tale of an attempt to reach the North Pole via balloon ca. 1897.

1979. A concession to fans of self-conscious fiction. This is the best of the type. A novel in progress is taken over by its characters.

1981. A historical novel based on the life of the twelfth-century St. Godric after he has returned from his Holy Land pilgrimages to live as a hermit at Finchale. Told in his voice--a rollicking and crisp de-Latinized English.

1980. One of the four great storywriters of the second half of the American century. Never repeats herself; never fails to delight.

1986–87. The most successful American novelist to adapt the detective story to different and 'more serious' ends. You won't be able to decide whether you are in actuality or an alternative world.

1988. Full disclosure: Carver was my teacher. Still, is there anyone better at the details of the lower-middle-class dead-end life?

1991. In 1906, in upstate New York, a young nun develops stigmata. A novel about the mystery (and possibility) of religious passion.

1994. A satire on Washington lobbyists--in this case, a lobbyist for the tobacco industry--by a writer than whom no one knows Washington better. (Yes, he is William F.'s son.)

1997. Better remembered for 'The Natural' and 'The Assistant.' His best stories are far better. He takes up a stance at the edge of suffering, where it begins to shade over into fantasy. Or hallucination.

1998. Odd how many excellent novels from this period are about something else. A novel about Communist China from the sixties to the eighties. Not a sweeping pageant, however, but ordinary people doing ordinary things--in a completely alien culture. Only in America!