Most famous for Lolita, this book changes what fiction can do and how stories can be told. Blew my mind the first time I read it.

Roth won every major award in America in 90s. This is the first novel that introduced his famous character, Zuckerman. In a direct challenge to storytelling, fact, fiction and memoir, the character of Zuckerman allows Roth to re-imagine Anne Frank as a living sexual object. Quite a literary feat if you ask me.

This is one of the best novels on college life because it shows the moral depravity of the intellectually elite at its worst, which is college: Intellectual advancement and debauchery a-la-cart. Read this after Faulkner as Ellis utilizes cubistic narration here too.

This reverse look at the daemons that try to tempt us (he refers to Christian doctorine here and specifically minions of Satan, but I think the brilliance here is that it could easily be any personal vice) is his most fantastic to read and to think about. You won't feel as if you have just been served a theological treaty, but you might have a hangover.

Native American storytelling doesn't challenge structure or form. It is its own structure, its own form. How does one try to write a novel with a story that needs to be heard blending this storytelling structure with the structure of Western thought that was established centuries ago? Read Silko's novel for the answer.