20 Essential Works of Fiction
Discover the 20 essential works of fiction every book lover must read. Explore timeless classics and modern masterpieces that define literature's greatest achievements.
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Collected Stories of Isaac Babel
by Isaac Babel
To read Babel is to experience the wild and often terrifying swings of Russian history."--BOOK JACKET.
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"Masquerade" and Other Stories
by Robert Walser
Born in Switzerland in 1878, Robert Walser worked as a bank clerk, a butler in a castle, and an inventor's assistant before discovering what William H. Gass calls his "true profession." From 1899 until he was misdiagnosed a schizophrenic and hospitalized in 1933, Walser produced nine novels and more than a thousand short stories and prose pieces. Walser's contemporary admirers were few but well-placed. They included Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Robert Musil, and Walter benjamin. Today Robert Walser is widely regarded as one of the most important and original literary voices of the twentieth century. In "Masquerade" and Other Stories, Susan Bernofsky, presents a representative selection of Walser's work, from his first published fiction to the stately prose of the last years before his voice vanished forever behind the asylum walls. Written between 1899 and 1933, these 64 sketches, scenes, stories, and wanderings through landscapes and dreamscapes are characterized by startling, skewed comparisons, warpings of syntax, vagaries or perspective, and a delight in contradiction. Quirky, playful, and sometimes bizarre, Walser's texts were unconventional by the standards in the context of today's fiction.
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Raymond Carver: Collected Stories (LOA #195)
by Raymond Carver
In collections such as Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver wrote with unflinching exactness about men and women enduring lives on the knife-edge of poverty and other deprivations. Beneath his pared-down surfaces run disturbing, violent undercurrents. Suggestive rather than explicit, and seeming all the more powerful for what is left unsaid, Carver's stories were held up as exemplars of a new school in American fiction known as minimalism or "dirty realism," a movement whose wide influence continues to this day. Carver's stories were brilliant in their detachment and use of the oblique, ambiguous gesture, yet there were signs of a different sort of sensibility at work. In books such as Cathedral and the later tales included in the collected stories volume Where I'm Calling From, Carver revealed himself to be a more expansive writer than in the earlier published books, displaying Chekhovian sympathies toward his characters and relying less on elliptical effects. In gathering all of Carver's stories, including early sketches and posthumously discovered works, The Library of America's Collected Stories provides a comprehensive overview of Carver's career as we have come to know it: the promise of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and the breakthrough of What We Talk About, on through the departures taken in Cathedral and the pathos of the late stories. But it also prompts a fresh consideration of Carver by presenting Beginners, an edition of the manuscript of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love that Carver submitted to Gordon Lish, his editor and a crucial influence on his development. Lish's editing was so extensive that at one point Carver wrote him an anguished letter asking him not to publish the book; now, for the first time, readers can read both the manuscript and published versions of the collection that established Carver as a major American writer. Offering a fascinating window into the complex, fraught relation between writer and editor, Beginners expands our sense of Carver and is essential reading for anyone who cares about his achievement. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
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The Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway
by Ernest Hemingway
The complete, authoritative collection of Ernest Hemingway's short fiction, including classic stories like "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," along with seven previously unpublished stories. In this definitive collection of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s short stories, readers will delight in Hemingway’s most beloved classics such as "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "Hills Like White Elephants," and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and will discover seven new tales published for the first time in this collection, totaling in sixty stories. This collection demonstrates Hemingway’s ability to write beautiful prose for each distinct story, with plots that range from experiences of World War II to beautifully touching moments between a father and son. For Hemingway fans, The Complete Short Stories is an invaluable treasury.
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First, Body
by Melanie Rae Thon
Winner of the 1997 Whiting Writers' Award One of Granta's "Best Young American Novelists"
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Jesus' Son
by Denis Johnson
Jesus' Son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. These stories tell of spiraling grief and transcendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost and found and lost again. The raw beauty and careening energy of Denis Johnson's prose has earned this book a place among the classics of twentieth-century American literature.
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Girl with Curious Hair
by David Foster Wallace
A collection of short stories by David Foster Wallace that explore the different ways people live their lives.
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The Rainbow Stories
by William T. Vollmann
A collection of thirteen short fiction stories about people around the world who live outside the law.
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Collected Stories of Franz Kafka
by Franz Kafka
Collects Kafka's short stories and parables, each reflecting his concern for modern man's search for identity, place, and purpose.
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The Razor's Edge
by W. Somerset Maugham
Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute. The progress of this spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham's most brillant characters - his fiancee Isabel, whose choice between love and wealth have lifelong repercussions, and Elliot Templeton, her uncle, a classic expatriate American snob. The most ambitious of Maugham's novels, this is also one in which Maugham himself plays a considerable part as he wanders in and out of the story, to observe his characters struggling with their fates.
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Journey to the End of the Night
by Louis-Ferdinand CĂ©line
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 slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe, and later in America where it was first published by New Directions in 1952. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.
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Self Portraits
by 太宰治
"A rich boy turned drop-out, a radical turned drug addict, obsessed with self destruction and suicide, Osamu Dazai retains his cult status among Japan's intellectual youth more than forty years after his death. These stories, based on his own experiences and arranged chronologically, provide insight into the sources of Dazai's enduring appeal as well as his art."--
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The Big Sleep & Farewell, My Lovely
by Raymond Chandler
Farewell, My Lovely: Philip Marlowe navigates the underworld of the Los Angeles gambling circuit while investigating the disappearance of a beautiful nightclub girl.
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The Overcoat and Other Short Stories
by Nikolai Gogol
Four short stories include a satirical tale of Russian bureaucrats and a portrayal of an elderly couple living in the secluded countryside.
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The Tales of Hoffmann
by Ernst Theodor Hoffman
A lawyer by day and a creator of a world of fantasy by night, Hoffman (1776-1822) lived a Jekyll and Hyde existence. Many of the characters in his stories are subject to a similar split personality. The duality of his nature is frequently reflected in some of his characters—Cardillac the goldsmith in Mademoiselle de Scudéry and Nathaniel in The Sandman, for example. Cardillac is a virtuous, industrious man by day but a violent criminal at night, while Nathaniel, obsessed by a childhood fantasy, is driven to madness and cruelty. These tales can be read on several levels: as an expression of the concerns of the Romantic era, as impressive examples of German Romantic literature and as exciting works of fiction made all the more extraordinary by their concern with the supernatural and the bizarre.
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The Tin Drum
by GĂĽnter Grass
A dwarf drummer found guilty of a crime he did not commit writes his memoirs from a mental hospital in postwar Germany