photo credit: gadl 

Recently, The Elegant Variation re-posted Harvard professor and The New Yorker literary critic James Wood’s list of  of the best British and American writing since 1945. 

From TEV:  “The list is especially interesting given that Wood says he sought to “avoid the ‘representative’, ‘important’ or ‘influential’ and chose, instead, books which I like, which seemed to me deep and beautiful, which aerate the soul and abrase the conscience …” (emphasis mine — love that…)

I’ve asterisked the authors I’ve read so far — see how you do!

JG Farrell: The Siege of Krishnapur
Jane Bowles: Collected Works
LP Hartley: The Go-Between
Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead; Armies of the Night
Walter Abish: How German Is It
Harold Brodkey: Stories in an Almost Classical Mode
Cynthia Ozick: The Messiah of Stockholm; Art and Ardour
William Burroughs: The Naked Lunch
*Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse 5
*Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems
*John Cheever: Collected Stories; Falconer
*Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
Angus Wilson: The Wrong Set; Hemlock and After; Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
Fred Exley: A Fan’s Notes
*Randall Jarrell: Poetry and the Age
*Robert Lowell: Life Studies; For the Union Dead; Near the Ocean
*Bernard Malamud: The Assistant; The Stories of Bernard Malamud
William Trevor: Collected Stories
*James Baldwin: The Fire Next Time; Giovanni’s Room
*Toni Morrison: Sula; Beloved
Henry Green: Loving; Concluding; Nothing
Howard Nemerov: Collected Poems
*AS Byatt: Still Life
VS Naipaul: A House for Mr. Biswas; In a Free State; The Enigma of Arrival
*Tim O’Brien: If I Die In A Combat Zone
*Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day
*Flannery O’Connor: A Good Man Is Hard To Find
*Frank O’Hara: Selected Poems
*Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems
*Ezra Pound: Pisan Cantos
John Barth: The Sotweed Factor
*Saul Bellow:  The Adventures of Augie March; Seize the Day; Herzog; Humboldt’s Gift
*John Berryman: The Dream Songs; The Freedom of the Poet and Other Essays
Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49; V
*Philip Roth: Goodbye, Columbus; The Counterlife; Reading Myself and Others
*JD Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye
*Donald Barthelme: Sixty Stories
Susan Sontag: Styles of Radical Will
*Wallace Stevens: Collected Poems
*Robert Penn Warren: All The King’s Men
*Eudora Welty: Collected Stories
*William Carlos Williams: Paterson
Edmund White: A Boy’s Own Story
Amy Clampitt: The Kingfisher
Don DeLillo: White Noise
*WH Auden: The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays; Collected Poems
Paul Bailey: Gabriel’s Lament
Angela Carter: The Magic Toyshop; Nights at the Circus
Bruce Chatwin: On The Black Hill
James Fenton: The Memory of War
*William Golding: Lord of the Flies; The Spire
WS Graham: Collected Poems
Raymond Carver: The Stories of Raymond Carver
Martin Amis: Money; The Moronic Inferno
*Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea
Graham Greene: The Heart of the Matter
John Ashbery: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror; Selected Poems
Geoffrey Hill: Collected Poems
Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook
Ivy Compton-Burnett: A Heritage and its History
Muriel Spark: Memento Mori; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano
Walker Percy: The Moviegoer
*Phillip Larkin: Collected Poems
*Ian McEwan: First Love Last Rites; The Cement Garden
Andrew Motion: Secret Narratives
Iris Murdoch: Under the Net; The Bell; The Nice and the Good
*George Orwell: 1984; Collected Essay and Journalism (4 vols)
*Carson McCullers: The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
JG Ballard: Concrete Island
Anthony Powell: A Dance of the Music of Time
*John Updike: Of the Farm; The Centaur; The Rabbit Quartet; Hugging the Shore
Jeanette Winterson: Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
*Ted Hughes: Selected Poems 1957-81
VS Pritchett: Complete Stories; Complete Essays
Craig Raine: A Martian Sends A Postcard Home
*Marianne Moore: Complete Poems
Elizabeth Taylor: The Wedding Group
Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children; The Satanic Verses
Tom Paulin: Fivemiletown
*Joseph Heller: Catch 22
Christine Brook-Rose: The Christine Brook-Rose Reader
Anthony Burgess: Earthly Powers
Alan Sillitoe: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Graham Swift: Waterland
Iain Sinclair: Downriver
Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited; The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold; Through a Cloud
*Jack Kerouac: On the Road
Denton Welch: A Voice Through a Cloud

Originally printed in the Guardian on Oct. 7, 1994.

If you had to choose only one of these to recommend… what (or who) would it be?