Doctor Zhivago
Pnin
On the Road
The Manila Rope
The Deadbeats
Homo Faber
Blue of Noon
The Midwich Cuckoos
Voss
Jealousy
The Birds
The Once and Future King
The Bell
Borstal Boy
Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Things Fall Apart
The Bitter Glass
The Guide
The Leopard
Deep Rivers
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Pluck the Bud and Destroy the Offspring
Billiards at Half-Past Nine
Down Second Avenue
Cider With Rosie
The Tin Drum
The Naked Lunch
Billy Liar
Absolute Beginners
Promise at Dawn
Rabbit, Run
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Magician of Lublin
Halftime
The Country Girls
Bebo’s Girl
God’s Bits of Wood
The Shipyard
Catch-22
Solaris
Cat and Mouse
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
A Severed Head
Franny and Zooey
No One Writes to the Colonel
Faces in the Water
Memoirs of a Peasant Boy
Stranger in a Strange Land
Labyrinths
The Golden Notebook
Time of Silence
Pale Fire
A Clockwork Orange
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Girl with Green Eyes
The Death of Artemio Cruz
The Time of the Hero
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
The Third Wedding
Dog Years
The Bell Jar
Inside Mr. Enderby
The Girls of Slender Means
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
Manon des Sources
The Graduate
Cat’s Cradle
V.
Herzog
The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein
Arrow of God
Three Trapped Tigers
Sometimes a Great Notion
The Passion According to G. H.
Back to Oegstgeest
Closely Watched Trains
The River Between
Garden, Ashes
Everything That Rises Must Converge
Things
In Cold Blood
Death and the Dervish
Silence
To Each His Own
The Crying of Lot 49
Giles Goat-Boy
Marks of Identity
The Vice-Consul
The Magus
The Master and Margarita
Wide Sargasso Sea
The Third Policeman
Miramar
Z
Pilgrimage
The Manor
One Hundred Years of Solitude
No Laughing Matter
Day of the Dolphin
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Eva Trout
The Cathedral
A Kestrel for a Knave
In Watermelon Sugar
The German Lesson
The Quest for Christa T.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
2001: A Space Odyssey
Belle du Seigneur
Cancer Ward
Myra Breckinridge
The First Circle
A Void / Avoid
them
Ada
The Godfather
Portnoy’s Complaint
Jacob the Liar
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Slaughterhouse Five
Blind Man with a Pistol
Pricksongs and Descants
Tent of Miracles
The Case Worker
Moscow Stations
Heartbreak Tango
Seasons of Migrations to the North
Here’s to You, Jesusa!
Fifth Business
Play It As It Lays
Jahrestage
A World for Julius
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
The Bluest Eye
The Sea of Fertility
Rabbit Redux
Cataract
Group Portrait With Lady
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
The Book of Daniel
Lives of Girls & Women
House Mother Normal
In a Free State
Surfacing
G
The Summer Book
The Twilight Years
The Optimist’s Daughter
Invisible Cities
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Honorary Consul
Crash
The Castle of Crossed Destinies
The Siege of Krishnapur
A Question of Power
Fear of Flying
The Dispossessed
The Diviners
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum
Dusklands
The Fan Man
The Port
Ragtime
The Commandant
The Year of the Hare
Humboldt’s Gift
Woman at Point Zero
Willard and His Bowling Trophies
Fateless
The Dead Father
Correction
A Dance to the Music of Time
W, or the Memory of Childhood
Autumn of the Patriarch
Patterns of Childhood
Blaming
Cutter and Bone
Interview With the Vampire
The Left-Handed Woman
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Almost Transparent Blue
In the Heart of the Country
The Engineer of Human Souls
Quartet in Autumn
The Hour of the Star
Song of Solomon
The Wars
Dispatches
The Shining
Delta of Venus
The Beggar Maid
Requiem for a Dream
The Singapore Grip
The Sea, The Sea
Life: A User’s Manual
The Back Room
The Virgin in the Garden
The Cement Garden
Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
So Long a Letter
Burger’s Daughter
A Bend in the River
A Dry White Season
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Fool’s Gold
Smiley’s People
Southern Seas
The Name of the Rose
Clear Light of Day
Confederacy of Dunces
Rituals
Smell of Sadness
Broken April
Midnight’s Children
Waiting for the Barbarians
Summer in Baden-Baden
The House with the Blind Glass Windows
Leaden Wings
The War at the End of the World
Lanark: A Life in Four Books
Rabbit is Rich
Couples, Passerby
July’s People
On the Black Hill
The House of the Spirits
Schindler’s Ark
A Pale View of Hills
Wittgenstein’s Nephew
The Color Purple
A Boy’s Own Story
If Not Now, When?
The Book of Disquiet
Baltasar and Blimunda
The Sorrow of Belgium
The Piano Teacher
The L
ife and Times of Michael K
Waterland
LaBrava
The Christmas Oratorio
Fado Alexandrino
The Witness
Shame
Money: A Suicide Note
Flaubert’s Parrot
Professor Martens’ Departure
Blood and Guts in High School
Larva: Midsummer Night’s Babel
Nights at the Circus
Neuromancer
The Wasp Factory
Democracy
The Lover
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
Empire of the Sun
The Busconductor Hines
Dictionary of the Khazars
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Legend
The Young Man
Love Medicine
White Noise
Half of Man Is Woman
Reasons to Live
The Handmaid’s Tale
Hawksmoor
Perfume
Blood Meridian
Contact
Simon and the Oaks
The Cider House Rules
Annie John
The Parable of the Blind
Love in the Time of Cholera
Ancestral Voices
The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman
The Drowned and the Saved
Watchmen
Extinction
An Artist of the Floating World
Memory of Fire
The Old Devils
Matigari
Anagrams
Lost Language of Cranes
The Taebek Mountains
Ballad for Georg Henig
Enigma of Arrival
World’s End
The Pigeon
Of Love and Shadows
Beloved
All Souls
The New York Trilogy
Black Box
The Bonfire of the Vanities
The Black Dahlia
The Afternoon of a Writer
The Radiant Way
Kitchen
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
Cigarettes
Nervous Conditions
The First Garden
The Last World
Oscar and Lucinda
The Swimming-Pool Library
The Satanic Verses
Wittgenstein’s Mistress
Paradise of the Blind
Foucault’s Pendulum
Gimmick!
Obabakoak
Inland
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Like Water for Chocolate
The History of the Siege of Lisbon
The Trick is to Keep Breathing
The Great Indian Novel
The Melancholy of Resistance
The Remains of the Day
London Fields
Moon Palace
Sexing the Cherry
Like Life
The Buddha of Suburbia
The Shadow Lines
The Midnight Examiner
The Things They Carried
The Music of Chance
Stone Junction
Amongst Women
Get Shorty
The Daughter
Vertigo
American Psycho
The Laws
Faceless Killers
Astradeni
Regeneration
Typical
Mao II
Wild Swans
Arcadia
Hideous Kinky
Memoirs of Rain
Asphodel
The Butcher Boy
Smilla’s Sense of Snow
The Dumas Club
Written on the Body
The Crow Road
Indigo
The English Patient
Possessing the Secret of Joy
All the Pretty Horses
The Triple Mirror of the Self
Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture
The Discovery of Heaven
Life is a Caravanserai
Before Night Falls
The Secret History
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
Remembering Babylon
The Holder of the World
The Virgin Suicides
The Stone Diaries
A Suitable Boy
What a Carve Up!
On Love
The Twins
Looking for the Possible Dance
Birdsong
The Shipping News
Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light
The Invention of Curried Sausage
Disappearance
Deep River
Felicia’s Journey
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
How Late It Was, How Late
City Sister Silver
Pereira Declares: A Testimony
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Our Lady of the Assassins
Land
Whatever
Troubling Love
The Late-Night News
The End of the Story
Love’s Work
A Fine Balance
The Reader
Santa Evita
Morvern Callar
The Unconsoled
Alias Grace
The Clay Machine-Gun
Infinite Jest
Forever a Stranger
The Ghost Road
Fugitive Pieces
Hallucinating Foucault
A Light Comedy
Fall on Your Knees
Silk
The God of Small Things
Margot and the Angels
The Life of Insects
Money to Burn
Jack Maggs
Underworld
Enduring Love
Crossfire
The Poisonwood Bible
Veronika Decides to Die
The Hours
All Souls Day
The Heretic
Elementary Particles
The Talk of the Town
Dirty Havana Trilogy
Savage Detectives
Disgrace
As If I Am Not There
Pavel’s Letters
In Search of Klingsor
The Museum of Unconditional Surrender
Fear and Trembling
2000s
Bartleby and Co.
Celestial Harmonies
Under the Skin
The Human Stain
White Teeth
Spring Flowers, Spring Frost
The Devil and Miss Prym
The Feast of the Goat
I’m Not Scared
Atonement
Soldiers of Salamis
Austerlitz
Life of Pi
The Corrections
Platform
Snow
Nowhere Man
Everything Is Illuminated
Kafka on the Shore
The Namesake
Vernon God Little
The Successor
Lady Number Thirteen
What I Loved
A Tale of Love and Darkness
Your Face Tomorrow
Cloud Atlas
The Swarm
Suite Française
The Master
The Book about Blanche and Marie
2666
The Line of Beauty
The Accidental
Mother’s Milk
Measuring the World
The Sea
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Carry Me Down
Against the Day
The Inheritance of Loss
Half of a Yellow Sun
Falling Man
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
The Blind Side of the Heart
The Gathering
Kieron Smith, Boy
Home
The White Tiger
Cost
&
nbsp; American Rust
Invisible
The Children’s Book
Acknowledgments
Preface to the second edition
By Peter Boxall, General Editor
The response to the first edition of 1001 Books has been overwhelming. Since its publication in March 2006, the book has generated a huge amount of discussion and passionate debate about what it means to read, about what we read for, and about what we should and shouldn’t read. If ever proof were needed that the novel is not dead, that it is a thriving and essential part of contemporary culture, then the response to the publication of 1001 Books has provided it. From public discussions of the book in the media and on the internet, to private emails sent to me from around the world, I have been both heartened and moved by the strength and the depth of the commitment to the novel that the response to this book has evidenced.
Of course, the form that this public response has taken has not always been consensual. While I have received many emails that enthuse about the list, the most common reaction to the book has been to engage critically with it. Typically, readers will have four responses. They will welcome the fact that some of their cherished titles are on the list; they will tell me about novels that they did not know, which the book has inspired them to read; they will ask why certain titles are on the list that they believe do not deserve to be; and they will demand to know why some titles that they think do deserve to be included have been omitted. Inevitably, every reader strikes a slightly different balance between these four responses, and every reader suggests a different list. I have come to the realization that the omission of a title from the list has been as much of a provocation to re-read it as its inclusion would have been, as readers match their priorities and their critical sensibility against that implied by the book. It has been this kind of engagement, and the debate that has ensued from it, that has been, for me, the most exciting consequence of the book, and its most worthwhile contribution.
With the publication of this new, international edition, this debate can only become fiercer. The publication of this book poses some important and difficult questions, to add to those put by the first edition. Perhaps the most pressing of these relates to the question of the relationship between nationality and the canon. What does it mean to have an “international” edition of this kind of book? In what ways would the book look different to a Czech audience, or a Spanish or German audience, than it would to an audience in the United States, or in the United Kingdom? Does a body of writing, a canon of essential texts, emerge from a national context, or does it in some way transcend nationality, rising above the contexts that generate it? What does it mean to try to respond to all of these different national contexts at the same time? Is it possible to produce a list that can speak at once to readers in Turkey and in Greece, in Serbia and Croatia?
I do not think I would be able to answer these questions adequately if I had 1001 pages for this preface, rather than just two. But what I hope that the publication of this new edition will do is extend the terms of the debate, reach out and engage with a fuller and more diverse readership. Rather than answering any questions about the vexed relationship between nationality, reading, and the canon, I hope that this book will bring the questions themselves to life, for a new, international generation of readers. And, as with the first edition of 1001 Books, I hope that this debate will take place in the context of an inclusive passion for reading, a love of what the novel can do. As with the first edition, the contributors to this book are not interested in producing an exclusive list, a list that can achieve a transnational and transcultural consensus about which books we should read before we die. The books that have been excised from the list in the move from the first edition to this second, international edition have been done so regretfully; it has not suddenly become safe to die without having read Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, or Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Similarly, non-Anglophone books that are included here—for example Uwe’s Jahrestage, Rojas’s Celestina—have not been chosen because, in an “international” context, they somehow annihilate the significance of the books they replaced. On the contrary, I hope that this book will build on the success of the first edition by increasing and stimulating debates about reading in a plethora of national contexts, rather than offering itself as a definitive list. Above all, I hope that people will disagree with the selection in this book passionately, and vocally. It is from such disagreement about what constitutes our international fictional heritage, from such critical and urgent discussion about the books that continue to define us, that the future of the novel will emerge.
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 2