recommended-reading
Plays
A Highly Subjective Recommended Reading List
For updated reading lists and links to online texts and text repositories, visit www.digitalcomposition.org
Fiction (With a few essays here and there)
Adler, R. Speedboat, Pitch Dark
Appelfeld, A: Badenheim
Aragon, L: Paris Peasant
Babel, I: Collected Stories
Baldwin, James: Stories; Nobody Knows My Name; Notes of a Native Son
Balzac: Lost Illusions; Stories
Barnes, Djuna: Nightwood; Smoke and Other Stories
Barthelme, Donald: Sixty Stories
Bassani, G: Behind the Door; Garden of the Finzi Contini
Beckett, S: Watt; Molloy; Malone; Malone Dies
Bernhard, Thomas: Correction; Gathering Evidence
Borges, J. L. : Stories
Borowski
Breton, A: Nadja
Brodkey, Harold: Stories in an Almost Classical Mode
Buchner, Georg: Lenz (published in Collected Works)
Burroughs: Naked Lunch
Calvino, Italo: Six Memos for the Next Millenium; Numbers in the Dark
Camus, Albert: The Myth of Sisyphus; Exile and the Kingdom; The Rebel
Carver, Raymond: Stories
Celine
Chekov: stories
Cortazar, J: Hopscotch; stories
Crevel, René
DeQuincey, Thomas: Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Dickens, Charles
Dos Passos, John: USA
Dostoyevsky, F: Brothers Karamazov; Crime and Punishment
Duras, M.: The Lover
Durrell, Lawrence
Eliot, George: Middlemarch; Daniel Deronda; The Lifted Veil
Ellison, Ralph: Invisible Man
Emerson, R. W.
Faulkner, William: Absalom Absalom; The Sound and the Fury
Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Flaubert: Three Tales; Madame Bovary; Sentimental Education
Goethe, : Elective Affinities
Gombrowicz, W: Cosmos; Pornographia; Ferdydurke
Grenier, Roger:
Hamsun, K: Hunger
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Hemingway, Ernest: A Moveable Feast; Complete Stories
Hernandez, Filisberto:
Hoffman
Hong Kingston, Maxime: Woman Warrior
Hurston, Zora Neale: Moses, Man of the Mountain
Huysmans, : Against Nature
Jacobs, Harriet: Diary in the Life of a Slave Girl
James, Henry: Portrait of a Lady; Stories; Spoils of Poynton, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove
Johnson, Dennis: Jesus’s Son; Already Dead
Joyce, James: Dubliners; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses; Finnegan's Wake
Kafka, Franz: Stories, The Castle, The Trial, America
Kawabata, Y: House of the Sleeping Beauties, Snow Country, First Snow on Fuji
Kincaid, Jamaica: Autobiography of My Mother; A Small Place
Kleist: Stories
Lennox, Charlotte: The Female Quixote
Levi, Primo: The Drowned and the Saved
Lispector, Clarice: Soulstorm; Family Ties
Mann, Thomas
Maupassant, Guy de: Stories
Melville, Herman: Moby Dick; Pierre; stories
Morrison, Toni: Sula; The Bluest Eye
Musil, R : Man Without Qualities (Knopf edition); Stories (Continuum edition, or any translations by Burton Pike)
Nabokov, V. : Lolita
O’Connor, Flannery: Complete Stories
Oates, Joyce Carol: Stories
Ondaatje, Michael: Running in the Family
Ozick, Cynthia
Paley, Grace: Stories
Pavese, C: stories and novellas
Prévost, Abbe de: Manon Lescaut
Proust, Marcel: Rememberance of Things Past (A la recherche du temps perdu)
Pynchon, Thomas
Richardson, Samuel: Clarissa
Robbe-Grillet, Alain
Roth, Philip: Portnoy’s Complaint
Ruskin, John
Rousseau, JJ: Confessions; Julie
Sade, Marquis de
Sarraute, Natalie: Tropisms, Childhood
Schulz, Bruno: Complete Stories
Shelley, Mary
Stein, Gertrude: Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Selected Writings
Stendhal: Red and the Black; Charterhouse of Parma
Sterne, Laurence: Tristram Shandy; Sentimental Journey
Tanazaki: Some Prefer Nettles
Thackary
Thoreau, Henry David: Walden; Journal of 1851
Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
Toomer, Jean: Cane
Turgenev
Twain, Mark
Unamuno : Stories
Villiers de L’Isle Adam: Cruel Tales
Walpole
West, Nathaniel: Day of the Locust; Miss Lonleyhearts
Wharton, Edith: House of Mirth
Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway; The Waves; To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard: Black Boy; Native Son
Yates, Richard: Eleven Kinds of Lonliness; Liars in Love
Zola
Poetry
Appolinaire
Ashbery
Auden
Baraka, Amiri (aka Jones, LeRoi)
Baudelaire, Charles
Berryman, John
Bishop, Elizabeth
Blackburn, Paul
Blake, William
Bunting, Basil
Cage, John
Cavafy
Celan, Paul
Chaucer
Clare, John
Coleridge
Coolidge, Clark
Crane, Hart
Creeley, Robert
Cummings, E.E.
Dante
Dickinson, Emily
Donne
Eliot, T.S.
Eshelman, Clayton
Ginsberg, Allen
Goethe
Gunn, Thom
Herbert, George
Herrick
Holderlin
Howe, Susan
Hughes, Langston
Kleinzahler, August
Landor, Walter Savage
Moore, Marianne
Neruda, Pablo
Li Po
Mallarmé, Stephane
Mandelstam, Osip
Marvell
Milton
Moore, Marianne
O’Hara, Frank
Olson, Charles
Padgett, Ron
Pound, Ezra
Rilke
Rimbaud, Arthur
Sachs, Nelly
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Spenser, Edmund
Tsvetaeva, M.
Tu Fu
Ungaretti, Giuseppe
Vallejo, César
Villon, Francois
Whitman, Walt
Williams, William Carlos
Wordsworth
Yeats, W. B.
Zukovsky, Louis
Albee, Edward
Beckett, Samuel
Kushner, Tony
Marlowe
Pirandello
Shakespeare
Shepherd, Sam
Synge
Webster