Bookslut, a literary webzine, put together a list of what they deem to be the 100 greatest books of the 20th century. Read about the project here.
1. Man with the Golden Arm - Nelson Algren
2. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
3. Foundation Trilogy - Isaac Asimov
4. Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin
5. Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
6. The Plague - Albert Camus
7. The Awakening - Kate Chopin
8. Hound of the Baskervilles - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
9. A Fan's Notes - Frederick Exley
10. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
11. A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
12. The Lord of the Flies - William Golding
13. Lanark - Alasdair Gray
14. The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
15. Dune by Frank Herbert
16. Portrait of the Artist - James Joyce
17. Inherit the Wind - Jerome Lawrence
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
19. Of Human Bondage - M. Somerset Maugham
20. Cry, the Beloved Country - Alan Paton
21. All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
22. Goodbye, Columbus - Philip Roth
23. Contact - Carl Sagan
24. Cancer Ward - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
25. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
26. Death in the Family - James Agee
27. Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
28. Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
29. Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett
30. Ficciones - J. L. Borges
31. Farenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
32. Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
33. Baron in the Trees - Italo Calvino
34. Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather
35. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
36. Three Sisters - Anton Chekhov
37. Hopscotch - Julio Cortazar
38. Little Prince - Antoine de Saint- Exupery
39. White Noise - Don DeLillo
40. Sister Carrie - Theodore Dreiser
41. Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
42. Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
43. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
44. Love Medicine - Louise Erdrich
45. been down so long it looks like up to me by Richard Farina
46. Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
47. No Place to Be Sombody - Charles Gordone
48. Tin Drum - Gunter Grass
49. Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein
50. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
51. Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
52. Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zola Neale Hurston
53. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
54. Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson
55. Thin Red Line - James Jones
56. Ulysses - James Joyce
57. The Trial - Franz Kafka
58. Tripmaster Monkey - Maxine Hong Kingston
59. Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koestler
60. Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
61. Angels in America - Tony Kushner
62. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
63. Golden Notebook - Dorothy Lessing
64. Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
65. Iron Heel - Jack London
66. The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
67. Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann
68. All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
69. Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
70. Spring Snow - Yukio Mishima
71. Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison
72. Wind Up Bird Chronicles - Haruki Murakami
73. Despair - Vladimir Nabokov
74. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
75. A Good Man is Hard to Find - Flannery O'Connor
76. The Famished Road - Ben Okri
77. 1984 - George Orwell
78. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig
79. Operation Wandering Soul - Richard Powers
80. Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust
81. The Charioteer - Mary Renault
82. Jealousy - Alain Robbe-Grillet
83. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
84. Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
85. Maus - Art Speigelman
86. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
87. Sophie's Choice - William Stryon
88. Black List Section H - Francis Stuart
89. Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
90. Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
91. Rabbit Run - John Updike
92. Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
93. Color Purple - Alice Walker
94. All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren
95. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
96. Miss Lonelyhearts - Nathanael West
97. Return of the Soldier - Rebecca West
98. Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe
99. Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolfe
100. Native Son - Richard Wright
Are you astounded by the fact that there's a book on this list that I haven't read?? Email me and if I do read it I'll give you credit for recommending it to me!
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