“Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
So ran the maxim of Gustave Flaubert, which is probably why, after his father’s death, he lived with his mother in their country home until he was fifty years old. Despite this he maintained his [...]
After that mammoth list from yesterday, I thought you’d appreciate something smaller. This is culled from The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books Edited by J. Peder Zane. His Top 10 list is derived from the top 10 lists of “125 of the world’s most celebrated writers”* combined:
- 1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot
*The above list was compiled from the combined input of the following writers:
Lee K. Abbott, Sherman Alexie, Kate Atkinson, Paul Auster, Melissa Bank, Russell Banks, John Banville, Julian Barnes, Andrea Barret, Madison Smartt Bell, Chris Bohjalian, T.C. Boyle, Judy Budnitz, James Lee Burke, Peter Cameron, Bebe Moore Campbell, Ethan Canin, Philip Caputo, Peter Carey, Michael Chabon, Fred Chappell, Sandra Cisneros, Pearl Cleage, Michael Connelly, Douglas Coupland, Jim Crace, Stanley Crawford, Michael Cunningham, Edwidge Danticat, Robb Forman Dew, Chitra Divakaruni, Emma Donoghue, Margaret Drabble, David Anthony Durham, Clyde Edgerton, Percival Everett, Karen Joy Fowler, Jonathan Franzen, Paula Fox, Alan Furst, Mary Gaitskill, G.D. Gearino, Denise Gess, Gail Godwin, Arthur Golden, Mary Gordon, Michael Griffith, Allan Gurganus, Barry Hannah, Donald Harington, Jim Harrison, Kathryn Harrison, Kent Haruf, Adam Haslett, Elizabeth Hay, Carl Hiaasen, Alice Hoffman, A.M. Homes, Andrew Hudgins, John Irving, Ha Jin, Heidi Julavits, Ken Kalfus, Thomas Keneally, A.L. Kennedy, Sue Monk Kidd, Haven Kimmel, Stephen King, Walter Kirn, Wally Lamb, David Leavitt, Jonathan Lethem, Margot Livesey, David Lodge, Norman Mailer, Thomas Mallon, Ben Marcus, Valerie Martin, Bobbie Ann Mason, Dennis McFarland, Patrick McGrath, Erin McGraw, David Means, Claire Messud, Lydia Millet, Susan Minot, David Mitchell, Lorrie Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, Stewart O’Nan, Robert B. Parker, Ann Patchett, Iain Pears, George Pelecanos, Tom Perrotta, Arthur Phillips, Robert Pinsky, Richard Powers, Reynolds Price, Francine Prose, Annie Proulx, Jonathan Raban, Ian Rankin, Roxana Robinson, Louis D. Rubin Jr., James Salter, George Saunders, Cathleen Schine, Jim Shepard, Anita Shreve, Alexander McCall Smith, Lee Smith, Elizabeth Spencer, Scott Spencer, Adriana Trigiani, Scott Turow, Barry Unsworth, Vendela Vida, Susan Vreeland, David Foster Wallace, Anthony Walton, Jennifer Weiner, Robert Wilson, Tom Wolfe and Meg Wolitzer
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My God, this novel makes me break out in a cold sweat! Do you know how much I’ve written in five months, since the end of August? Sixty-five pages! Each paragraph is good in itself and there are some pages that are perfect. I feel certain. But just because of this, it isn’t getting on. [...]
A sense of belonging, of having a past that helps to explain you and perhaps went a long way to making and moulding you, comes through strongly in the fiction of such diverse novelists as Thomas Hardy and William Faulkner, of Graham Greene, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Gustav Flaubert. Not to mention contemporary authors like [...]
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