I’m just glad it wasn’t ‘The Audacity of Hope” or something by Alynski.
This list is CRAP!
No Tolkien, Lewis, Hawthorne, or Steinbeck.
No Dumas, Dante, or Heinlein.
But the Marxists just LOOOOOVE the Russians...
I'm very surprised - but delighted - that this made the list.
She was a very devout Christian, and all her stories reflect this -- in a shocking, sometimes visceral way.
My favorite is "A Good Man is Hard to Find."
It is truly one of the most shocking short stories I have ever read in my life. She was a brilliant, original artist, and a true Southern lady.
‘Madame Bovary’ is the root of Modern Literature for very formal reasons. It has nothing to do with ‘edginess’.
Patriot’s History of the United States . . . Oh, wait, never mind.
Ulysses??? C’mon, it’s not even an effective doorstop.
Top 10 20th Century
1. Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov
2. The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. The Search of Lost Time — Proust
4. Ulysses — James Joyce
5. Dubliners — James Joyce
6. One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel Garcia Marquez
7. The Sound and the Fury — William Faulkner
8. To the Lighthouse — Virginia Woolf
9. The complete stories of Flannery O’Connor
10. Pale Fire — Nabokov
Top 10 19th Century
1. Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary — Flaubert
3. War and Peace — Tolstoy
4. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Mark Twain
5. The stories of Anton Chekhov
6. Middlemarch — George Eliot
7. Moby-Dick — Melville
8. Great Expectations — Dickens
9. Crime and Punishment — Dostoevsky
10. Emma — Jane Austen
The 19th picks seem reasonable, but most of the 20th is pretentious, over-rated and even unreadable.
There are many works the better.
#1- The Holy Bible
#1,997,599,764- The Qur’an
I’m sure you have something to say.
Tolstoy beats out Shakespeare?? Now THAT’S funny!
I despise Nabokov’s precious style so I have a lot of problems with the twentieth century list. The 19th century list is better (how could it not be) but their failure to put Brothers Karamazov in the top ten is disgraceful.
I have thousands of books but could be perfectly content with only my copies of Anna Karenina and Atlas Shrugged.
Thomas Wolfe (not Tom Wolfe) should have been on this list. No one captures the reality of growing up in America the way he does.
I would highly recommend my two favorite Polish works:
Sienkiewicz - With Fire and Sword (Ogniem i mieczem)
Mickiewicz - Pan Tadeusz
bookmark
No Nancy Drew mysteries or Billy Whiskers stories?
Ditto for Flannery O'Connor. When she was writing, criticism finally caught up with fiction. That is to say, critics were identifying symbols and subtexts almost as fast as writers were creating them, so the literary mannerisms that flourished in the 1940s came to seem tired and transparent in subsequent decades. All the symbol-hunting and Christ-figure stuff that was all the rage in the 40s and 50s put the next generations of readers off in a big way.
Of course in English-speaking countries these lists are almost always going to be biased in favor of English-language authors. You may feel good about Broch or Musil, Mahfouz or Hamsun, Agnon or Platonov, but even most critics and teachers haven't read them and won't put them on their list. But it is a slap in the face of Thomas Mann that he doesn't rate and Nabokov, who hated Mann, has two entries.
The 19th century is pretty much what you'd expect, except that Crime and Punishment should be higher and The Brothers Karamazov should also be on the list. Chekhov doesn't fit in that well, though. A great writer to be sure, but it's hard to compare novelists with short-story writers, since they're trying to accomplish very different things.
Moby Dick? The story is another "Boy meets whale, Boy hates whale" thing. It's a great novel because of all that stuff thrown in that gets in the way of the plot. That's my take, anyway.