Guide to Literacy
“Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.”
So said David Foster Wallace, generally considered by his peers to have been the James Joyce of their generation.
Hellbomb has assembled a literary guide for our visitors: one hundred works of fiction spanning four centuries: from the work of the first novelist Cervantes to arguably the finest novel of 2010: works you should read.
Titles are ranked chronologically because all are ranked No. 1 and all are about what it is to be a fucking human being.
1. Don Quixote - Cervantes (as translated by Walter Starkie) (1605 & 1615)
1. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy – Lawrence Sterne (1759)
1. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley (1831)
1. Lost Illusions – Honoré de Balzac (as translated by Herbert J. Hunt) (1837-1843)
1. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (1847)
1. Moby Dick – Herman Melville (1851)
1. The Marble Faun – Nathaniel Hawthorne (1860)
1. Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev (as translated by Constance Garnett) (1862)
1. Notes from the Underground - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (as translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) (1864)
1. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (1865)
1. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (as translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) (1866)
1. Middlemarch – George Eliot (1874)
1. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James (1881)
1. Hunger – Knut Hamsun (as translated by Robert Bly) (1890)
1. As A Man Grows Older - Italo Svevo (as translated by Beryl de Zoete) (1898)
1. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (1902)
1. The Wings of the Dove - Henry James (1902)
1. Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust (as translated by C. K. Moncrieff and Andreas Mayor) (1912–1927)
1. Dubliners - James Joyce (1914)
1. The Moon and Sixpence - W Somerset Maugham (1919)
1. Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson (1919)
1. Ulysses – James Joyce (1922)
1. The Confessions of Zeno - Italo Svevo (as translated by Beryl de Zoete) (1923)
1. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
1. Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos (1925)
1. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf (1925)
1. The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder (1928)
1. Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (1929)
1. As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner (1930)
1. The Radetzky March – Joseph Roth (as translated by Joachim Neugroshel) (1932)
1. Death on the Installment Plan – Louis-Ferdinand Celine (as translated by Ralph Manheim) (1936)
1. Murphy – Samuel Beckett (1938)
1. Rebecca – Daphne du Marier (1938)
1. At Swim Two Birds – Flann O’Brien (1939)
1. The Man Who Loved Children – Christina Stead (1940)
1. The High Window – Raymond Chandler (1942)
1. Our Lady of the Flowers – Jean Genet (as translated by Bernard Frechtman) (1943)
1. Two Serious Ladies - Jane Bowles (1943)
1. The Member of the Wedding - Carson McCullers (1946)
1. The Roads To Freedom – Jean-Paul Sartre (as translated by Gerard Hopkins) (1946-1950)
1. Under The Volcano – Malcolm Lowry (1947)
1. 1984 – George Orwell (1949)
1. The Ballad of the Sad Café - Carson McCullers (1951)
1. The Grass Harp - Truman Capote (1951)
1. A Dance to the Music of Time – Anthony Powell (1951-1975)
1. A Legacy – Sybille Bedford (1952)
1. Charlotte's Web - E.B. White (1952)
1. Go – John Cellon Holmes (1952)
1. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison (1952)
1. The Killer Inside Me – Jim Thompson (1952)
1. Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor (1952)
1. The Night Of The Hunter – Davis Grubb (1953)
1. A Good Man is Hard to Find - Flannery O’Connor (1955)
1. The Recognitions – William Gaddis (1955)
1. Seize The Day – Saul Bellow (1956)
1. Pnin - Vladimir Nabakov (1957)
1. The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell (1957-1960)
1. A Severed Head - Iris Murdoch (1961)
1. Franny and Zooey - J.D. Salinger (1961)
1. Mother Night – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1961)
1. The Two Faces of January – Patricia Highsmith (1961)
1. We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson (1962)
1. Last Exit To Brooklyn – Hubert Selby, Jr. (1964)
1. A Fan’s Notes – Frederick Exley (1965)
1. Joe Gould's Secret - Joseph Mitchell (1965)
1. Stoner – John Williams (1965)
1. Valley of the Dolls - Jacqueline Susann (1966)
1. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (as translated by Gregory Rebassa) (1967)
1. The Atrocity Exhibition – J. G. Ballard (1969)
1. Play It As It Lays - Joan Didion (1970)
1. Spring Snow - Yukio Mishima (as translated by Michael Gallagher) (1972)
1. The Optimist’s Daughter – Eudora Welty (1972)
1. Rubyfruit Jungle – Rita Mae Brown (1973)
1. The Princess Bride - William Goldman (1973)
1. The Easter Parade - Richard Yates (1976)
1. Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison (1977)
1. Requiem for a Dream - Hubert Selby Jr. (1978)
1. Women – Charles Bukowski (1978)
1. The Memoirs of an Anti-Semite – Gregor von Rezzori (1979)
1. Zuckerman Bound – Philip Roth (1979-1985)
1. The Book of Ebenezer Le Page - G. B. Edwards (1981)
1. The Loser – Thomas Bernhard (1983)
1. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera (as translated by Henry Heim) (1984)
1. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café – Fannie Flagg (1987)
1. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
1. Resuscitation of a Hanged Man - Denis Johnson (1991)
1. The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides (1993)
1. Mercy of a Rude Stream – Henry Roth (1994 -1998)
1. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace (1996)
1. The Untouchable – John Banville (1997)
1. The Savage Detectives – Roberto Bolaño (as translated by Natascha Wimmer) (1998)
1. Waiting - Ha Jin (1999)
1. The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood (2000)
1. White Teeth - Zadie Smith (2000)
1. Atonement - Ian McEwan (2001)
1. Empire Falls – Richard Russo (2001)
1. 2666 – Roberto Bolaño (as translated by Natascha Wimmer) (2004)
1. Fun Home – Alison Bechdel (2006)
1. On The Road (The Original Scroll) – Jack Kerouac (2007)
1. Freedom - Jonathan Franzen (2010)
