The Essayist

Donald Barthelme’s Reading List

A reading list of 81 Books, chosen by the father of post-modern fiction

• Flann O’Brien, At Swim Two-Birds
• Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman
• Isaac Babel, Collected Short Stories
• Borges, Labyrinths
• Borges, Other Inquisitions
• Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Thomas Bernhard, Correction
• Rudy Wurlitzer, Nog
• Isaac B Singer, Gimpel the Fool
• Bernard Malamud, The Assistant
• Bernard Malamud, The Magic Barrel
• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
• Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano,
• Samuel Beckett entire
• Knut Hamsun, Hunger
• Max Frisch, I’m Not Stiller
• Max Frisch, Man in the Holocene
• Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
• Tommaso Landolfi, Gogol’s Wife
• Thomas Pynchon, V
• John Hawkes, The Lime Twig
• John Hawkes, Blood Oranges
• Paley, Little Disturbances
• Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
• Susan Sontag, I, Etc.
• Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle
• Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces
• Bellow, Henderson the Rain King
• John Updike, The Coup
• John Updike, Rabbit, Run
• The Paris Review interviews
• Rust Hills (ed.), How We Live
• Joe David Bellamy (ed.), Superfiction
• Puschart Prize Anthologies
• Sternburg (ed.), The Writer on Her Work
• André Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism
• Motherwell (ed.), Documents of Modern Art
• Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
• Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World
• Flaubert, Letters
• Mamet, Sexual Perversity in Chicago
• Joy Williams, The Changeling
• Joe David Bellamy (ed.), The New Fiction
• Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato
• Amos Tutola, The Palm-Wine Drunkard
• Ann Tyler, Searching for Caleb
• Kenneth Koch, Thank You
• Frank O’Hara, Collected Poems
• John Ashbery, Rivers and Mountains
• Wesley Brown, Tragic Magic
• Roland Barthes, Mythologies
• Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
• Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel
• Ann Beattie, Falling in Place
• William Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
• Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life
• Gass, The World Within the Word
• Mailer, Advertisements for Myself
• Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
• Celine, Journey to the End of the Night
• Kobo Abe, The Box Man
• Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
• Peter Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
• Peter Handke, Kaspar and Other Plays
• André Breton, Nadja
• John Barth, Chimera
• Walker Percy, The Moviegoer,
• Jayne Anne Phillips, Black Tickets
• Peter Taylor, Collected Stories
• Colette, The Pure and the Impure
• Carver, Will You Please be Quiet, Please
• John Cheever, Collected Stories
• Leonard Michaels, I Would Have Saved Them if I Could
• Eudora Welty, Collected Stories
• Max Apple, The Oranging of America
• Flannery O’Connor, Collected Stories
• Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
• Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
• Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz
• Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
• Wayne C Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction

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    just printed this out so that...could cross off titles when appropriate. Who needs human...

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    Frak, I’ve got work

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    Okay. This is tackle worthy.

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    I am embarrassingly far behind in my reading.

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