On the occasion of the 4th of July, we the asked the rest of the world for its opinion on American literature. In a deeply unscientific survey of nearly 50 writers, editors, publishers, critics, and translators, representing 30 countries, we asked them to name three quintessentially American books, and tell us about their choices.
Individual titles named: 96 · Books by women: 19 · Most popular decade: The 2000s · Least popular decade: The 1940s · Oldest book: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin (1791) · Newest book: Tenth of December, George Saunders (2013) · Most cited writers: William Faulkner (8), Herman Melville (5), F. Scott Fitzgerald (4), J.D. Salinger (4), Mark Twain (4)
[Featured image: “America” according to Google image-search.]
The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
The quintessential coming-of-age story. And the only book I read over a single Saturday as a teenager.
Ragtime, E. L. Doctorow
A book about small people and how they shape the big story of American history.
Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
The quintessential immigrant saga told through the unique viewpoint of a man who used to be a girl.
–Manol Peykov, Bulgaria, translator and publisher of Janet 45
To Build a Fire, Jack London.
Because 2016 marks the centenary of London’s death and because no other writer details America’s conflicted relationship with the wild with anything approaching his authority and understanding.
Wyoming Stories, Annie Proulx
Perhaps the greatest chronicler of change among contemporary American writers, she captures in the theatre of rodeo the death throes of the great American West.
Damned if I Do, Percival Everett
Recommended to me by a friend after I was twice cruised by a pickup bearing a Confederate flag whilst out running in rural Massachusetts, Everett’s story “The Appropriation of Cultures” recounts the tale of a black man who buys a Ford truck with a rebel flag decal and insists on keeping it. Timely.
–Aminatta Forna, Scotland, author of 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize novel The Memory of Love
Tenth of December, George Saunders
What a blow against the hidden and apparent prejudices. In his cunning short stories George Saunders shows that kind of present America that many Americans want to conceal. It’s a real thing.
A Mercy, Toni Morrison
A lyrical and allusive journey to the very beginnings of the American nation. Toni Morrsion is depicting a social and racial laboratory in a wild new world where the oppressed people are the material in the test tubes.
Sabbath’s Theater, Phillip Roth
A real killer. A nasty portrait of a dirty old man who is a more embittered version of Alexander Portnoy. Too many readers have missed the hard irony of this multilayered in novel beneath its harsh attitude towards the society Mickey Sabbath is living in.
–Jukka Petäjä, Finland, main critic at the Helsinki-based newspaper Helsingin Sanomat
Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West
A dark comedy about disillusionment after the Great Depression in the form of a troubled journalist who failed to give the proper advice to his lonely readers.
Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone
The Vietnam War continues in California, mixed with hardcore drugs, corruption and madness.
Train Dreams, Denis Johnson
A man who experiences , over the course of his 80 years, what it means to be born in a land that changes dramatically: from wilderness to television, an epic in 100 pages.
–Andres Felipe Solano, Colombia, author of the novels Sálvame, Joe Louis, and Los hermanos Cuervo and selected by Granta as one of the Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists
Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
A tragic and, at the same time, subtle portrait of the 1950s.
Light in August, William Faulkner
It’s brilliant, epic and legible.
U.S.A. Trilogy, John dos Passos
Biographies, articles, song fragments, the main narrative… everything works in perfect harmony.
–Carol Bensimon, Brazil, author of Everybody Loves Cowboys and one of Granta’s Best Young Brazilian Novelists
The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
Hard-boiled guys with heart, fatal blondes and gimlets by the pool. Big cars roaming in sunny LA.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Philip K. Dick
The long use of delusional drugs has left everyone paranoid—or else it’s all real, and there’s a concealed foreign invasion going on.
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
A Russian embraced by America, writing a great American novel.
–Marcelo Ferroni, Brazil, editor of Editora Objectiva and Granta Brazil, author of Guerrilla Warfare: A Practical Method and From the Walls, My Love, the Slaves are Watching Us
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
The American hunger to comprehend all, and the impossibility of it, permeated half by cheerful melancholy and half by demonic rage.
Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
A tragically American context, in which you feel miscegenation to be more horrifying than incest; also, only in America can Sutpen’s doomed dream of self-creation make sense.
The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
Eager to stay away from “all that David Copperfield kind of crap”—i.e., the sense of the British, consistent selfhood—what does Holden have to hang on to? Only the fragile here-and-now self: hence his obsessive, endless talk, which is the only thing he has to keep him going.
–Motoyuki Shibata, Japan, translator and editor of Monkey Business
The Tortilla Curtain, T.C. Boyle
The best novel about America’s most fascinating city: Los Angeles.
Postcards from the Edge, Carrie Fisher
Clever, funny, painfully honest: Fisher describes the pleasures and (mostly) pains of Hollywood like no one else.
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
A celebration of life, friendship, jazz, and that most American experience: driving your car.
–Han Ceelen, Netherlands, writer and editor at 360 Magazine
Sweet Talk, Stephanie Vaughn
“My name is Duke! My name is Duke!” It sure is, metaphor dog. It surely is.
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
What would you do / To get to me / What would you say / To have your way / Would you give up / Or try again / If I hesitate / To let you win / Or would you be yourself / Or play your role / Tell all the boys / Or keep it low / If I say no / Would you turn away / Or play me off / Or would you stay / If at first you don’t succeed / Dust yourself off and try again / You can dust it off and try again / I’m into you / You into me / But I cant let it go / So easily / Not ’til I see / What this could be / Be eternity / Or just a week / You know, our chemistry / Is off the chain / Is perfect now / But will it change / This ain’t a yes / This ain’t a no / Just do your thing / We’ll see how it goes…ohhh / If at first you don’t succeed / Dust yourself off and try it again / You can dust it off and try again
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
Impractical ramblingness + audiovisual media + drugs + characters full of trepidatious braggadocio created by a confidently unsure author + competitive sports + dystopian LOLs + addictiveness in and of itself + maths = U. S. of A.
–Sam Cooney, Australia, publisher and editorial director at The Lifted Brow
Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville
I prefer not to is the point of negation from which everything may start ever again and there are few things more American in my mind than this act of pure creation.
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
The landscapes of honest colors, fata morganas and melting mirages have become over time an America more real than America itself, a reimagined America which in the end is, must be, the most enduring (and beautiful) country of all.
Suttree, Cormac McCarthy
Perhaps the greatest American novel of this side of time, quintessentially American in its verbal inventiveness and daemonic power: “I have seen them in a dream, slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them.”
–Lila Azam Zanganeh, France, author of The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness
Sweet Land Stories, EL Doctorow
Perhaps the most perfect collection of short stories I know. Its quietness rumbles—nonetheless—with the American storm.
Light Years, James Salter
In which America is boiled down into exceptional, impossible sentences. And into the catastrophe of a marriage.
Collected Stores, Lydia Davis
No one has responded more brilliantly than Davis to the garrulous silence of contemporary America, the depths at which its banality twists inside.
–Rana Dasgupta, England, author of Tokyo Cancelled, Solo and Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi
Underworld, Don DeLillo
A key reference of the second part of the 20th century for the American narrative. Any major American novel must be considered under the light of Delillo’s new impulse towards fiction. Masterpiece.
The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
Many titles could have been chosen. Some could be skipped or filtered but I could not think of quintessential American fiction without Holden Caulfield’s monumental rage and sadness.
The Heart is Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
If I see my emotional suitcase as a reader and think of American fiction, this book is the first thing I pack. The choice of a European reader looking for non-quintessential American fiction and finding it in the Big South, yes or yes.
–Elena Ramírez, Spain, editorial director at Seix Barral and director of fiction at Internacional Grupo Planeta
The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
One man tries every job in the NAFTA bloc.
American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
The free market finds its shining avatar in Patrick Bateman.
The Pat Hobby Stories, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Hobby has so much more to tell us about America than Gatsby.
–Ned Beauman, England, author of Glow
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
This is where it all starts, the new world called America, no other work of fiction before had created characters like Huck and Jim, or the landscape with Mississippi running through its veins like blood, and no one had ever used language the way Huck and Jim did. Along with this, Huck Finn also set the stage for great works of American fiction becoming moral guardians of America, reminding us that it is preferable to go to hell but do the right thing.
The Day of Locust, Nathanael West
The seductions and dangers of celebrity and entertainment in America, leading to a unique kind of violence bred out of what Saul saw most threatening to America: our “sleeping consciousness” and “Atrophy of feeling.”
Kinder than Solitude, Yiyun Li
Reminding us of another quintessential American trait: being renewed through the alternative eye of immigrants who bring with them a fresh perspective, reminding us how the “old world” illuminates and gives new life to this new world. A good example from this novel is a young Chinese girl objecting most to “Not knowing and making do with not knowing.”
–Azar Nafisi, Iran, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran and The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books [Ed.’s note: Ms. Nafisi is clearly an expert on this very particular subject.]
The Human Stain, Philip Roth
Because it painfully explores America’s lethal obsession with race; because its portrayal of a damaging culture of offense makes it a book about our times; because its melancholic tone never leaves the reader again.
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
An homage to the grandness of the land and to a host of fine American characteristics: youth, recklessness, boredom, lust, drugs, jazz and self-destruction; must be read before the crucial age of 21.
No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
A sober dissection of defeat, foolishness, neverending violence and of the fatal American instinct to do good; leaves you 300 years older.
–Klaus Wivel, Denmark, author of The Last Supper forthcoming from New Vessel Press
The Old Man and The Sea, Ernest Hemingway
To me Hemingway is the embodiment of America. It is rare that when thinking of a novel, I immediately feel it in my guts—this sense of complete loneliness, baked by a merciless sun and shrouded by the salty sea in a desperate battle of the individual against the elements and against all odds.
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
The ultimate American masterpiece that could share a shelf with The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace without flinching—the fascinating American deeply religious paranoia and its relentless self-destructive obsession with the Devil.
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Reflects attributes that are at the roots of the American condition—its deep adherence to the dark dangerous side of religion, its nauseating self righteousness and its fierce womanophobia.
–Yitzhak Gormezano Goren, Israel, author of Alexandrian Summer
The Buddha in the Attic, Julie Otsuka
One of the most poetic books I’ve ever read, poetic in its subsuming of the details within the whole. America in the eyes of Japanese immigrants. Americans mirrored in their hopes and disappointments. And suddenly one is one of them, one stands on top of a ship and spots the pale strip of land like a heavenly sign and doesn’t know if it bodes well.
Winter Journal, Paul Auster
The mapping out of an American life. Every place is familiar. As familiar as a body that drinks and smokes too much. All scars and infirmities are expressed. They tell a story.
Still Can’t See Nothin’ Comin’, Daniel Grey Marshall
A straight road leading to the abyss. The occasional curves give a respite and having hit bottom, one senses that it goes still further. Childhood and youth in the Midwest, brutal and tender at the same time, as far as that’s possible, but here at least it’s real.
–Milena Michiko Flasar, Germany, author of I Called Him Necktie
A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
A book that takes all of America’s leading narratives—a confession, a memoir, a Vanity Fair article, even a PowerPoint presentation—and forges them into one sword to pierce the American heart: Redemption, transformation—God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn’t everyone?
Light Years, James Salter
A book about the double life of married people in America: Two lives are perfectly natural, he thought, as he picked up a water chestnut. Two lives are essential.
What Work Is, Philip Levine
The quintessential American poet: smart, visual, precise, forever fighting the ‘how-it-is’ of the world around him: I listen to my breath / come and go and try to catch its curious taste, / part milk, part iron, part blood, as it passes / from me into the world.
–Phillip Huff, Netherlands, author of two novels.
Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder
Young readers all over the world enjoy this study of the birth of a nation and some of its basic values, from the point of view of a settler family.
Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis
The first American Nobel prize winner describes the middle class life with biting accuracy and gentle satire.
The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem
A modern coming-of-age story that brilliantly mixes magical realism with contemporary social issues.
–Johanna Sinisalo, Finland, author of science fiction and fantasy
American Pastoral, Philip Roth
This book remains for me the most extraordinary novel about the failure of the American Dream—while at the same time is an amazing portrait of a man.
The Son, Philip Meyer
A stunningly vivid novel about the history of the United States (and about greed), committed to the truth, epic with tremendous strength.
Blonde, by Joyce Carol Oates
I remember Joyce Caol Oates describing this enormous and wonderful story of Marilyn Monroe as “an American tragedy,” and it’s absolutely what it is.
–Raphaëlle Leyris, France, literary critic for Le Monde
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
An American journey through innocence, prejudice and unlikely friendships, to the tune of the southern vernacular.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace
An American journey through state fairs, Caribbean cruises and the trappings of television, to the soundtrack of a David Lynch movie.
American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
An American journey through materialism, violence and shoulder-padded suits, to the tune of Huey Lewis and the News.
–Ane Farsethås, Norway, editor and critic at the Norwegian newspaper Morgenbladet
Falconer, John Cheever
A university professor/junkie who killed his own brother, became gay in jail and managed to escape in a very funny way from this horrible prison: we don’t have such brilliant criminals in French literature and I love stories of salvation.
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
I can’t think of any other obese geniuses in literature (except in Rabelais but it’s so long ago) and I love Ignatius Reilly’s laziness, his communist-hating mother, and his unforgettable girlfriend Myrna, in an otherwise very sad story of dropouts that always makes me think of New Orleans.
The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
Also a New Orleans story; it’s very simple, this man drifting in the French Quarter, who loves going to movie theaters, cannot fit in anywhere; you kind of want to give him a hand but eventually I guess he doesn’t need any help, he just wants to go as far as he can into the questions he’s asking about himself and the world around him. I’ve read this book several times and I keep on wondering why I love it so much.
–Dominique Fabre, France, author of Guys Like Me and The Waitress Was New
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
I still recall the feeling I had after I first read this book about a dozen years ago. It was as if someone had beaten me, thrown me into a gutter and then into a jewelry box. That’s how it was in America, I had to imagine, splendor and human suffering, a fancy ball of vanities where I would nonetheless have liked to have danced.
Light in August, William Faulkner
A book that was incredibly strenuous to read. Perhaps the most strenuous book I’ve ever held in my hands. And yet it was impossible to escape from the muddled charm of the self-less, fragile and at the same time very tough Lena Grove. Enmity between the sexes, angry passion and coldness, loneliness and fanatic belief in God—I found all of it close together in this book. An unforgettable reading experience.
Donald Duck, Walt Disney Productions as illustrated by Carl Barks
In my mind, Donald Duck is much more than a cartoon figure. He’s a dandy, an incomparable figure, an enemy of the philistine bourgeoisie, a cynic and a soulful drake. A perfect hero. Someone who is enthusiastic about technology and not averse to believing in progress. As drawn by Barks, Donald has the wisest of insights and bravest of callings. And sometimes luck. I’ve always connected him with the USA and with the belief, so widespread in Europe, that in America everything is possible.
–Marjana Gaponenko, Ukraine, author of Who is Martha?
On Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson
Imparts in nuce some tenets of the kind of ontological optimism which the Europeans admire in US citizens to this day—pretty edifying material; also helpful when you’re sixteen and desperate and a foreign-exchange student in a god-forsaken Texan prairie town with no access to any mode of transportation, like myself in the late 80s.
The Last Gentleman, Walker Percy
A man without qualities from the Deep South on a doubtful pilgrimage across the country, tackling some of the big issues along the way: How to deal with the captious workings of one’s own passivity in the face of historical turmoil? How to muster the moral strength to cross the road on a Wednesday afternoon? What is the metaphysical function of genital sex? Timeless questions.
Speedboat, Renata Adler
A young journalist in a pretty ferocious NYC setting, partly autobiographical novel-collage, conflating urban intensities, quiet nuance, resilience, intellectualism, vicious gossip, sheer literary beauty—something to read to your kids, for them to become decent folks.
–Frank Wegner, Germany, publisher at Suhrkamp
Where I’m Calling From, Raymond Carver
Carver’s stories always remind me Edward Hopper’s paintings and the early Miles Davis, they all portray one universal thing in a very American way: everyone’s solitude.
Underworld, Don DeLillo
An American, post-modern, fragmented War and Peace, a beautiful monster. Somehow, this epic seems to tell us, God is dead, so everything can become God: nuclear bomb (fear), baseball (entertainment), or rubbish (everything else).
11/22/63, Stephen King
We often hear a super-short story here: one American family only has two books, one is the Bible, then another must be Stephen King. Is that really so?
–Kong Yalei, China, translator, author of Volcano Hotel
S.C.U.M. Manifesto, Valerie Solanas
Because only a big conflicted superpower like the USA could create the circumstances for the creation of such a biting satire of what the western patriarchy is made of and how its extremes manifest.
Train Dreams, Denis Johnson
Shows me that even though the USA is an enormity on the geographical and geopolitical scale it is first and foremost a place where human-sized stories take place.
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
Enforces my belief that the good people of the USA believe that everyone has got the potential to be someone.
–Sjón, Iceland, author of The Blue Fox
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
I guess the South is as far away from Europe that you can get in the US? This is such a powerful novel, providing an insight into Southern culture and history, and urging both young and old readers to think for themselves.
The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
There is something essentially American about the setting and atmosphere in this novel—a kind of dreamy, well-manicured suburbia which felt very exotic to me.
Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Sometimes you need an outsider’s view on a country to truly understand it.
–Johanna Haegerström, Sweden, editor at Albert Bonniers Förlag and of Swedish Granta
Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
…was about a young boy being myself at our datscha in Udelnaya near Moscow.
The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
…was making a vivisection of my aversions and fears, of my guts and dreams which had nothing to do with America.
Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade, Kurt Vonnegut
…was about Dresden, which I visited with our school delegation while reading the book.
Forty years ago I was reading some wonderful books without realizing they were American. I was 15 and the USA was not in our universe. It seems that the best and most quintessential of American fiction has not much “American“ about it. Just human. That is quintessential.
–Mikhail Shishkin, Russia, author of Maidenhair
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin
Because it’s the revelation of America’s daybreak and a very inspiring story about independence, self-improvement and personal greatness in the era of endless opportunities. Besides, it has a bunch of tips for budding writers.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
This book, which introduced America to me, when I was nine, and almost made me cry, when I saw the Mississippi River for the first time twenty years later. This novel about race, identity and the limits of freedom could only be written in the USA.
Tales of the Jazz Age, F. Scott Fitzgerald
This collection of effervescent and bitter stories, carries you straight into the New World of the 1920s. It charges you with doses of audacity and recklessness. Quite a wholesome blend in some situations.
–Alisa Ganieva, Russia, author of Salaam, Dalgat!
Collected Stories, William Saroyan
William Saroyan’s stories of Armenian immigrants in the San Joaquin Valley are as full of discovery and wonder as creation myths, which, for the most part, they are, in that they capture the genesis of the New Armenia which Saroyan had predicted would begin whenever Armenians—”…this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost…”—meet anywhere in the world.
Collected Stories, O. Henry
Henry’s tragicomic plots, his roguish characters, may classify as one of the first experiments in urban fairy tales. It should come as great satisfaction to all students of literature that his inventive plot games and strong characterization, which made him loved by readers, were the very qualities that enraged the critics.
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
It is tempting to say that in Captain Ahab Melville created the first American who waged war overseas driven by a morbid passion that was ultimately self-destroying. But it is the warm brooding of revenge, and the manner in which Melville personified an emotion in Ahab’s character, that makes Moby-Dick read like a legend, instead of a 19th-century text.
It is perhaps just a coincidence that 35 years ago I was first introduced to these American writers in Urdu, in which they had been translated by some of Urdu language’s greatest contemporary prose writers. It was years before I realized that these writers did not write in Urdu, and lived far away, in another land.
–Musharraf Ali Farooqi, Pakistan, author of five novels
Tracy’s Tiger, William Saroyan
Twentysomething beauty, invisible violence, the sweetest of Sad Saroyan in those fabulous 1950s of dreams to come and disappointments to leave behind (or vice versa).
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver
What do we talk about when we talk about What We Talk About When We Talk About Love? When we talk about What We Talk About When We Talk About Love we talk about loss.
House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
The best unreliable literary inauguration for this already unrecognizable XXIst century in the Untranslatable States of America.
–Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, Cuba, writer and artist
Theophilus North, Thornton Wilder
For showing with great humor the deepest roots of American entrepreneurship and resilience.
The Love of the Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald
For an introduction to the makeup of Hollywood, which runs the world.
Light in August, William Faulkner
For explaining the social and psychological fabric of the American South, which casts a shadow over the whole US.
–Hamid Ismailov, Uzbekistan, writer and journalist
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
It has been 30 years since I first read this novel written 165 years ago. I still remember it clearly. It has inspired me to often reflect on the inseparable relations between evils, ethics and art, and the synthesis of the three of them.
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
This novel is very different from the author’s other works. It is a chef d’oeuvre of literary union of skills, humanity, psychology and art.
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
This novel has proven it to be possible to be preoccupied with profound passion when confronting reality, and simultaneously accomplishing an opus that involve reflective complications. It doesn’t matter if the work shows signs of rawness. Those are but expressions of the author’s uninhibited sense of freedom. This is exactly the sort of power much needed in the writings of the East.
–Yan Lianke, China, author of numerous novels and short-story collections, including The Four Books, Lenin’s Kisses, and Dream of Ding Village
The Swimmer, John Cheever
Ned Merril swims back home through a string of swimming pools, a deeply existential exercise.
Let It Come Down, Paul Bowles
Because how Americans see themselves abroad is a great part of Americana. A great story of disillusionment.
A Sport and A Pastime, James Salter
So precise about the body, and still highly poetic. One of the most sensual books of all times.
–Amanda Michalopoulou, Greece, novelist
Burlesque Autobiography, Mark Twain
Need a good laugh? This one’s for you. Plus Mark Twain is the real American thing. Do you want an American dream? Here you have it: you can be somebody else. In this book, he reinvents himself. Nobody recommended it to me, I found it on the web.
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
Need to feel the States are another Latin American country? Here the reality is American, but the feeling is not. I read it initially in a Spanish translation. Curiosity turned me on, so I read it in English. But I can’t forget that first version.
Reflections In a Golden Eye, Carson McCullers
Need a good read? I read it by mistake—it was on a syllabus for a course I wasn’t supposed to be taking. Got no credits for it, but my, my! What a catch it was!
–Carmen Boullosa, Mexico, author of Texas: The Great Theft
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
Metaphysical horror represented by the whale is allegorized by its extreme whiteness. The same fascination with color (or better said, with no-color) is also present in Poe’s “Arthur Gordon Pym” and in Truman Capote’s “Miriam”, among others. Viewed from a certain distance, Moby Dick is an empty horizon or presence that must be occupied by progress. Fear willing to be defeated by history and writing.
Amerika, Franz Kafka
Although Kafka is not an American writer, I think on him as the first writer who noticed the contemporary phenomenon that consist in imagining the United States as a transnational space. From the point of view of the imaginary migration, the sword in the hand of the Statue of Liberty cannot be a mistake. So far, the “Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma” remains one of the best representations of the American Dream.
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
Grotesque and sublime, selfish and unfathomably generous, the Bundren family journey is probably the most American history I have ever read, if I can appropriate the adjective “American” for a moment as an excuse to talk about human condition.
–Carlos Yushimito, Peru, author of Lessons for a Child Who is Late
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Wide-eyed vision, hallucinatory language, enhanced powers of perception to fuel with dancing fire the American gothic dream.
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
The voracious American mind rampaging around the intricate forests of youth and paranoia, which encompasses everything (plus tennis).
American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
Part social comedy, part Dostoevskian study of the male gaze and America’s top export, wild capitalism.
–Pola Oloixorac, Argentina, author of The Wild Theories, founding editor of The Buenos Aires Review
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
The hardboiled detective is a true American contribution to the world of fiction. The urban legend of Phillip Marlowe serves as the model for an international billion-dollar industry, mimicking American urban decay and its concomitant cool. In The Big Sleep we are served a truly flawed crime plot, but a great literary work of art, defining a genre and setting a standard for crime fiction unsurpassed to this day.
The Lost Weekend, Charles Jackson
Antabuse in writing, addiction in pure form, a psychological masterpiece of the post-Fitzgerald era, for the first time showing the grim face of the alcoholic behind the much romanticized writer, and the shady and shaky side of New York bars in the 1940s. Proving that you can take Joyce out of Dublin.
King Suckerman, George Pelecanos
My first and defining Pelecanos-read, introducing a writer who could bring back questions of race, class, and gender, in a mix with the best of pop-culture references. Pelecanos has an ear so finely tuned, that I, as a Norwegian, was convinced I could differentiate between five Washingtonian sociolects before the last page was turned.
–Eirik Bø, Norway, publisher at Pelikanen
Less Than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis
A novel about the boredom and emptiness of the über rich, written in a cold, reserved style, sparse and bleak; a perfect description of life in the 1980s. Clay is one with one of loneliest characters in American literature.
Lord of the Barnyard, Tristan Egolf
This is the literary grunge novel, a relentless story written in a hurricane-style, the ultimate underdog novel about the underprivileged and the have-nots.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers
It’s heartbreaking (Eggers loses his parents within five weeks) and it’s staggering (style, humor, originality, design) but most of all it contains the best frisbee scene in American fiction.
–Oscar Van Gelderen, Netherlands, publisher at Lebowski
The Old Man and The Sea, Ernest Hemingway
I was amazed that literature could be this—nothing happening, a single anecdote: an old man goes out to fish and that is all he does, he fishes. I liked that just one thing could be the substance of a whole novel. I remember giving it to my father, and that he didn’t like it; that was when I began to notice a difference between the books my parents liked and the ones that spoke to me. Reading The Old Man and The Sea was a formative experience for me: in the way it was narrated, the way it lingered over descriptions, it was an example of how absorbing a simple story can be.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
Lovely, poetic, sad, sublime. It was assigned to me in high school and I never forgot it. The beautiful tale of Spiros Antonapoulos.
Geography III, Elizabeth Bishop
A book about traveling and about thinking about those travels while at home, with lines you commit to memory and carry with you always.
–Nurit Kasztelan, Argentina, poet, publisher and bookseller
More than twenty years ago, I read On the Road, the great novel of Jack Kerouac, I love it as voice of reality for the Beat Generation: I still remember the two friends who travel around the United States and Mexico, a rich story of drugs, alcohol, and sex. After that, I remember when I read A Rose for Emily, by William Faulkner: this short story changed my mind about the writing of the short story, and how to write a great short story. After that I read Faulkner’s wonderful novel The Sound and The Fury. The last wonderful book, for me, by an American author, was The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster: it revealed to me the other side of America, and its similarities with Riyadh, a sense of loneliness and foreignness these two cities share.
–Yousef Al-Mohaimeed, Saudi Arabia, author of Wolves of the Crescent Moon and Munira’s Bottle