What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years? by New York Times
The New York Times Book Review's editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify...
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1. Beloved by Toni Morrison
Beloved (1987) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. The novel, her fifth, is loosely based on the life and legal case of the slave Margaret Garner, about whom Morrison...
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2. Underworld by Don DeLillo
Underworld is a postmodern novel written in 1997 by Don DeLillo. It was nominated for the National Book Award, is one of his better-known novels, and was a best-seller.
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3. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West is a 1985 Western novel by American author Cormac McCarthy. It was McCarthy's fifth book, and was published by Random House. The narrative foll...
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4. Rabbit at Rest by John Updike
In John Updike's fourth and final novel about ex-basketball player Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the hero has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild. His son, Nelson, is behavi...
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4. Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike
Rabbit Is Rich is a 1981 novel by John Updike. It is the third novel of the four-part series which begins with Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux, and concludes with Rabbit At Rest. There is also a relat...
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4. Rabbit Redux by John Updike
Rabbit Redux finds the former high-school basketball star, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, working a dead-end job and approaching middle age in the downtrodden and fictional city of Brewer, Pennsylvania, ...
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4. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
Rabbit, Run depicts five months in the life of a 26-year-old former high school basketball player named Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, and his attempts to escape the constraints of his life.
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5. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
American Pastoral is a Philip Roth novel concerning Seymour "Swede" Levov, a Jewish-American businessman and former high school athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov's happy and conventional upper...
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A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
A Confederacy of Dunces is a picaresque novel written by John Kennedy Toole, published in 1980, 11 years after the author's suicide. The book was published through the efforts of writer Walker Perc...
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Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Ruth narrates the story of how she and her younger sister Lucille are raised by a succession of relatives in the fictional town of Fingerbone, Idaho (some details are similar to Robinson's hometown...
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Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
Winter's Tale is a 1983 novel by author Mark Helprin. It takes place in a mythical New York City near the turn of the 20th century, markedly different from the world we live in.
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White Noise by Don DeLillo
Set at a bucolic midwestern college known only as The-College-on-the-Hill, White Noise follows a year in the life of Jack Gladney, a professor who has made his name by pioneering the field of Hitle...
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The Counterlife by Philip Roth
The Counterlife (1986) is a novel by the American author Philip Roth. It is the fourth full novel to feature the fictional novelist Nathan Zuckerman. However, when The Counterlife was published, Zu...
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Libra by Don DeLillo
Libra (1988) is a novel written by Don DeLillo. It focuses on the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and offers a speculative account of the events that shaped the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
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Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver
Where I'm Calling From is a short story and the title of a collection of thirty-seven short stories by American author Raymond Carver. This story, as well as many of his others, focuses on the effe...
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The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
The Things They Carried is a collection of related stories by Tim O'Brien, about a platoon of American soldiers in the Vietnam War, originally published in hardcover by Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Whil...
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Mating by Norman Rush
Mating is a novel by American author Norman Rush. It is a first-person narrative of an unnamed American anthropology graduate student in Botswana around 1980. It focuses on her relationship with Ne...
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Operation Shylock by Philip Roth
Operation Shylock: A Confession is novelist Philip Roth's 19th book and was published in 1993. The novel follows narrator "Philip Roth" on a journey to Israel where he attends the trial of accused ...
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Independence Day by Richard Ford
Independence Day follows Frank Bascombe, a New Jersey real estate agent, through the titular holiday weekend as he visits his ex-wife, his troubled son, his current lover, the renters of one of his...
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Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth
Mickey Sabbath is an unproductive, out-of-work, former puppeteer with a strong affinity for whores, adultery, and the casual sexual encounter. Sabbath takes great pleasure in his status as the (pro...
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Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy
Cities of the Plain is the final volume of American novelist Cormac McCarthy's "The Border Trilogy." A film adaptation to be directed by Andrew Dominik has been announced for release in 2012. The t...
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The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy
The Crossing (ISBN 0-394-57475-3) is a novel by prize-winning American author Cormac McCarthy, published in 1994 by Alfred A. Knopf. The story is the second installment of McCarthy's "Border Trilogy".
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All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
All the Pretty Horses is a novel by U.S. author Cormac McCarthy published in 1992. Its romanticism (in contrast to the bleakness of McCarthy's earlier work) brought the writer much public attention...
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The Human Stain by Philip Roth
The Human Stain is set in 1990s America, the time of the culture wars, political correctness and the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal. The story is told by Nathan Zuckerman, a writer who lives ...
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The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternate history in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindb...
