Literature

I'm a reader, big time. I have about 4,000 books in my collection. (Can't wait for all information to be digitally stored!) These are some of my favorites – well, the ones I'd recommend – divided up into Drama, Novels, Poetry, and Short Stories. I was going to divide them by genre, but felt that would only reinforce how a lot of good work gets ignored.

I put my nonfiction favorites on another page.

§ Drama

• Aeschylus – Agamemnon.
• Euripides – Hippolytus, Iphigenia at Aulus, Iphigenia at Taurus, and Medea.
• Victor Hugo – Ruy Blas.
• Henrik Ibsen – An Enemy of the People.
• Ayn Rand – Night of January the 16th. I'd like to see it made into a film.
• Jean-Paul Satre – The Flies. After reading No Exit, which I did not like, I was surprised he wrote this one.
• William Shakespeare – Of course! My favorites from him are Hamlet, Julius Ceasar, King Lear, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, Othello, and Richard III.
• Sophocles – King Oedipus and Antigone. My favorite of the ancient tragedians.
• Edmond Rostand – Cyrano de Bergerac.

§ Novels

• Peter S. Beagle – The Last Unicorn. This is a thinking person's fantasy novel. The Innkeeper's Song.
• Andrei Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita and his short stories.
• Ramsey Campbell – Ancient Images.
• Jonathan Carroll – The Land of Laughs and others. Another thinking person's fantasy writer.
• Adolfo Bioy Casares – A Plan for Escape. Short jaunt through a surreal world.
• Raymond Chandler – Just about any of his novels.
• Robert R. Chase – Shapers and Crucible. I wish he would write more!
• Philip K. Dick – Clans of the Alphane Moon. Satire that is not vicious. Dick always seems to like his characters too much to be vicious.
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Crime and Punishment and The Idiot.
• Greg Egan – Quarantine.
• E. M. Forster – A Passage to India.
• John Gardner – Grendel. "Beowulf" from the monster's perspective. Well-written and fun to read.
• Knut Hamsun – Hunger and Victoria.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Blithedale Romance.
• Sheri Holman – The Dress Lodger. Well written, but very gruesome.
• T. E. D. Klein – The Ceremonies. I wish he would write more novels!
• Pär Lagerkvist – Barabbas and The Sybil. I feel Barabbas is the better of the two.
• Stanislaw Lem – Solaris, Fiasco, and Eden. Lem is a lot like Olaf Stapeldon, an idea man. He comes up with great ideas. Even the stories are good, though the characterization is not as strong.
• Coram McCarthy – All the Pretty Horses. Memorable characters, engaging prose at times bordering on poetry, and moving scenes.
• Carson McCullers – The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
• Bernard Malamud – The Fixer and his short stories.
• Edward Plunkett (a.k.a. Lord Dunsany) – The King of Elfland's Daughter and The Charwoman's Shadow. Two great and very different fantasy novels.
• Ayn Rand – We the Living, Anthem, and The Fountainhead. The last is my favorite of hers. For the record, I did not like Atlas Shrugged.
• Mary Renault – The Mask of Apollo. She has a knack for leaving me drained.
• Joanna Russ – And Chaos Died.
• Bruce Sterling – Schismatrix and Heavy Weather. The former is one of my favorite science fiction novels.
• Michael Swanwick – Vacuum Flowers.
• Jacques Anatole François Thibault (a.k.a Anatole France) – Penguin Island and Thaïs. Both great, though in different ways.
• Jim Thompson – The Killer Inside Me. Can't take him too seriously, but his writing is intense.
• Rose Tremaine – Music and Silence.
• Sigrid Undset – Gunnar's Daughter. She manages to capture the spirit of the old sagas, yet this is a modern novel.
• Vernor Vinge – All his novels! His A Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorite science fiction novels.
• Ian Watson – The Embedding and Miracle Visitors. Two very good science fiction novels.
• Walter Jon Williams – Angel Station, Hardwired, and Voice of the Whirlwind. The first is my favorite of his.
• Robert Anton Wilson – The Earth Will Shake. I was a sort of pen pal of Robert Shea, the coauthor of Wilson's more well known The Illuminatus Trilogy, a few years before his death.

§ Poetry

• Matthew Arnold – "Dover Beach."
• William Blake – Too many to list here.
• Constantine P. Cavafy – "The God Abandons Antony" and "The Footsteps" from the Keeley and Sherrard translation.
• Amy Clampitt – "Medusa."
• Emily Dickenson – Many! She is a master word-smith.
• H.D. – Her poetry is so alive, especially "Along the Yellow Sand" and "Oread."
• Rita Dove – "Persephone, Falling" and "Persephone Underground." I'm a sucker for classical subjects.
• Robert Frost – Too many to mention.
• Dana Gioia – "Labyrinth without a Minotaur" and "Summer Storm."
• John Gray – "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," of course.
• Lars Gustafsson – "A Letter to a Tyrant," the Christopher Middleton translation.
• Seamus Heaney – Especially his "Lustral Sonnet." "So Greek with consequence" from that poem is one of the most memorable phrases I've ever read.
• Robinson Jeffers – "Rock and Hawk" and "Vulture."
• Omar Khayyam – The Rubaiyat, of course! The Edward Fitzgerald translation.
• Giacomo Leopardi – The Eamon Grennan translation (from the Italian, if you haven't guessed) Selected Poems. I know they say poetry is what's lost in translation. Grennan has found a way to translate poetry into poetry.
• Edwin Muir – "The Labyrinth," "The Good Town," "Oedipus," "The Usurpers," and "A Trojan Slave." The first is one of my favorite poems. Sadly, he remains out of print.
• Michael Pettit – "Legless Boy Climbing in and out of Chair" and "Woman Jumping from Rock to Rock." The former contains the powerful ending, "There's no trick to this."
• Pindar – "Nemean VIII" in almost any translation.
• Edgar Allen Poe – "Annabel Lee" and "The Raven."
• Edwin Arlington Robinson – "The Pity of the Leaves" and some others.
• Theodore Roethke – "Root Cellar" and others.
• Arseny Tarkovsky – "First Meetings." This poem appears in his son's film The Mirror. It's powerful.
• Alfred Lord Tennyson – "The Eagle," "Ulysses," and others. See sample below.
• Chidiock Tichborne – The one written on the eve of his execution, of course.
• William Wordsworth – His "The Daffodils" is one of my favorite poems.
• James Wright – "A Blessing" and several others.

§ Short Stories

• Peter S. Beagle – The stories in Giant Bones and Others. These are a thinking person's fantasy stories.
• Algernon Blackwood – "The Willows" is, for me, the archetypal story of the fantastic (in Todorov's sense). I think that's his best for that effect, though several others of his come close.
• Jorge Luis Borges – I like most of his short stories, but I think of them less as works of art than puzzles.
• Andrei Bulgakov – "The Fatal Eggs" and other of his surreal science fiction tales.
• Italo Calvino – Many in the Tim Parks' translation Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories.
• Ramsey Campbell – Lots from Demons by Daylight and his later collections. (I've only managed to find one tale from his The Inhabitants of the Lake which I liked also.)
• Raymond Carver – "Cathedral."
• Greg Egan – "Planck Dive" and others. He's one of the leading edges of hard science fiction.
• William Gibson – I think he's a better short story writer than a novelist.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne – Quite a few, including "Young Goodman Brown."
• Henry James – "The Aspern Papers," which is classified as a novella, but I never was all that good at telling where the short story ends and the novella begins – not to mention where the novellete or novel begins!
• T. E. D. Klein – "The Events at Poroth Farm," everything in The Dark Gods, and "Ladder." See my comment under novels.
• Bruce Sterling – The Crystal Express is probably his best collection to date.
• Vernor Vinge – A good portion, but especially "The Ungoverned."

Flower in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies,

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,

Little flower – but IF I could understand,

What you are, root and all, and all in all,

I should know what God and man is.

– Tennyson

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