Stewart O’Nan’s Top 100 novels
1. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude
2. Frederick Exley: A Fan’s Notes
3. Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
4. Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities
5. Joanna Scott: Arrogance
6. James Welch: Winter in the Blood
7. Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
8. Alice Munro: The Beggar Maid
9. James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
10. Gertrude Stein: Three Lives
11. Lisa Shea: Hula
12. Kate Braverman: Lithium for Medea
13. Toni Morrison: Sula
14. Don DeLillo: End Zone
15. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: Slaughterhouse-Five
16. Leslie Marmon Silko: Ceremony
17. William Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom!
18. Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar
19. Robert Stone: Dog Soldiers
20. Elizabeth Tallent: Museum Pieces
21. Flannery O’Connor: The Violent Bear It Away
22. James M. Cain: The Postman Always Rings Twice
23. Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart
24. Carolyn Chute: The Beans of Egypt, Maine
25. Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian
26. Tim O’Brien: Going After Cacciato
27. Richard Wright: Native Son
28. N. Scott Momaday: House Made of Dawn
29. E.M. Forster: A Passage to India
30. Albert Camus: The Stranger
31. Robert Coover: The Universal Baseball Association
32. William S. Burroughs: Naked Lunch
33. Samuel Beckett: Three Novels
34. John Edgar Wideman: Sent For You Yesterday
35. Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
36. Louis-Ferdinand Celine: Journey to the End of the Night
37. John Cheever: The Wapshot Chronicle
38. James Salter: A Sport and a Pastime
39. Marilynne Robinson: Housekeeping
40. Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises
41. Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
42. Kathy Acker: Blood and Guts in High School
43. William Styron: Lie Down in Darkness
44. Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
45. Nicholson Baker: The Mezzanine
46. Alice McDermott: That Night
47. Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano
48. Mona Simpson: Anywhere But Here
49. Ken Kesey: Sometimes a Great Notion
50. James Agee: A Death in the Family
51. George Eliot: Middlemarch
52. William Saroyan: The Human Comedy
53. Carson McCullers: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
54. Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
55. Michael Tolkin: Among the Dead
56. James McConkey: Court of Memory
57. Dorothy Allison: Bastard Out of Carolina
58. Evan S. Connell: Mrs. Bridge
59. John Hawkes: The Cannibal
60. Lawrence Naumoff: Rootie Kazootie
61. Larry Woiwode: Beyond the Bedroom Wall
62. Julio Cortazar: Hopscotch
63. Trey Ellis: Platitudes
64. James Baldwin: Go Tell It on the Mountain
65. Richard Yates: Revolutionary Road
66. Margaret Atwood: Surfacing
67. ; Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit is RichJohn Updike: Rabbit at Rest
68. Ring Lardner: You Know Me, Al
69. Walker Percy: The Moviegoer
70. Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea
71. Stendhal: The Red and the Black
72. Norman Mailer: The Executioner’s Song
73. William Kennedy: Ironweed
74. Eudora Welty: The Optimist’s Daughter
75. Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange
76. Jamaica Kincaid: Annie John
77. William Faulkner: Light in August
78. Jean-Paul Sartre: Nausea
79. Denis Johnson: Angels
80. Jeffrey Eugenides: The Virgin Suicides
81. Alain Robbe-Grillet: Jalousie
82. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
83. Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
84. John Gardner: Nickel Mountain
85. William Maxwell: Time Will Darken It
86. ; Ordinary Love &Jane Smiley: Good Will
87. Franz Kafka: The Trial
88. Michel Butor: Mobile
89. Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth
90. J.D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye
91. Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace
92. Herman Melville: Moby-Dick
93. Robert O’Connor: Buffalo Soldiers
94. Stephen King: The Stand
95. Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
96. Robert Boswell: Crooked Hearts
97. Padgett Powell: Edisto
98. Philip Roth: Portnoy’s Complaint
99. Willa Cather: My Antonia
100. William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury