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Original Essays | November 9, 2009

Jesse Bullington: IMG Abash'd the Devil Stood



I don't believe in evil. It's a word I use, certainly, because words are shortcuts and we all take the short way round from time to time, but that's... Continue »
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List Madness

 
The Albeit Unscientific but Pretension-Free Powell's Top 25
(A Rebuttal to the Modern Library's Top 100)

 
The Right to Compile Lists? Just one of the endangered freedoms of our time. We here at Powell's aren't in the business of taking political stands, but if one more concerned citizen tells us our lists are compromising national security and/or corrupting the minds of young children, we'll simply have no choice but to make our lists even longer. List-making is a basic human freedom, if you ask us, right up there with The Right to Mock News Anchors' Hair and The Right to Repress Memories of High School.

Is Ulysses the greatest novel ever written? Quite possibly. But if only one percent of the population can understand it without a full semester devoted to Joyce's arcane references, who cares? With apologies to members of the White Male Dead-guy canon, we thought it might be instructive to select books that people actually read.

Is our list "better" than theirs? The answer will depend on your taste. But one thing's for sure – ours reflects a diverse community of talented writers mysteriously overlooked by the lords at The Modern Library. (And if you're a glutton for such lists, be sure to check out the Modern Library's Top 100 Nonfiction Books of the Century as well.)
 

The Modern Library

The 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, as drawn up by the editorial board of the Modern Library (and reported by the Associated Press).

Powell's Books

25 great novels we would have liked to have seen on their list, chosen by our staff.

1. Ulysses, James Joyce

2. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

4. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

5. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

6. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

7. Catch-22, Joseph Heller

8. Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler

9. Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence

10. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

11. Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry

12. The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler

13. 1984, George Orwell

14. I, Claudius, Robert Graves

15. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

16. An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser

17. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers

18. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

19. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

20. Native Son, Richard Wright

21. Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow

22. Appointment in Samarra, John O'Hara

23. U.S.A. (trilogy), John Dos Passos

24. Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson

25. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster

26. The Wings of the Dove, Henry James

27. The Ambassadors, Henry James

28. Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

29. The Studs Lonigan Trilogy, James T. Farrell

30. The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford

31. Animal Farm, George Orwell

32. The Golden Bowl, Henry James

33. Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser

34. A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh

35. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

36. All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren

37. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder

38. Howards End, E.M. Forster

39. Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin

40. The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene

41. Lord of the Flies, William Golding

42. Deliverance, James Dickey

43. A Dance to the Music of Time (series), Anthony Powell

44. Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley

45. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

46. The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad

47. Nostromo, Joseph Conrad

48. The Rainbow, D.H. Lawrence

49. Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence

50. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller

51. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer

52. Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth

53. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov

54. Light in August, William Faulkner

55. On the Road, Jack Kerouac

56. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett

57. Parade's End, Ford Maddox Ford

58. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

59. Zuleika Dobson, Max Beerbohm

60. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy

61. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather

62. From Here to Eternity, James Jones

63. The Wapshot Chronicles, John Cheever

64. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

65. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

66. Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham

67. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

68. Main Street, Sinclair Lewis

69. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton

70. The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell

71. A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes

72. A House for Mr. Biswas, V.S. Naipaul

73. The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West

74. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

75. Scoop, Evelyn Waugh

76. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark

77. Finnegans Wake, James Joyce

78. Kim, Rudyard Kipling

79. A Room With a View, E.M. Forster

80. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

81. The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow

82. Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner

83. A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul

84. The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen

85. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad

86. Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow

87. The Old Wives' Tale, Arnold Bennett

88. The Call of the Wild, Jack London

89. Loving, Henry Green

90. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

91. Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell

92. Ironweed, William Kennedy

93. The Magus, John Fowles

94. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys

95. Under the Net, Iris Murdoch

96. Sophie's Choice, William Styron

97. The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles

98. The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain

99. The Ginger Man, J.P. Donleavy

100. The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington

1. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

2. Beloved, Toni Morrison

3. Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

4. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

5. The Color Purple, Alice Walker

6. My Antonia, Willa Cather

7. Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor

8. Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood

9. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov

10. Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

11. Nightwood, Djuna Barnes

12. Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman Capote

13. Three Lives, Gertrude Stein

14. Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison

15. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

16. The Bone People, Keri Hulme

17. The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien

18. The Razor's Edge, Somerset Maugham

19. Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs

20. White Noise, Don Delillo

21. Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban

22. Bless Me, Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya

23. Zami, a New Spelling of My Name, Audre Lorde

24. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K Dick

25. London Fields, Martin Amis

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