"Smiley dazzles the reader with nearly 300 pages of zestful analysis....Smiley's brilliant and bounteous critical feat and celebration of the novel's humanitarian spirit will kindle new appreciation for the form, and inspire more adventurous reading." Booklist (Starred Review)
"Bracing literary criticism from a practitioner's point of view....Stimulating, provocative and unfailingly intelligent in short, vintage Smiley." Kirkus Reviews
"In addition to being a Pulitzer Prize-winning and widely read novelist herself, Smiley spent many years teaching in college classrooms. So exposition on the novel comes naturally to her. Über-English majors will embrace this opportunity as they would the chance to reconnect with a favorite professor....But perhaps the greatest pleasure offered by this cross between a course syllabus and a love letter to the novel are the almost 300 pages at the end." Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor (read the entire Christian Science Monitor review)
Jane Smiley is the author of eleven novels as well as three works of nonfiction. She is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. Smiley lives in Northern California.
1. Introduction
2. What Is a Novel?
3. Who Is a Novelist?
4. The Origins of the Novel
5. The Psychology of the Novel
6. Morality and the Novel
7. The Art of the Novel
8. The Novel and History
9. The Circle of the Novel
10. A Novel of Your Own (I)
11. A Novel of Your Own (II)
12. Good Faith: A Case History
13. Reading a Hundred Novels
A HUNDRED NOVELS
1. Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
2. Snorri Sturluson, Egilssaga
3. Author unknown, The Saga of the People of Laxardal
4. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron
5. Anonymous, Lazarillo de Tormes
6. Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron
7. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote, vols. 1 and 2
8. Madame de La Fayette, The Princess of Clèves
9. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko and “The Fair Jilt”
10. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Roxana
11. Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded
12. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
13. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote
14. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
15. Voltaire, Candide
16. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
17. Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses
18. The Marquis de Sade, Justine
19. Sir Walter Scott, The Tale of Old Mortality, The Bride of Lammermoor
20. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
21. Jane Austen, Persuasion
22. James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
23. Stendhal, The Red and the Black
24. Nikolai Gogol, Taras Bulba
25. Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time
26. Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Pons and Cousin Bette
27. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
28. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
29. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
30. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Toms Cabin
31. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
32. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables
33. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
34. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
35. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, The Moonstone
36. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
37. Émile Zola, Thérèse Raquin
38. Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset, The Eustace Diamonds
39. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot
40. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
41. George Eliot, Middlemarch
42. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
43. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, The Awkward Age
44. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
45. Bram Stoker, Dracula
46. Kate Chopin, The Awakening
47. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
48. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
49. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
50. Max Beerbohm, The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson, or an Oxford Love Story
51. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
52. Sinclair Lewis, Main Street
53. Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter, vol. 1, The Wreath
54. James Joyce, Ulysses
55. Italo Svevo, Zenos Conscience
56. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
57. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
58. Franz Kafka, The Trial
59. Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers
60. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
61. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterleys Lover
62. Virginia Woolf, Orlando
63. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
64. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, vol. 1
65. Mikhail Sholokhov, And Quiet Flows the Don
66. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
67. Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart
68. P. G. Wodehouse, The Return of Jeeves, Bertie Wooster Sees It Through, Spring Fever, The Butler Did It
69. T. H. White, The Once and Future King
70. Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children
71. Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters
72. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
73. Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows
74. Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate, Dont Tell Alfred
75. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
76. Jetta Carleton, The Moonflower Vine
77. Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
78. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
79. John Gardner, Grendel
80. Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women
81. Naguib Mahfouz, The Harafish
82. Iris Murdoch,The Sea, the Sea
83. David Lodge, How Far Can You Go?
84. Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent
85. Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
86. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
87. Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John
88. J. M. Coetzee, Foe
89. Toni Morrison, Beloved
90. A. S. Byatt, Possession
91. Nicholson Baker, Vox
92. Garrison Keillor, WLT: A Radio Romance
93. Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum
94. Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance
95. Francine Prose, Guided Tours of Hell
96. Chang-rae Lee, A Gesture Life
97. Arnosˇt Lustig, Lovely Green Eyes
98. Zadie Smith, White Teeth
99. John Updike, The Complete Henry Bech
100. Ian McEwan, Atonement
101. Jennifer Egan, Look at Me
Index