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Karen Joy Fowler

In an Author’s Note appended to her sixth novel, Booth, Karen Joy Fowler explains: “I did not want to write a book about John Wilkes. This is a man who craved attention and has gotten too much of it; I didn’t think he deserved mine. And yet there is no way around the fact that I wouldn’t be writing about his family if he weren’t who he was, if he hadn’t done what he did.”

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Featured List

Karen Joy Fowler

In an Author’s Note appended to her sixth novel, Booth, Karen Joy Fowler explains: “I did not want to write a book about John Wilkes. This is a man who craved attention and has gotten too much of it; I didn’t think he deserved mine. And yet there is no way around the fact that I wouldn’t be writing about his family if he weren’t who he was, if he hadn’t done what he did.”

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The Book: The Top Ten

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New List

Jonathan Franzen

1. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880).
2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869).
3. The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925).
4. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913–27).
5. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925).
6. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (1936).
7. The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal (1839).
8. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955).
9. The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead (1940).
10. Independent People by Halldór Laxness (1934).

 

 

 

Classic List

Judy Budnitz

 

1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955).
2. Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson (1992).
3. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946).
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960).
5. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877).
6. The stories of Isaac Babel (1894–1940).
7. The House of Breath by William Goyen (1950).
8. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (1961).
9. Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme (1981).
10. The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz (1934).