The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin (c. 1760). This bawdy, funny, surreal, and encyclopedic Chinese classic stretches across 120 chapters. Reality and illusion shift constantly in the world of Jia Baoyu, scion of the wealthy but declining Jia family. He is a master at the arts of poetry, philosophy, and love but meets his match in his frail, beautiful cousin Lin Daiyu, one of the twelve beauties of Jinling.

Total Points: 7 (AGold 7)

The Tale of Genji by Shikibu Murasaki (c. 1001–1010 c.e.). Reputedly the world’s oldest novel, this immense epic romance chronicles the (mostly amorous) adventures of Japanese Prince Genji, a lowborn youth who is adopted by an emperor and grows into a handsome prodigy both irresistible to women and obsessively preoccupied with them. Genji’s peregrinations outside the hermetic world of the imperial court stimulate an elaborate panorama of the life of the period; the author’s depictions of Genji’s various and ingenious sexual conquests still dazzle.

Total Points: 7 (KJF 7)

The Thin Red Line by James Jones (1962). Green recruits become hardened soldiers, their eyes reflecting the “thousand yard stare” of those who have seen too much, in this novel set during World War II’s battle for Guadalcanal. Narrated from the perspective of various soldiers assigned to Charlie Company, the novel reflects the complexity of war—the horror and heroism of its licensed murder—while navigating the “thin red line between the sane and the mad.”

Total Points: 7 (DFW 7)

The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov (1901). In this gloomy Russian drama, the youthful hopes of siblings Olga, Masha, and Irina Prozorov curdle with time into the desperate sins and bitter resentments of later life. Often called a play in which nothing happens, The Three Sisters—one of four major dramas written by Chekhov at the end of his life—is actually a masterly study in dramatic texture, its voices and themes counterpointing each other as if they were notes in an orchestral piece.

Total Points: 7 (MD 7)

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carré (1974). This is the first novel in Le Carré’s Karla trilogy featuring aging, meticulous, self-effacing British spy George Smiley. Smiley is called out of forced retirement to root out a traitorous “mole” placed in the London headquarters of British intelligence by Soviet spymaster Karla. Working alone and without his agency’s resources for fear of alerting the mole, Smiley methodically sets about unmasking his quarry in this quintessential Cold War cloak-and-dagger yarn.

Total Points: 7 (IP 7)

U.S.A. trilogy by John Dos Passos (1938). Infused with the radical politics of the 1920s and 1930s and littered with newspaper excerpts, stream of consciousness prose, and biography, this triptych weaves an epic American narrative tapestry. Comprised of the novels The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money, U.S.A. follows a host of divergent Americans from childhood on up in their unique attempts to find a place in a nation teetering on the verge of social unrest. Mixing newspaper reportage with fiction long before the word postmodern gave academics something to write about, U.S.A. reads like a newsreel and a dream.

Total Points: 7 (NM 5) (RBP 2)

Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947). It’s the Day of the Dead in Mexico, and Geoffrey Firmin, a British ex-diplomat and professional alcoholic, is eager to oblige, embarking on a self-destructive bender like no other in literature. Lowry, who left hospitalization for his own drinking problem on the day the novel was published, recounts it all with a searing stream of consciousness that nods to Faulkner and Joyce and which Martin Amis called “drunkenness recollected in sobriety.”

Total Points: 7 (WK 7)

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966).  Carolyn Leavitt writes:  “Suicidal and alcoholic Jean Rhys wrote shatteringly spare books about women being beaten down by life. Rhys takes the classic story of “Jane Eyre” and spins it on its head, telling it from the viewpoint of none other than Mrs. Rochester, the mad wife locked in the attic.  Instead of being just the symbolic shadowy presence she was in “Jane Eyre,” she becomes a full-blown fascinating character in her own right. A Creole woman taken away from her beloved Island life, her sexuality repudiated by her husband, she’s torn from the things and the person she loves, and she goes slowly mad.  Rhys said the fame this book brought her, at age 70, came too late.  Truly, an essential read.”

Total Points: 7 (CL 7)

Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin (1983). One winter night, Peter Lake—master mechanic and second-storey man—attempts to rob a fortress-like mansion on the Upper West Side. Though he thinks it is empty, the daughter of the house is home. Thus begins the affair between a middle-aged Irish burglar and Beverly Penn, a young girl dying of consumption. It is a love so powerful that Peter Lake, a simple and uneducated man, will be driven to stop time and bring back the dead.

Total Points: 7 (TJ 7)

A Disaffection by James Kelman (1989). Patrick Doyle is a 29 year old Glasgow teacher in an ordinary school. Disaffected, frustrated and increasingly bitter at the system he is employed to maintain, Patrick begins his rebellion, fuelled by drink and his passionate, unrequited love for a fellow teacher. 

Total Points: 6 (IWelsh 6)

A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley (1968). A cross between Charles Bukowski and John Kennedy Toole, this harrowing, hilarious autobiographical novel portrays a raw and likable barstool dreamer. He is a slovenly, all-American misfit headed for the psychiatric institution, who fills his head with all-American fantasies of fame, wealth, and beautiful women. He doesn’t live life but watches it; his great passion is California golden boy Frank Gifford of the New York Giants, who symbolizes his hopes and whose injury triggers his self-reckoning.

Total Points: 6 (GP 6)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare (1595). The summit of Shakespeare’s early romantic comedies, this play explores the troubled course of love leading to the marriages of King Theseus of Athens and Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, and two young aristocratic Athenian couples. The trouble begins when the king of fairies interferes with the Athenian couples via his agent Puck, who administers love potions to the wrong characters. The ensuing confusion is finally resolved in the fifth act as the royal marriage is celebrated by the performance of a hilarious piece of nonsense staged by simple guildsmen led by Bottom the weaver, whose dream gives the play its name.

Total Points: 6 (KJF 6)

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (1959). Hansberry’s award-winning play was the first by a black woman to be produced on Broadway. It focuses on the Youngers, a struggling African American family in 1950s Chicago, who must decide how to spend the $10,000 insurance money Mama collects from her deceased husband. Mama wants a home, her daughter Beneatha an education, and her son Walter a business. What ensues is a generational debate over values and whether or not African Americans can realize the American Dream.

Total Points: 6 (PCle 6)

A Room with a View by E. M. Forster (1908). While the Brits might be repressed at home, they seem to lose their heads (and sometimes their clothes) in hot, hot Italy. This eagle-eyed satire of the Italian effect stars the wealthy and young Lucy Honeychurch, who switches hotel rooms in Florence with a lower-class British father and son and then fights her mounting attraction to the son as well as her building rebelliousness against the corset of Victorian manners.

Total Points: 6 (RR 6)

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (1859). It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.... These well-known and loved lines begin Dickens's novel set during the bloodiest moments of the French Revolution. When former aristocrat Charles Darnay learns that an old family servant needs his help, he abandons his safe haven in England and returns to Paris. But once there, the Revolutionary authorities arrest him not for anything he has done, but for his rich family's crimes. Also in danger: his wife, Lucie, their young daughter, and her aged father, who have followed him across the Channel. His salvation may be his uncanny resemblance to the dissolute yet nobel Sydney Carton.

Total Points: 6 (EF 6)

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (1929). Remarque drew on his military experience to craft this seminal antiwar novel. At the outset of World War I, Paul Baumer and his fellow Germans are gung-ho. As the senseless bloodbath continues, hope turns to disillusionment, and death comes to seem a welcome reprieve in this gritty and poignant tale.

Total Points: 6 (SV 6)

Another Country by James Baldwin (1962). Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, among other locales, Another Country is a novel of passions—sexual, racial, political, artistic—that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime. In a small set of friends, Baldwin imbues the best and worst intentions of liberal America in the early 1970s.

Total Points: 6 (JGil 6)

Bertha (1959) and George Washington Crosses the Delaware (1962), two plays by Kenneth Koch. These two plays about the exuberance of war are from the renowned New York School poet who said his dramatic influences included Shakespeare’s chronicle plays, Alfred Jarry’s parody of Macbeth, Ubi Roi, the experimental music of John Cage, and A Visit from Saint Nicholas by Clement Moore. Koch’s plays are brief, abrupt, language-centered, and childlike in their wonderment and humor, often undercutting heroic stances with a joke but always striving to capture what the playwright called “Dionysiac things.”

Total Points: 6 (AT 6)

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia by Rebecca West (1941). While England slept, West clearly saw the danger of Hitler, who embodied for her the “genius of murder which has shaped our recent history.” Her account of a trip from Dalmatia to Kosovo reads like the cry of a modern Cassandra. As she details the stirrings of blind ethnic hatred among the Serbs and Croats, she offers a preview of nightmares to come.

Total Points: 6 (AF 6)

Cane by Jean Toomer (1923). A hybrid of literary forms—poetry, prose, and drama—and a groundbreaking work of black literature, this book is a collage of portraits of African Americans from the urban North to the rural South. “Kabnis,” the third part of the book, unites the work’s themes in a story of Ralph Kabnis, an educated northerner who has come to Georgia to teach and is transformed as an artist by the beauty and violence of life there.

Total Points: 6 (PE 6)

Collected Poems of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79). Bishop's poems combine humor and sadness, pain and acceptance, and observe nature and lives in perfect miniaturist close-up. The themes central to her poetry are geography and landscape―from New England, where she grew up, to Brazil and Florida, where she later lived―human connection with the natural world, questions of knowledge and perception, and the ability or inability of form to control chaos. She was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1956 (Poems: North & South – A Cold Spring) and the National Book Award in 1970 for her body of work to that point.

Total Points: 6 (Boyd 6)

Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton (1948). Written just before apartheid became law in South Africa, this novel exposes the nation’s racial problems through the story of a rural black minister who travels to Johannesburg to save a friend’s daughter, who has become a prostitute, and later, his son, who is accused of murder. This vivid portrait of South Africa is informed by the white author’s Christian faith, which suggests that only changed hearts can reform, and redeem, his nation.

Total Points: 6 (AMS 6)

Edisto by Padget Powell (1984). Imbued with a strong sense of place—an isolated strip of South Carolina coast called Edisto—this novel centers on one Simons Everson Manigault, a twelve-year-old possessed of a vocabulary and sophistication way beyond his years and a preadolescent bewilderment with the behavior of adults. These include his mother, who is known as the Duchess, and his enigmatic father-surrogate, Taurus.

Total Points: 6 (JHUMP 6)

Endgame by Samuel Beckett (1957). Originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett himself, Endgame is considered by many critics to be the greatest single work by the Nobel laureate. A pinnacle of Beckett’s characteristic raw minimalism, it is a pure and devastating distillation of the human essence in the face of approaching death. Tom LeClair writes: "I’ve seen many performances of Beckett’s play and read it numerous times, and yet I never tire of—and never exhaust—his drama of exhaustion.  And repetition.  At the end, the tragi-comic Hamm divests himself of everything but says “Me to play.”  And the performance goes on the next night, and we go on despite all of our losses."

(TLeClair 6)

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973). This iconic feminist novel of fantasy, liberation, and “the zipless fuck” kicked up plenty of dust in the early 1970s. The unpublished writer and unhappily married Isadora Wing yearns to fly free and receives her epiphany through an affair and the discovery of her own sexuality and power. Many critics dismissed Jong as a pornographer in literary clothing; her protagonist, they claimed, was as self-absorbed as the baby boomers themselves. But the book sold millions and became a touchstone for a much greater social movement.

Total Points: 6 (DFW 6)