Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (2003). In this richly imagined speculative novel spiked with doomsday humor, Atwood envisions a world where our hubris, obsessions with technology and profit, and environmental abuse result in hell on earth. As her rueful narrator, Snowman, struggles to survive in a harsh postapocalyptic world, he becomes a reluctant guru for a bioengineered tribe of innocents (created by the mad genius, Crake), recalls his ruthlessly competitive lost world, and asks: What does it mean to be human?

Total Points: 4 (GDG 4)

Paradise by Toni Morrison (1997). “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” So begins Paradise, which opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in an all-black small town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by the descendants of freed slaves and survivors in exodus from a hostile world, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage. In prose that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem, Toni Morrison challenges fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth into a meditation on race, religion, gender, and a far-off past that is ever present. 

Total Points: 4 (TLeClair 4)

Pricksongs & Descants by Robert Coover (1969). The story lies in the telling in this groundbreaking collection of metafictions. Through rich, playful language, Coover reimagines traditional tales, including Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, and the Virgin birth. In stories such as “The Elevator” and “The Babysitter,” he makes the familiar surprising, suggesting that there is always another (and another and another) way of looking at things.

Total Points: 4 (KA 4)

Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje (1982). In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India, " Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family in this inspired travel narrative and family memoir.

Total Points: 4 (TJ 4)

Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald (1934). Carolyn Leavitt writes: “No, it isn’t really great literature, but you’ll never read anything so raw and honest and feverish. Of course, Zelda is not as talented as her husband. She’s way too in love with strings of adverbs and adjectives, and her story is like a funhouse mirror, but “Save Me the Waltz” unveils the story of Zelda’s life that her husband plundered for his own work. It’s heartbreakingly sad even though it means to be a glamorous tale of a flapper/ballerina, and it gives a window into a tormented and talented woman who was never allowed to fulfill her own great expectations.”

Total Points: 4 (CL 4)

She Had Some Horses by Joy Harjo (1983). Harjo is a celebrated Native American writer whose poetry often explores the connection between ancient traditions and the modern world. This collection of rhythmic, free-form poems searches for meaning in a mythic, mysterious world and for survival strategies in an often harsh landscape.

Total Points: 4 (SA 4)

Silence by Shusaku Endo (1969). Set during the early seventeenth century, when Japanese Christians and the European priests serving them were persecuted and forced to renounce their faith, this novel focuses on a Portuguese priest whose travails force him to ponder “the silence of God . . . the feeling that while men raise their voices in anguish God remains with folded arms, silent.”

Total Points: 4 (HaJ 4)

Stories of Grace Paley (1922– ). Paley’s political beliefs inform her stories, but she never writes cant. Her Greenwich Village surroundings infuse her work, making New York City seem like a small town. Her stories of what she calls “everyday life, kitchen life”—of frustrated wives, knife-wielding children, and cold men—are written in the freshest, loosest, most modern language imaginable.

Total Points: 4 (AH 3) (DL 1)

Stories of William Trevor (1928– ). Trevor is less an innovator than a perfectionist of the short story form, with each instance featuring two or three well-drawn characters, a stoutly alluring situation, and not a word out of place. The hundreds of stories he has crafted during his long career are nearly all set in the Irish countryside, which Trevor reveals as surprisingly erotic, sinister, and altogether contemporary, its residents often bent like trees by the wind of a single event.

Total Points: 4 (ML 1) (AP 3)

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (1961). A counterculture favorite during the 1960s, this novel tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, who was born during the first flight to Mars. Reared by Martians, the orphan returns to Earth as a young man, where he questions the customs and values taken for granted there. Michael also learns he inherited a large fortune and the deed to Mars. As the world government tries to seize his assets, Michael forms a church preaching free love. His followers think he is the Messiah—and that spells trouble.

Total Points: 4 (DFW 4)

In a narrative composed of short sequences, each recounting episodes or developments of moment, and interspersed with extracts from fictive notebooks and statements by an urban planner, Marie-Sophie Laborieux, the saucy, aging daughter of a slave affranchised by his master, tells the story of the tormented foundation of her people's identity. The Caribbean shantytown established by Marie-Sophie is menaced from without by hostile landowners and from within by the volatility of its own provisional state. Hers is a brilliant polyphonic rendering of individual stories informed by rhythmic orality and subversive humor that shape a collective experience.

Total Points: 4 (JDíaz 4)

The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch (1973). Bradley Pearson is a fifty-eight-year-old tax inspector who has written three books. Convinced he has a masterpiece within him, he quits his job and rents a tranquil cottage. His plan is thwarted at every turn, however, by the needs of his ex-wife, quarreling friends, his sister’s suicide, writer’s block, and his sudden passion for his friends’ twenty-year-old daughter. A murder caps off this philosophical thriller about marriage, love, and art.

Total Points: 4 (JL 4)

The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow (1971). The central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia.
His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted.Out of the shambles of his childhood, he has constructed a new life—marriage to an adoring girl who gives him a son of his own, and a career in scholarship. It is a life that enrages him. In the silence of the library at Columbia University, where he is supposedly writing a Ph.D. dissertation, Daniel composes something quite different. It is a confession of his most intimate relationships—with his wife, his foster parents, and his kid sister Susan, whose own radicalism so reproaches him. The result is a book of memories, a book of investigation and book of judgments about the nature of leftist politics in the United States —its sacrificial rites, its peculiar cruelties, its humility, its bitterness.

Total Points: 4 (JGil 4)

The Book of Evidence by John Banville (1989). Frederick Charles St. John Venderveld Montgomery is an Irishman who has traveled the world. Back in his dull hometown, he becomes obsessed with a three hundred-year-old painting. He murders an old woman to secure it. Upon his capture for that crime, he offers a confession that reveals his savage heart and soulless existence.

Total Points: 4 (ALK 4)

The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen (1938). When orphaned teenager Portia Quayne comes to London to live with her effete, older half-brother Thomas and his cynical, sophisticated wife Anna, she finds warmth only in a crusty family servant—and in the inappropriate attentions of family friend Eddie, who toys heartlessly with the girl’s emotional adoration. Bowen brings Jamesian subtlety to bear on Portia’s revivifying loss of illusions and steady growth toward maturity. The result is a triumph of analytical precision in this tragedy of innocence endangered by unfeeling adults.

Total Points: 4 (GG 4)

The Enigma of Arrival by V. S. Naipaul (1988). This chilly yet hypnotic antinovel—devoid of plot or conventional psychologizing—shuttles among the narrator’s childhood memories of his native Trinidad, fictionalized accounts of that island’s colonization, and elegiac descriptions of his present life in Wiltshire, England, where the charms of rural English life are eroding under the pressures of modernization. With an immigrant’s attentiveness, Naipaul details the minutiae of bleak exile, revealing a writer at home only in language.

Total Points: 4 (AW 4)

The House of Breath by William Goyen (1950). Poetic, serpentine prose becomes cascades of memory and emotions in this story of a man who returns to his tiny hometown of Charity, Texas. As he lovingly depicts the town—its landscape, folk, speech, superstitions, and fables—Goyen provides what the novelist Katherine Anne Porter described as “a sustained evocation of the past, a long search for place and identity, and the meaning of an intense personal experience; an attempt to cleanse the heart of its mysterious burden of guilt.”

Total Points: 4 (JBud 4)

The Known World by Edward P. Jones (2003). Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, this rich, sprawling novel centers on the life and legacy of an African American man who was also a slaveholder. Through a wide cast of characters, who display a wide range of perspectives and emotions, Jones examines the concept of slavery, especially how the master–slave relationship corrupts the soul.

Total Points: 4 (GP 1) (AWald 3)

The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh (1948). Dennis Barlow is an English poet working at a Hollywood pet cemetery. Arranging a friend’s funeral, he falls for a cosmetician at the posh Whispering Glades, a paradise for the human deceased, or Loved Ones. The funeral business and its ridiculous jargon (survivors of Loved Ones are Waiting Ones; bodies are viewed in the Slumber Room) provide lively “meat” (as employees privately refer to corpses) for Waugh to skewer.

Total Points: 4 (AMH 4)

The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde (1891). Wilde’s only novel offers a devastating portrait of the effects of evil and debauchery on a young aesthete in late-19th-century England. Combining elements of the Gothic horror novel and decadent French fiction, the book centers on a striking premise: As Dorian Gray sinks into a life of crime and gross sensuality, his body retains perfect youth and vigor while his recently painted portrait grows day by day into a hideous record of evil, which he must keep hidden from the world. First published as a serial story in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, the editors feared the story was indecent, and without Wilde's knowledge, deleted five hundred words before publication. Despite that censorship, it offended the moral sensibilities of British book reviewers, some of whom said that Oscar Wilde merited prosecution for violating the laws guarding the public morality.

Total Points: 4 (AFilip 4)

The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence (1915). Declared obscene and banned by British authorities, Lawrence’s novel about three generations of an English family boldly challenged conventional mores by openly depicting emotional and sexual needs. His protagonist, Ursula Brangwen, breaks from family tradition by going off to college and becoming a teacher. Free-spirited Ursula also experiments with her sexuality, having an affair with a Polish exile, Anton Skrebensky, and developing an intense attraction for an older woman. Her search for love is alternately disillusioning and liberating.

Total Points: 4 (JCO 4)

The Road to Wellville by T.C. Boyle (1993). Will Lightbody is a man with a stomach ailment whose only sin is loving his wife, Eleanor, too much. Eleanor is a health nut of the first stripe, and when in 1907 she journeys to Dr. John Harvey Kellogg's infamous Battle Creek Spa to live out the vegetarian ethos, poor Will goes too. So begins this wickedly comic look at turn-of-the-century fanatics in search of the magic pill to prolong their lives—or the profit to be had from manufacturing it. It is a novel brimming with a Dickensian cast of characters and laced with wildly wonderful plot twists.

Total Points: 4 (AWald 4)

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffennegger (2003). This is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger's cinematic storytelling that makes the novel's unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant.

Total Points: 4 (JPico 4)

The Widow's Children by Paula Fox (1976). On the eve of their trip to Africa, Laura Maldonada Clapper and her husband, Desmond, sit in a New York City hotel room, drinking scotch-and-sodas and awaiting the arrival of three friends: Clara Hansen, Laura's timid, brow-beaten daughter from a previous marriage; Carlos, Laura's flamboyant and charming brother; and Peter Rice, a melancholy editor whom Laura hasn't seen for over a year. But what begins as a bon voyage party soon parlays into a bitter, claustrophobic clash of family resentment. From the hotel room to the tony restaurant to which the five embark, Laura presides over the escalating innuendo and hostility with imperial cruelty, for she is hiding the knowledge that her mother, the family matriarch, has died of a heart attack that morning.Tom Bissell considers this “the most intense novel I've ever read—and the best ending.

Total Points: 4 (TBiss 4)

True Grit by Charles Portis (1968). In this epic and often comic tale of retribution, greed, and ambition, sixty-nine-year-old spinster Mattie Ross recalls her youthful struggle to hunt down her father’s killer in the wild Indian territory of the 1870s. While Ross studies her scripture, she breaks bread with the foul-mouthed, seldom-sober Marshall who is helping her. Both a woman’s coming-of-age saga and an adventure riddled with biblical allegory, the novel reveals the depth of grit in characters plagued by contradictions.

Total Points: 4 (GP 4)