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Melissa Bank RIP

We are sad to hear that Top Ten contributor Melissa Bank died of lung cancer on Aug. 2 at the age of 61.



Melissa is best known for her bestselling book of linked short stories, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing (1999), which featured a common main character, Jane Rosenthal, who was very similar to Bank. As Simon Hattenstone observed in a profile of Bank for the Guardian, “Jane and Bank were both born in Philadelphia and live in New York, they share a neurologist father who died of leukemia in his late 50s, a background in publishing, an older lover with a history of drunkenness and diabetes.”

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Featured List

Melissa Bank RIP

We are sad to hear that Top Ten contributor Melissa Bank died of lung cancer on Aug. 2 at the age of 61.



Melissa is best known for her bestselling book of linked short stories, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing (1999), which featured a common main character, Jane Rosenthal, who was very similar to Bank. As Simon Hattenstone observed in a profile of Bank for the Guardian, “Jane and Bank were both born in Philadelphia and live in New York, they share a neurologist father who died of leukemia in his late 50s, a background in publishing, an older lover with a history of drunkenness and diabetes.”

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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).