New exclusive lists created by authors for the TopTenBooks.net website.
The Top Ten List of Tom Bissell
- Middlemarch - Modern novelistic consciousness begins, I think, with this book. by George Eliot
- Ulysses - Desite its longeurs (and boy does it have some) nobody has ever written more definitively about place and more seductively about consciousness. by James Joyce
- Stoner - The best "quiet" book I've ever read, and the most heartbreaking. by John Williams
- Blood Meridian - The best example of how monstrous violence can be made beautiful. by Cormac McCarthy
- London Fields - The apocalypse as stand-up comedy as murder mystery. by Martin Amis
- Of a Fire on the Moon - His most neglected great book. by Norman Mailer
- The Widow's Children - The most intense novel I've ever read (and the best ending). by Paula Fox
- Shah of Shahs - The work that showed me how nonfiction can be as artful and beautiful as fiction. by Ryszard Kapuscinski
- Dog Soldiers - Has the single greatest death scene I've ever read, and I read it, probably, every couple of weeks to remind me what prose can do. by Robert Stone
- Snowblind - An impossibly stylish and gripping real-life thriller about life in the cocaine trade. by Robert Sabbag