Context

Reading Guides

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We asked our advisors at bookstores across the country to respond to a number of questions. These lists were generated from their responses.

Challenging Novels College Students Should Read

Locos: A Comedy of Gestures,

Felipe Alfau
Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
Rule of the Bone, Russell Banks
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
A Fine and Private Place, Peter S. Beagle
Molloy, Samuel Beckett
Herzog, Saul Bellow
Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer, Alicia Borinsky
Textermination, Christine Brooke-Rose
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
Heartbreak Hotel, Gabrielle Burton
Angels and Insects, A. S. Byatt
Possession, A. S. Byatt
If on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino
The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter
Spartina, John Casey
Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar
A Feast of Snakes, Harry Crews
Underworld, Don DeLillo
White Noise, Don DeLillo
Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Doblin
City of God, E. L. Doctorow
The Oblivion Seekers, Isabelle Eberhardt
Ask the Dust, John Fante
The Magus, John Fowles
Sophie’s World, Jostein Gaarder
The Recognitions, William Gaddis
A Gathering of Old Men, Ernest Gaines
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
The Tunnel, William H. Gass
Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, William H. Gass
The Tin Drum, Günter Grass
Hunger, Knut Hamsun
The Passion Artist, John Hawkes
The Blind Owl, Sadegh Hedayat
Refiner’s Fire, Mark Helprin
Niels Lyhne, Jens Peter Jacobson
Finnegans Wake, James Joyce
Ulysses, James Joyce
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
The Apes of God, Wyndham Lewis
The Apple in the Dark, Clarice Lispector
Reader’s Block, David Markson
Wittgenstein’s Mistress, David Markson
The Journalist, Harry Mathews
The Butcher Boy, Patrick McCabe
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
Suttree, Cormac McCarthy
Hopeful Monsters, Nicholas Mosley
Invitation to a Beheading, Vladimir Nabokov
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
Vurt, Jeff Noon
At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien
The Gormenghast Novels, Mervyn Peake
Life: A User’s Manual, Georges Perec
The Locusts Have No King, Dawn Powell
The Gold Bug Variations, Richard Powers
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
Ishmael, Daniel Quinn
The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Tom Robbins
Call it Sleep, Henry Roth
"Fools Say," Nathalie Sarraute
Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby
Quo Vadis, Henryk Sienkiewicz
Waterland, Graham Swift
Darconville’s Cat, Alexander Theroux
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
Only Twice I’ve Wished for Heaven, Dawn Turner Trice
O.K.: The Corral, the Earps, and Doc Holliday, Paul West
The Great American Novel, William Carlos Williams

Works of Fiction with a Reputation for Being Difficult

Great Expectations, Kathy Acker
LETTERS, John Barth
Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges
The Death of Virgil, Hermann Broch
The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton
Three Trapped Tigers, G. Cabrara Infante
Auto-Da-Fé, Elias Canetti
The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., Robert Coover
62: A Model Kit, Julio Cortázar
Palinuro of Mexico, Fernando del Paso
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco
Middlemarch, George Eliot
E. Luminata, Diamela Eltit
A Fan’s Notes, Frederick Exley
Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
Go Down, Moses, William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
The Flower Beneath the Foot, Ronald Firbank
Terra Nostra, Carlos Fuentes
JR, William Gaddis
The Recognitions, William Gaddis
The Tunnel, William H. Gass
Makbara, Juan Goytisolo
The Tin Drum, Günter Grass
The Blind Owl, Sadegh Hedayat
A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
The Wings of the Dove, Henry James
Finnegans Wake, James Joyce
Ulysses, James Joyce
Raintree County, Ross Lockridge, Jr
The Same Embrace, Michael Lowenthal
Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
Ancient Evenings, Norman Mailer
Take Five, D. Keith Mano
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
Ada, or Ardor, Vladimir Nabokov
At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien
The Journal of Albion Moonlight, Kenneth Patchen
The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell
A Glastonbury Romance, John Cowper Powys
The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
V., Thomas Pynchon
Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
The Great Fire of London, Jacques Roubaud
The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
Mulligan Stew, Gilbert Sorrentino
The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne
Darconville’s Cat, Alexander Theroux
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
The Lizard’s Tail, Luisa Valenzuela
Conversation in the Cathedral, Mario Vargas Llosa
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
The Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton
Voss, Patrick White
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
The Waves,

Virginia Woolf

Funniest Works of Fiction

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
Kangaroo, Yuz Aleshkovsky
Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexie
Money, Martin Amis
Human Croquet, Kate Atkinson
Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Kate Atkinson
The Sot-Weed Factor, John Barth
60 Stories, Donald Barthelme
The Feast of Love, Charles Baxter
Watt, Samuel Beckett
Zuleika Dobson, Max Beerbohm
Woodcutters, Thomas Bernhard
Killoyle, Roger Boylan
The Ballad of Habit and Accident, Rock Brynner
Naked Lunch, William Burroughs
Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino
Auto-Da-Fé, Elias Canetti
The Full Catastrophe, David Carkeet
Death on the Installment Plan, Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Tempest-Tost, Robertson Davies
Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, Denis Diderot
The Ginger Man, James Donleavy
The River Why, David James Duncan
Walking Across Egypt, Clyde Edgerton
The Franchiser, Stanley Elkin
Otherwise Engaged, Suzanne Finnamore
Bouvard and Pécuchet, Gustave Flaubert
The Princess Bride, William Goldman
Second Skin, John Hawkes
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
House Mother Normal, B. S. Johnson
Ulysses, James Joyce
The Trial, Franz Kafka
The Moccasin Telegraph, W.P. Kinsella
Diminished Capacity, Sherwood Kiraly
The Bear Went over the Mountain, William Kotzwinkle
Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure, Jeremy Leven
Billy and Girl, Deborah Levy
Et Tu, Babe, Mark Leyner
Handling Sin, Michael Malone
The Confidence-Man, Herman Melville
Bloodsucking Fiends, Christopher Moore
Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov
At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien
The Dalkey Archive, Flann O’Brien
The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien
Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor
The Dog of the South, Charles Portis
Norwood, Charles Portis
Kiss of the Spider Woman, Manuel Puig
Jane and Prudence, Barbara Pym
Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Ishmael Reed
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Tom Robbins
Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth
Barrel Fever, David Sedaris
Naked, David Sedaris
I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
Humphry Clinker, Tobias Smollett
Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, Gilbert Sorrentino
Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne
Karoo, Steve Tesich
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Rebecca Wells
Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West
Modern Baptists, James Wilcox
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde
Very Good, Jeeves,

P. G. Wodehouse

Best Literary Magazines

Agni
American Scholar
Atlantic Monthly
Baffler
Book
Boulevard
Columbia Journalism Review
Conjunctions
CONTEXT
Gargoyle
The Germ
Grand Street
Granta
Harper’s
McSweeney’s
Missouri Review
New Yorker
New York Review of Books
New York Times Book Review
The Paris Review
Ploughshares
Poets and Writers
Poetry
Publishers Weekly
Review of Contemporary Fiction
Salmagundi
Salt Hill
Sulfur
Sun
Third Coast
Tin House
Tri-Quarterly
Washington Post Book Review
World Literature Today
Writers’ Journal
Zoetrope: All-Story
Zyzzyva


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Context Reading Guides Untitled document We asked our advisors at bookstores across the country to respond to a number of questions. These lists were generated from their responses. Challenging Novels College Students Should Read Locos: A Comedy of Gestures, Felipe Alfau Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood Rule of the Bone, Russell Banks Nightwood, Djuna Barnes A Fine and Private Place, Peter S. Beagle Molloy, Samuel Beckett Herzog, Saul Bellow Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer, Alicia Borinsky Textermination, Christine Brooke-Rose A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess Heartbreak Hotel, Gabrielle Burton Angels and Insects, A. S. Byatt Possession, A. S. Byatt If on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter Spartina, John Casey Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar A Feast of Snakes, Harry Crews Underworld, Don DeLillo White Noise, Don DeLillo Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Doblin City of God, E. L. Doctorow The Oblivion Seekers, Isabelle Eberhardt Ask the Dust, John Fante The Magus, John Fowles Sophie’s World, Jostein Gaarder The Recognitions, William Gaddis A Gathering of Old Men, Ernest Gaines One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez The Tunnel, William H. Gass Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, William H. Gass The Tin Drum, Günter Grass Hunger, Knut Hamsun The Passion Artist, John Hawkes The Blind Owl, Sadegh Hedayat Refiner’s Fire, Mark Helprin Niels Lyhne, Jens Peter Jacobson Finnegans Wake, James Joyce Ulysses, James Joyce The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin The Apes of God, Wyndham Lewis The Apple in the Dark, Clarice Lispector Reader’s Block, David Markson Wittgenstein’s Mistress, David Markson The Journalist, Harry Mathews The Butcher Boy, Patrick McCabe Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy Suttree, Cormac McCarthy Hopeful Monsters, Nicholas Mosley Invitation to a Beheading, Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov Vurt, Jeff Noon At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien The Gormenghast Novels, Mervyn Peake Life: A User’s Manual, Georges Perec The Locusts Have No King, Dawn Powell The Gold Bug Variations, Richard Powers Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon Ishmael, Daniel Quinn The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Tom Robbins Call it Sleep, Henry Roth "Fools Say," Nathalie Sarraute Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Quo Vadis, Henryk Sienkiewicz Waterland, Graham Swift Darconville’s Cat, Alexander Theroux A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole Only Twice I’ve Wished for Heaven, Dawn Turner Trice O.K.: The Corral, the Earps, and Doc Holliday, Paul West The Great American Novel, William Carlos Williams Works of Fiction with a Reputation for Being Difficult Great Expectations, Kathy Acker LETTERS, John Barth Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges The Death of Virgil, Hermann Broch The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton Three Trapped Tigers, G. Cabrara Infante Auto-Da-Fé, Elias Canetti The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., Robert Coover 62: A Model Kit, Julio Cortázar Palinuro of Mexico, Fernando del Paso Bleak House, Charles Dickens The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco Middlemarch, George Eliot E. Luminata, Diamela Eltit A Fan’s Notes, Frederick Exley Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner Go Down, Moses, William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner Tom Jones, Henry Fielding The Flower Beneath the Foot, Ronald Firbank Terra Nostra, Carlos Fuentes JR, William Gaddis The Recognitions, William Gaddis The Tunnel, William H. Gass Makbara, Juan Goytisolo The Tin Drum, Günter Grass The Blind Owl, Sadegh Hedayat A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving The Wings of the Dove, Henry James Finnegans Wake, James Joyce Ulysses, James Joyce Raintree County, Ross Lockridge, Jr The Same Embrace, Michael Lowenthal Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry Ancient Evenings, Norman Mailer Take Five, D. Keith Mano The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers Moby-Dick, Herman Melville Ada, or Ardor, Vladimir Nabokov At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien The Journal of Albion Moonlight, Kenneth Patchen The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell A Glastonbury Romance, John Cowper Powys The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon V., Thomas Pynchon Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand The Great Fire of London, Jacques Roubaud The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth Mulligan Stew, Gilbert Sorrentino The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne Darconville’s Cat, Alexander Theroux The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy The Lizard’s Tail, Luisa Valenzuela Conversation in the Cathedral, Mario Vargas Llosa Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace The Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton Voss, Patrick White Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf The Waves, Virginia Woolf Funniest Works of Fiction The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams Kangaroo, Yuz Aleshkovsky Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexie Money, Martin Amis Human Croquet, Kate Atkinson Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Kate Atkinson The Sot-Weed Factor, John Barth 60 Stories, Donald Barthelme The Feast of Love, Charles Baxter Watt, Samuel Beckett Zuleika Dobson, Max Beerbohm Woodcutters, Thomas Bernhard Killoyle, Roger Boylan The Ballad of Habit and Accident, Rock Brynner Naked Lunch, William Burroughs Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino Auto-Da-Fé, Elias Canetti The Full Catastrophe, David Carkeet Death on the Installment Plan, Louis-Ferdinand Céline Tempest-Tost, Robertson Davies Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, Denis Diderot The Ginger Man, James Donleavy The River Why, David James Duncan Walking Across Egypt, Clyde Edgerton The Franchiser, Stanley Elkin Otherwise Engaged, Suzanne Finnamore Bouvard and Pécuchet, Gustave Flaubert The Princess Bride, William Goldman Second Skin, John Hawkes Catch-22, Joseph Heller House Mother Normal, B. S. Johnson Ulysses, James Joyce The Trial, Franz Kafka The Moccasin Telegraph, W.P. Kinsella Diminished Capacity, Sherwood Kiraly The Bear Went over the Mountain, William Kotzwinkle Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure, Jeremy Leven Billy and Girl, Deborah Levy Et Tu, Babe, Mark Leyner Handling Sin, Michael Malone The Confidence-Man, Herman Melville Bloodsucking Fiends, Christopher Moore Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien The Dalkey Archive, Flann O’Brien The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor The Dog of the South, Charles Portis Norwood, Charles Portis Kiss of the Spider Woman, Manuel Puig Jane and Prudence, Barbara Pym Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Ishmael Reed Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Tom Robbins Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth Barrel Fever, David Sedaris Naked, David Sedaris I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith Humphry Clinker, Tobias Smollett Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, Gilbert Sorrentino Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne Karoo, Steve Tesich A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Rebecca Wells Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West Modern Baptists, James Wilcox The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde Very Good, Jeeves, P. G. Wodehouse Best Literary Magazines Agni American Scholar Atlantic Monthly Baffler Book Boulevard Columbia Journalism Review Conjunctions CONTEXT Gargoyle The Germ Grand Street Granta Harper’s McSweeney’s Missouri Review New Yorker New York Review of Books New York Times Book Review The Paris Review Ploughshares Poets and Writers Poetry Publishers Weekly Review of Contemporary Fiction Salmagundi Salt Hill Sulfur Sun Third Coast Tin House Tri-Quarterly Washington Post Book Review World Literature Today Writers’ Journal Zoetrope: All-Story Zyzzyva Current issue: CONTEXT # 22 CONTEXT is a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community. CONTEXT is available at bookstores nationwide.

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