61 essential postmodern reads: an annotated list

The thing about postmodernism is it's impossible to pin down exactly what might make a book postmodern. In looking at the attributes of the essential postmodern reads, we found some were downright contradictory. Postmodern books have a reputation for being massive tomes, like David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" -- but then there's "The Mezzanine" by Nicholson Baker, which has just 144 pages. And while postmodern books would, you'd think, have to be published after the modern period -- in the 20th or 21st centuries -- could postmodernism exist without "Tristram Shandy"? We think not.

Below is our list of the 61 essential reads of postmodern literature. It's annotated with the attributes below -- the author is a character, fiction and reality are blurred, the text includes fictional artifacts, such as letters, lyrics, even whole other books, and so on. And while this list owes much to George Ducker and David L. Ulin, you can address all complaints to me.

And now: The 61 essential postmodern reads!

Kathy Acker's "In Memorium to Identity" 
Donald Antrim's "The Hundred Brothers" 
Margaret Atwood's "The Blind Assassin"
Paul Auster's New York Trilogy
Nicholson Baker's "The Mezzanine"
J.G. Ballard's "The Atrocity Exhibition"
John Barth's "Giles Goat-Boy"
Donald Barthelme's "60 Stories"
John Berger's "G"
Thomas Bernhard's "The Loser"
Roberto Bolaño's "2666"
Jorge Luis Borges' "Labyrinths"
William S. Burroughs' "Naked Lunch"
Robert Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy"
Italo Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler"
Julio Cortazar's "Hopscotch"
Robert Coover's "The Universal Baseball Association, Henry J. Waugh, Proprietor"
Stanley Crawford's "Log of the S.S. Mrs. Unguentine"
Mark Danielewski's "House of Leaves"
Don Delillo's "Great Jones Street"
Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle"
E.L. Doctorow's "City of God"
Geoff Dyer's "Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D. H. Lawrence"
Umberto Eco's "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana"
Dave Eggers' "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius"
Steve Erickson's "Tours of the Black Clock"
Percival Everett's "I Am Not Sidney Poitier"
William Faulkner's "Absalom! Absalom!"
Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything Is Illuminated"
William Gaddis' "JR"
William Gass' "The Tunnel"
John Hawkes' "The Lime Twig"
Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter"
Aleksandar Hemon's "The Lazarus Project"
Michael Herr's "Dispatches"
Shelley Jackson's "Skin"
Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis"
Milan Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting"
Jonathan Lethem's "Motherless Brooklyn"
Ben Marcus' "Notable American Women"
David Markson's "Wittgenstein's Mistress"
Tom McCarthy's "Remainder"
Joseph McElroy's "Women and Men"
Steven Millhauser's "Edwin Mullhouse"
Haruki Murakami's "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle"
Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire"
Flann O'Brien's "At Swim-Two-Birds"
Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"
Harvey Pekar's "American Splendor"
Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow"
Philip Roth's "The Counterlife"
W.G. Sebald's "The Rings of Saturn"
William Shakespeare's "Hamlet"
Gilbert Sorrentino's "Mulligan Stew"
Christopher Sorrentino's "Trance"
Art Spiegelman's Maus I & II
Laurence Stern's "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy"
Scarlett Thomas' "PopCo"
Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five"
David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest"
Colson Whitehead's "John Henry Days" 

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Comments

[sparky]

I would also like to say that in this era of reception theory, you can turn any text into something postmodern.

[ed]

Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow owes so much to James Joyce: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and, dear God, Finnegans Wake.

What about Richard Brautigan? Trout Fishing in America, Willard and His Bowling Trophies...

Charles Bukowski: Ham on Rye, Hollywood, Post Office

[buster]

i imagine joyce didn't make this list because he is modern, not postmodern. and just because a book is experimental and unconventional does not make it postmodern.

[reviewstew]

Of all the great Haruki Murakami work, "Wind Up Bird" seems a rather poor choice. I realize it was very popular, but still...

[pannonica]

One word: contrived.

In so many instances, authors' best works are substituted with second-tier "underappreciated" (nonetheless inferior) novels.

And too much name-checking with of-the-moment-but-transient writers.

[veege]

surprised there was no mention of Delillo in the article or in the comments.

[Erika Reiman]

A major figure in this type of literature, influenced by Sterne to be sure, was Jean Paul (1763-1825), whose five major novels (in German) were extremely popular in his day.

[Gabriel]

Don't forget Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down by Ishmael Reed

[Bobbie Giltz]

Born to Heal Gladys Taylor McGarey

Get's your head straight

[neptuneflame]

Totally agree with those above me that bemoan the lack of Woolf and Bulgakov. I would add Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea" and Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein."

[Martin]

Puig hasn't been mentioned anywhere here. He should be.

[agolab]

I'd like to repeat: No Beckett? No Joyce?

Travesty.

[agolab]

I might also add: No Camus? No Sartre?

I would also like to add that there is no philosophical works. Where is my Derrida? My Neitzsche? My Lyotard?

[Bry]

Does anyone know in what ways _Naked Lunch_ "comments on its own bookishness"? I'm aware of Burroughs's preoccupation with general semantics and his word virus idea, but that seems clearly distinct from some sort of meta-biblio-fiction.

[Bry]

Addtionally, the criteria for what constitutes postmodern here is so broad that you could justify adding almost any book to the list.

What? No Dr. Seuss?

[MJ]

What about London Fields or Time's Arrow by Martin Amis?

[Paul M. Cray]

Certainly "Finnegans Wake" as a progenitor (and "Don Quixote"). Also Martin Amis, either "Money" or "London Fields", Julian Barnes, either "Flaubert's Parrot" or "A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters", David Lodge, "How Far Can You Go?", Salman Rushdie, "Midnight's Children", Jonathan Coe, "What a Carve Up!" And where is B.S. Johnson? The usual choice would probably be "The Unfortunates", but I actually prefer his first novel "Travelling People".

[Paul G]

Surely Italo Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" disrupts/plays with form in a big way. A book with multiple starts, including excerpts from other books and actively disorientates the reader is playing with the form. Interesting list!

[Tim K]

Maus is a worthy inclusion, but "thin"? It's a multi-volume set.

[jim doyle]

What about Kerouac!!

[Scott McMillin]

Your missing B.S. Johnson's seminal novel-in-a-box The Unfortunates and at least one of Robbe-Grillet's novels, but otherwise not a bad list. Having Hawthorne on there is stretch (even as a progenitor).

[Scott McMillin]

*Your was a typo: should be You're obviously

[Peter Rennick]

Don't forget Bely's "Petersburg".

[Dale]

Interesting list. I would put Tom Robbins (especially Another Roadside Attraction and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues) on there as well.

[ben]

Satanic Verses - Mr. Rushdie

[cd]

There's something very un-Postmodern about arguing over a definitive list of who belongs under the umbrella of Postmodernism, isn't there?

That being said, the ones I've read from this list and from the comments are all great works, so I'm glad to see people recommending them.

[mrchompchomp]

Why not Stanlislaw Lem? Too Polish? Or too Sci-fi-y?

[Paul R]

What about Renata Adler's SPEEDBOAT?

[Mark Terrill]

I can't believe I'm the only one to mention Richard Brautigan, whose Troutfishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar are the ultimate proto-postmodern novels, the significance of which is vastly underestimated.

[Leo van der Sterren]

This ridicule list of 61 essential postmodern reads indicates the absurdity (postmodern, if you like) of notions such as ‘postmodernism’. In whatever form postmodernism may have presented itself, it was always a phenomenon that consumed and eroded away itself, until the inevitable truism came to light: postmodernism has never existed.

[rachael]

i think that bret easton ellis' works could also be added to this list...particularly 'american psycho.'

[John]

I'd recommend Paul Auster's "City of Glass". Very complex, rich, with many layers. Conveniently available both in written and graphic novel form! Wonderful stuff.

David Moser's "This Is the Title of This Story, Which Is Also Found Several Times in the Story Itself" is way too short, but had an immense impact on my development: http://consc.net/misc/moser.html

[Nathan Baca]

Perhaps Andre Gide's "The Conterfeiters"?

[Leia]

I wish that Peter Carey had been included, for one.

[Askii]

Anyone who hasn't read the sublime "Pale Fire" drop whatever you're doing and just go right now. A wonderful, moving poem, wrapped in a bizarre novel, that one flips back and forth through like an adult "Choose Your Own Adventure".

Just finshed "Life of Pi" (not paricularly post-modern, but a great story nonetheless), was about to start "Gravity's Rainbow", but I'm going to do "Pale Fire" again first!

[Rafael]

What about Milorad Pavic???

[matt]

Slaughterhouse Five should have the "author is a character" notation.

[Manders]

David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas"? Anyone?

[lori precious]

where are the women?

[lori precious]

i would include

The Famished Road
by Ben Okri

and

Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe

[Roberta Kay]

No one list will satisfy all, but I must suggest that number 62 could be the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon.

[Mark]

Herman Hesse? Steppenwolf?

[Thomas Smith]

I'd insist on these as additions:

William Gibson: "Necromancer"
Virginia Woolf: "To the Lighthouse"
James Joyce: "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: "One Hundred Years of Solitude"
Mervyn Peake: "Titus Groan"

[HollyG]

What about Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman? Or Byatt's Possession? Or, more recently, Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics? Or Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot?

[Tim Footman]

For starters...

John Fowles: The French Lieutenant's Woman
BS Johnson: The Unfortunates
Stella Gibbons: Cold Comfort Farm
Evelyn Waugh: Vile Bodies
Georges Perec: Life: A User's Manual
TS Eliot: The Waste Land
Leonard Cohen: Beautiful Losers
David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas
Douglas Coupland: Generation X

[g]

no Cortazar??????????????????

[Abe Walker]

cool, but i don't get why any of these are distinctly postmodern characteristics. i mean, "author is a charcter", maybe, but "includes historical falsehoods"

[Bill]

I'm sorry, but some of the great classics that defined contemporary genres of literature belong on this list. If Don Quixote and Hamlet and (though yet to be mentioned), say, the Decameron, Canterbury Tales, and Orlando Furioso -- or even the Satyricon and Metamorphoses -- all meet multiple criteria, doesn't that suggest the criteria need revision? Yes, those criteria *tend* to be *more present* in *much* "pomo" lit, but they're hardly original to it. So, new clear bright line?

[Matt]

Homer's Odyssey: Think of the character of Odysseus, telling so much of his own tale, working his audiences. Think of the multiple strands at work. Think of the self-conscious jokes and joys of the epic. I know, oral composition and all that, but Homer is the original pre- and post-modern, original everything, actually. (Also, Sterne wasn't writing in a vacuum; he had plenty of contemporaries playing literary games and Classical tradition to teach him the way. Horace's odes can be pretty "post-modern," if you look for how they may fit the rubric.)

[Karen Correia Da SIlva]

So basically this list is arguing that if a text possesses some of the same thematic qualities as postmodern literature, is non-linear, or "plays with language", it can be tossed under the blanket term, right? Sorry to say, but that's a terribly misinformed position! While Tristram Shandy is a postmodern progenitor, it definitely isn't postmodern. What about the aspects of cyclicality, cultural disillusionment, ironic nihilism, cultural pastiche? I must remind everyone that postmodernism is tied to its origins in late 20th century capitalism. I urge everyone to read Jean Francois Lyotard's "The Postmodern Condition" along with Frederic Jameson's "Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism", and consider this list just another misinformed contribution to the confusion surrounding the label.

I'm glad, though, to see Gravity's Rainbow on the list!