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

[John Domini]

Some wonderful folks & books on this list, & my compliments. Still, I've got to pick some nits. Re: John Barth, he's a better read & more po-mo as well in books that followed GILES, like CHIMERA or his late-career masterpiece, THE LAST VOYAGE OF SOMEBODY THE SAILOR. Re: G. Sorrentino, the STEW's doesn't quite work, finally; go with the earlier IMAGINATIVE QUALITIES OF ACTUAL THINGS, or the later LUNAR FOLLIES. Re: Coover, c'mon, the one you want is SPANKING THE MAID. Plus, any good list has got to have some Carole Maso (maybe AUREOLE) & some Michael Martone (maybe MICHAEL MARTONE BY MICHAEL MARTONE), plus the Dutchman Cees Nooteboom.

[Matt]

Hmm... Where's Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer? It almost seems too obvious to exclude. Good list otherwise. There's so much good postmodernist literature out there it's difficult to grab it all.

[John Mascaro]

Lists such as these are good only to start arguments. These arguments can be fun, when entered into in the right spirit. This is a fun list to argue and wrangle with. Nice to see Burton on there.

Classicism sez art imitates life
Modernism sez life imitates art
Postmodernism sez art imitates life imitating art imitating life imitating art imitating life imitating art imitating life imitating art imitating life imitating art imitating life imitating art imitating life . . . .

[ryan]

what an awful list. It starts off ok but then devolves into randomness. The Scarlet Letter, are you kidding me? a fine book, of course, but I have never heard the term post-modern used with it and hope never again to

[neil m]

one-eyedlist: No Finnegans Wake, No Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, No Pirandello (1920s), No Machado de Assis (1880) - lots of European novels paved the way but not here - and Beckett beckett beckett?

[valerie]

I am a bit confused about post-modernism but I'm reading a book in class and it seems to be a well writen post0modern book. The book is called Things Fall Apart by: Chinua Achebe

[Anon]

I hate to jump on the "my favorite author is not on the list" bandwagon, but no Samuel R. Delany seems like a real oversight.

[Experimental Reader]

Thank you so much for that list!
In the course of a seminar we read and discussed Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" and after that I was eager to get to know more examples of such experimental/postmodern (call-it-the-way-you-prefer) literature.

Now following that list I read Ballard's "Atrocity Exhibition" and Murakami's "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" - Both were unique and unusual in the way they affected me.