Archive for '100 Cool Novels'
E-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #79: Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis, 1922
Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis, 1922.
It’s rare that a novel or one of its characters enters everyday language. Most people can identify Captain Ahab or Hester Prynne, and their circumstances or personalities may be summoned to make a point about obsession or hypocrisy. But only rarely does a novel get right to the heart of a [...]
E-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #80: A Fan’s Notes, Frederick Exley, 1968
E-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #80: A Fan’s Notes, Frederick Exley, 1968.
This fictional memoir is as breathless and manic as its author surely was when couch-surfing his way across Eisenhower’s America, steadfastly refusing to grow up, always lurking in the shadow of his beloved local sports-hero father, who died at 40. Fred, Ex, Exley, [...]
E-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #86: Sula by Toni Morrison
Sula, Toni Morrison, 1974. This wonderful short novel might seem to draw influence from the Magic Realism trend in South American literature (then growing in popularity), but despite apparent affinities with the works of Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez, Morrison’s novel probably owes more to traditional American folk storytelling and the extraordinary history of [...]
Full StoryE-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #81: Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust
The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West, 1939. Considered one of the century’s best novels—it made the Modern Library 100—it is also regarded as one of the great novels about Hollywood, displaying the grimy underside and barely-restrained violence beneath the polished glamor of America’s dream mills. The novel portrays Tinseltown as a Golgotha, a place [...]
Full StoryE-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #82: Loving by Henry Green
#82: Loving, Henry Green, 1945. Henry Green (Henry Vincent Yorke) is a dark horse among modern novelists. He never enjoyed placement in the first rank alongside Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, or James Joyce, though his novel Living (not to be confused with Loving) was included in Cyril Connolly’s greatly influential 1965 Modern Movement, which listed [...]
Full StoryE-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #83: My Life as a Man by Philip Roth
My Life as a Man, Philip Roth, 1974. Like many unabashedly ambitious novelists, Roth can be dazzling and exasperating by turns, sometimes, like Faulkner, simultaneously. There is little question that he is one of the best living American novelists, and his recent enshrinement in the Library of America series (very few living authors warrant inclusion) [...]
Full StoryE-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #84: Native Son by Richard Wright
Number 84 on our top 100 countdown: Native Son, Richard Wright, 1940. A gripping, scathing, infuriating novel. Arnold Rampersad described Bigger Thomas, the sullen young murderer at the center of the novel, as the least likable main character in all of American literature, which is saying something. Wright’s novel was selected as the Book-of-the-Month and [...]
Full StoryE-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #85: Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
Number 85 on our top 100 countdown: Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson (1919). This is a book that has fallen on hard times. Upon its debut, it was considered a bold and even shocking addition to the naturalist style in American letters. Anderson was hailed as a genius for his portraits of troubled, unstable, yearning small-town [...]
Full StoryE-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #87: Ask the Dust by John Fante
Number 87: Ask the Dust, John Fante (1939). The first real Beat, Fante had it stylistically over most of those who would call themselves “beat” in the following decades (most of whose books were painted purple with the brush of Thomas Wolfe). Fante had a precise and easily comprehended influence on Charles Bukowski, a problematic [...]
Full StoryE-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #86: The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis
Number 86 on our top 100 countdown: The Rachel Papers, Martin Amis (1973). This is a precocious, sly, and maddeningly provocative debut by the son of England’s greatest immediately postwar novelists, Kingsley (see the entry for Lucky Jim). The Rachel Papers features a wonderfully light, dexterous touch in its first-person descriptions of an intelligent young [...]
Full StoryE-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #88 (TIE): Willa Cather’s My Antonia and Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person”
Number 88 (TIE): My Antonia, Willa Cather (1918) AND “The Displaced Person,” Flannery O’Connor, The Sewanee Review, v. 62, n. 4, Autumn 1954, later in A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) and Complete Short Stories (1971). I decided to link these two. The Cather is a rather short novel, and the O’Connor is [...]
Full StoryE-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #89: Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis (1954). This novel deserves to be on the list simply because it inspires the reader to literally laugh out loud, a simple pleasure that eludes the novel’s lead character in the repressed environment of his anonymous university. Amis’s superb combination of stylistic and situational humor has made this one of [...]
Full StoryE-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #90: John Updike’s Rabbit Books
Number 90: Rabbit, Run (1960); Rabbit Redux (1971); Rabbit is Rich (1981); Rabbit at Rest (1990), John Updike. This is my second quaternary, and it might seem like I’m cheating, but as with the Ford, these are four unified novels of comparable length (and increasingly sophisticated prose style) covering the tragicomic lives of characters over [...]
Full StoryE-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #91: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit
Number 91: The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien (1937). Given the extraordinary ease with which today’s readers have surrendered to the infantilizing pressures felt in most other parts of our culture, I feel I should consent to admit one children’s book to the list, and this is it. The one thing about art intended for children is [...]
Full StoryE-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #92: Norman Mailer’s Naked and the Dead
#92: Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer (1948). This is a powerful and surprising debut from the 26-year-old Mailer, and it shows how compelling he could be before he transformed into a gas giant orbiting the pop culture solar system. Naked and the Dead remains striking as a war novel, because it displays the unheroic [...]
Full StoryErnie’s Top 100 Cool Novels, #93, Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves
Top 100 Cool Novels #93: Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves (1929). This is one of the most powerful summations of the disillusionment that set in among the English after the carnage and ambiguous resolution of the First World War. It is also more honest and authentic than Graves’s friend and contemporary Sassoon’s autobiographical Sherston [...]
Full StoryTop 100 Cool Novels, #94, Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell
Top 100 Cool Novels #94 is Pictures from an Institution, Randall Jarrell (1954). Although his greatest achievement was his precise and humane literary criticism, followed only by his intense war poems, Jarrell also took the time to write a single satirical novel about campus life. It is set in the years of exciting and exasperating [...]
Full StoryTop 100 Cool Novels, #95, GUT Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson
Top 100 Cool Novels, #95: GUT Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson (1997). This book really stands in for Winterson’s entire oeuvre, which must be read in toto to be fully appreciated. Her record is substantial, including the legendary Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), The Passion (1987), Sexing the Cherry (1989), Written on the Body [...]
Full StoryTop 100 Cool Novels, #96, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Ernie’s Top 100 Cool Novels #96: In Cold Blood, Truman Capote (1965). It is quite remarkable to think that a writer as prominent and well-regarded as Capote—he is certainly one of the most recognizable mid-century American writers, a type, if you will—only completed one prolonged, accomplished article of prose, his 1965 “non-fiction” novel In Cold [...]
Full StoryTop 100 Cool Novels, #97, Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Cool novel #97: Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole (1980). Well, if we want to weigh in on heart, one of our five criteria for “coolness” in a novel, this book has more than a pound of it. Confederacy of Dunces is a triumph of Augustan wit grafted onto middle-late 20th century concerns; the Black [...]
Full StoryErnie’s 100 Cool Novels, #99, Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
#99: Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee (1999): Advanced and agile style married to profound emotional insights on flashpoints of race, age, social standing, sex, gender, violence, and justice; a powerful read from a powerful writer.
Full StoryTop 100 Cool Novels #100, Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford
Welcome to the first installment of E-Verse’s 100 Cool Novels.
This is an informal list of E-Verse’s favorite novels written in English in the last century and is meant to be more amusing than strictly instructive. The criteria we used for selection are:
1. Popular reception
2. Stylistic influence
3. Internal complexity and formal achievement
4. Heart
5. Guts
We originally planned [...]
