User login

Image CAPTCHA
Enter the characters shown in the image.

Joyce Carol Oates's Top Ten List

For most writers, 25 short story collections would be three careers. For Joyce Carol Oates it’s just a notch on her heavyweight title belt as the World’s Most Prolific Literary Artist.

Her latest collection, “Black Dahlia & White Rose,” receives a mixed review in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. “The stories in this collection generally involve a combination of macabre events, fantastical turns and unguarded first-person storytelling,” writes critic Randy Boyagoda. “Throughout, Oates explores the rough fortunes of (mostly) women who think they’re in control of their situations but are inevitably proved wrong, sometimes brutally so.”

Listen to NPR’s review of Black Dahlia & White Rose.

Watch interviews with Joyce.
Visit Joyce’s website.
Read earlier New York Times coverage of Joyce.

Joyce Carol Oates’s Top Ten List

  1. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866).
  2. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922).
  3. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929).
  4. The poems of Emily Dickinson (1830–86).
  5. The stories of Franz Kafka (1883–1924).
  6. The Red and the Black by Stendhal (1830).
  7. The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence (1915).
  8. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence (1920).
  9. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851).
  10. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884).

New List

Claire Messud

1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813).
2. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913–27).
3. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (1881).
4. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857).
5. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877).
6. The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1872).
7. Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo (1923).
8. A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul (1961).
9. The Loser by Thomas Bernhard (1983).
10. Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (1988).

Classic List

Arthur Phillips

1. The stories of Franz Kafka (1883–1924).
2. Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec (1978). See below).
3. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924).
4. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962).
5. Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1600).
6. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913–27).
7. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869).
8. The stories of Anton Chekhov (1860–1904).
9. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (1844).
10. The Odyssey by Homer (ninth century b.c.e.?).