Donald Barthelme's recommended readingNOV 10 2009

A syllabus compiled by American author Donald Barthelme composed of 81 books.

If the list's books are skewed toward Barthelme's particular obsessions -- one of the entries is "Beckett entire" -- this is only to its credit. Most are novels. All but two of the books, Knut Hamsun's Hunger and Flaubert's Letters (numbers 15, 40), were written in the twentieth century, most in the past thirty years. And all have that dizzying sense of otherness and surprise common to great books, an affluence of vitality.

Update: Phil Gyford copied the list into plain old text.