Reading beyond the best-seller list : a polemic and a plea.
I. Old masters. Herodotus : the histories / translated from the Greek by Robin Waterfield
Tales from Ovid / by Ted Hughes
The rise of western Christendom : triumph and diversity, A.D. 200-1000. Second ed. / by Peter Brown
The Arabian nights : a companion / by Robert Irwin
The name of the rose / by Umberto Eco ; translated from the Italian by William Weaver
The civilization of Europe in the Renaissance / by John Hale
William Tyndale : a biography / by David Daniell
A dead man in Deptford / by Anthony Burgess
The complete works of François Rabelais / translated from the French by Donald M. Frame.
II. Professionals at work. Vermeer : a view of Delft / by Anthony Bailey
Samuel Pepys : the unequaled / by Claire Tomalin
Boswell's presumptuous task : the making of the life of Dr. Johnson / by Adam Sisman
Mason & Dixon / by Thomas Pynchon
The lunar men : five friends whose curiosity changed the world / by Jenny Uglow.
III. Romantic Dreamers. Pushkin : a biography / by T.J. Binyon
The manuscript found in Saragossa / by Jan Potocki ; translated from the French of Ian Maclean
Victor Hugo / by Graham Robb
Les fleurs de mal / by Charles Baudelaire ; translated from the French by Richard Howard
Crime and punishment / by Fyodor Dostoevsky ; translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
The letters of Gustave Flaubert / selected, edited, and translated from the French by Francis Steegmuller
The posthumous memoirs of Brás Cubas / by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis ; translated from the Portuguese by Gregory Rabassa. Dom Casmurro / by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis ; translated from the Portuguese by John Gledson.
IV. Visionaries and moralists. Emerson : the mind on fire / by Robert D. Richardson Jr.
Lewis Carroll : a biography / by Morton N. Cohen
John Ruskin : the early years ; John Ruskin : the later years / by Tim Hilton
An autobiography / by Anthony Trollope
William Morris : a life for our time / by Fiona MacCarthy
Oscar Wilde / by Richard Ellmann
A.E. Housman : a critical biography / by Norman Pge
Bernard Shaw. Volume 2, 1898-1918 : the pursuit of power / by Michael Holroyd
Madame Blavatsky's baboon : a history of the mystics, mediums, and misfits who brought spiritualism to America / by Peter Washington.
V. We moderns. Marcel Proust : a life / by Jean-Yves Tadié ; translated from the French by Euan Cameron
Selected letters. Volume 4, 1918-1922 / Marcel Proust ; translated from the French by Joanna Kilmartin
Proust's way : a field guide to "In search of lost time" by Roger Shattuck
Remembrance of things past / abridged and read by Neville Jason
Memoir of Italo Svevo / by Livia Veneziani Svevo ; translated from the Italian by Isabel Quigley
The letters of T.S. Eliot. Volume 1, 1898-1922 / edited by Valerie Eliot
Eliot's new life / by Lyndall Gordon
Ford Madox Ford / by Alan Judd
The complete short stories / by Ronald Firbank ; edited by Steven Moore
The selected prose of Fernando Pessoa / edited and translated from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith
No laughing matter : the life and times of Flann O'Brien / by Anthony Cronin
Collected fictions / by Jorge Luis Borges ; translated from the Spanish by Andrew Hurley
Djuna : the life and work of Djuna Barnes / by Phillip Herring
Nightwood : the original version and related drafts / by Djuna Barnes ; edited by Cheryl J. Plumb
Damned to fame : the life of Samuel Beckett / by James Knowlson.
VI. Serious entertainers. Hauntings / by Vernon Lee
Yours, Plum : the letters of P.G. Wodehouse ; edited by Frances Donaldson
Algernon Blackwood : an extraordinary life / by Mike Ashley
Tarzan forever : the life of Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan / by John Taliaferro
Cornell Woolrich : first you dream, then you die / by Francis M. Nevins, Jr.
The Avram Davidson treasury edited by Robert Silverberg and Grania Davis
The wine-dark sea / by Robert Aickman
Chester Himes : a life / by James Sallis
Suspects / by Thomas Berger
Sergio Leone : something to do with death / by Christopher Frayling
Grievance / by K.C. Constantine
Second sight / by Charles McCarry
Night watch / by Terry Pratchett.
VII. Critical observers. Theory of prose / by Viktor Shklovsky ; translated from the Russian by Benjamin Sher
Kipling, Auden & Co. : essays and reviews, 1935-1964 / by Randall Jarrell
Lectures on literature / by Vladimir Nobokov ; edited by Fredson Bowers
The western canon : the books and schools of the ages / by Harold Bloom
Up in the old hotel / by Joseph Mitchell
My ears are bent / by Joseph Mitchell
One art : letters / by Elizabeth Bishop ; selected and edited by Robert Giroux
The sixties : the last journal, 1960-1972 / by Edmund Wilson ; edited by Lewis M. Dabney
United States : essays, 1952-1992 / by Gore Vidal
The war against cliché : essays and reviews, 1971-2000 / by Martin Amis.
VIII. Lovers, poets, and madmen. Secrets of the flesh : a life of Colette / by Judith Thurman
Robert Graves : the years with Laura / by Richard Perceval Graves
Between moon and moon : selected correspondence (1946-1971) / by Robert Graves ; edited by Paul O'Prey
The locusts have no king / by Dawn Powell
The golden spur / by Dawn Powell
Angels on toast / by Dawn Powell
Possession : a romance / by A.S. Byatt
The complete fiction of W.M. Spackman / edited and with an afterword by Steven Moore
Lost property : memoirs and confessions of a bad boy / by Ben Sonnenberg
Licks of love : stories and a sequel, Rabbit remembered / by John Updike.
IX. Magicians of the word. Saint Glinglin / by Raymond Queneau ; translated from the French by James Sallis
Surviving : the uncollected writings of Henry Green ; edited by Matthew Yorke
Living ; Loving ; Party going / by Henry Green
Nothing ; Doting ; Blindness / by Henry Green
Georges Perec : a life in words / by David Bellos
Mulligan stew / by Gilbert Sorrentino
Riddley Walker / by Russell Hoban
Larva : Midsummer Night's babel / by Julián Ríos ; translated from the Spanish by Richard Alan Francis, with Suzanne Jill Levine and the author
Landor's tower, or, The imaginary conversations / by Iain Sinclair.
X. Europeans. The tale of the 1002nd night / by Joseph Roth ; translated from the German by Michael Hoffman
Life of a poet : Rainer Maria Rilke / by Ralph Freedman ; lyrical verse translated from the German by Helen Sword, in collaboration with the author
Uncollected poems / by Rainer Maria Rilke ; translated from the German by Edward Snow
Embers / by Sándor Márai ; translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway
The complete works of Isaac Babel / edited by Nathalie Babel ; translated from the Russian by Peter Constantine
Mikhail Bulgakov : a critical biography / by Lesley Milne
Regions of the great heresy : Bruno Schulz, a biographical portrait / by Jerzy Ficowski ; translated from the Polish and edited by Theodosia Robertson
The last leopard : a life of Guiseppe di Lampedusa / by David Gilmour
Paul Celan : poet, survivor, Jew / by John Felstiner
That mighty sculptor, Time / by Marguerite Yourcenar ; translated from the French by Walter Kaiser, in collaboration with the author
Extinction / by Thomas Bernhard ; translated from the German by David McClintock
Austerlitz / by W.G. Sebald ; translated from the German by Anthea Bell.
XI. Writers of our time. What's bred in the bone / by Robertson Davies
Little kingdoms : three novellas / by Steven Millhauser
The famished road / by Ben Okri
Accordion crimes / by E. Annie Proulx
Cities of the plain (volume 3 of the Border trilogy) / by Cormac McCarthy
Mrs. Ted Bliss / by Stanley Elkin
The tunnel / by William H. Gass
Reader's block / by David Markson
A frolic of his own / by William Gaddis
The amber spyglass (book 3 of His dark materials) / by Philip Pullman
Underworld / by Don Delillo.
XII. Performing selves. Ackerly : the life of J.R. Ackerly / by Peter Parker
The Knox brothers / by Penelope Fitzgerald
The means of escape : stories / by Penelope Fitzgerald
Collected tales and fantasies / by Lord Berners
Cyril Connolly : a life / by Jeremy Lewis
The letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh / edited by Charlotte Mosley
Bruce Chatwin : a biography / by Nicholas Shakespeare
The diaries of Kenneth Tynan / edited by John Lahr
The letters of Kingsley Amis / edited by Zachary Leader.
Coda. Classroms and their discontents
A Renaissance reading list
Journeying toward God : ten classics of faith and doubt
A science fiction reading list.