What books should we bring with us into the new millennium? We asked All Things Considered book reviewer Alan Cheuse, who teaches writing at
George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Cheuse is the author of several books, including the novels The Light Possessed and The Grandmothers' Club, and the story collection Lost and Old Rivers. He gave us his essential list of English and American books:
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
The watershed novel of 20th-century American life, with its story of family
dissolution, individual pathos, and glorious style.
Ulysses
James Joyce
The greatest novel in English in the 20th century, because of its engaging
story of three characters adrift in Dublin for 24 hours -- and a lifetime --
and because the book is a vast storehouse for novelistic technique.
Everything any reader wants to know about life and love, and everything any
writer wants to know about how to depict life and love, all in one long,
sometimes difficult, but always magnificent volume.
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
A landmark work, in terms of its presentation of the inner self in relation
to the everyday world -- and to history -- with lessons about time and art
that are unmatched by any other novel in English.
The Complete Short Stories
Ernest Hemingway
The gold standard for the modern American short story.
The Rainbow
D.H. Lawrence
The great novel about love and marriage against a backdrop of an England in
flux. The first book of a trilogy that also includes Women in Love and Aaron's Rod. Lawrence has written many other novels
worth keeping, as well as some of the finest short stories in English.
Poems
W.B. Yeats
The master of the modern poem in English.
Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowry
A tour de force unlike any other in the language, set in Mexico on the Day
of the Dead 1938, and in Hell, in Purgatory, and leading toward paradise --
at least in the incandescent prose.
Poems
Robert Frost
The greatness of modern simplicity, etched in language clean and right as
bone long-washed in sand.
A Passage to India
E.M. Forster
"Only connect." The novel that celebrates and critiques more than a century
of Western colonial visions.
The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen
The death of innocence, the birth of tragedy.
Native Son
Richard Wright
Our own country's Crime and Punishment.
Stories
Grace Paley
Comedy and pathos in stories particular to New York, and utterly universal.
The Naked and the Dead
Norman Mailer
Modern war, and uneasy peace.
Play It As It Lays
Joan Didion
Hollywood and anomie, as never before in the history of the world.
The Iceman Cometh
Eugene O'Neil
Down and outers on the rising arc toward tragic glory.
Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller
Everyman, at home and on the road.
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
What did he do, to be so black and blue? The magnificent symbolic novel of
race and American meaning.
