A couple of weeks (months?) ago when we asked folks to ask questions, more than a few people asked about our favorite cultural things. You wanted to know our favorite books, authors, etc.
In the abstract, this seemed like a fun thing to write. It’d serve as an occasion to think through stuff we love and write about why we love it. We’d have an excuse to survey all the things we’ve encountered and write a tidy little set of list of things we like best.
We were pretty sure that we could write this thing in a couple of hours since we’re pretty comfortable making value judgments and our feelings about things are typically pretty clear. We don’t regularly run into problems assessing whether we thought a book was good or bad. We, likewise, are more or less immediately sure whether we liked something or not. Even comparing things against other things isn’t too challenging. The only time judging or feeling gets complicated is when we think too hard about whether we liked something because we thought it good or whether we thought it good because we liked it. Thankfully, though, we’re usually able to avoid Euthyphro-type problems by ignoring them and pretending they aren’t problems.
Listing favorites, then, would be easy. We’d just catalog things we have judged to be good and enjoy. EASY.
It wasn’t. It was awful. It was hard to narrow the lists down. It was painful to exclude certain things. It is nerve-wracking to expose our taste in such explicit terms such that our cultural capital is vulnerable to scrutiny. Adding to the actual difficulty of just writing the lists is the nagging feeling that sharing this stuff seems like it cannot possibly have a positive outcome. Our ignorance, bias, pretention, and other negative traits related to aesthetic judgment will (below) be revealed and, as a result, we’ll be left exposed and ashamed. Sharing these lists feels like sharing nudes of a particular part of our soul in less than flattering light.
Anyways, enough preamble. We’ve made some lists below of our favorite books and writers. In order to make the task manageable we made some arbitrary rules:
We are only considering writers working in English after 1800. There are some theoretical reasons behind this rule, but we primarily adopted it in order to save ourselves from attempting to answer questions or make decisions that made our head hurt.
We did not Google anything. These lists then are drawn from our imperfect memory and the actual books in our home. We figure that if we’ve forgotten that something exists altogether, then it’s probably not our favorite anything.
Any list that was dominated by dead people has been supplemented by a list focused on living people. We mainly did this to make decisions easier, but also because reading someone’s list of favorite things and finding that all their favorite things are very old is a downer. Who wants to live in a world where the best things are all behind us, settled, in the dust? Not us.
No more than five entries on each list. It would have killed us to do more and, we figure, would probably be dull to read more. We tried to narrow things down to just three, but almost had an aneurysm so chilled out and got lax.
Those were the rules. So, now, the lists:
Favorite Novels (by Living Novelists)
The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
Slumberland by Paul Beatty
Home Land by Sam Lipsyte
You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman
Favorite Novels (by Dead Novelists)
The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville
Sula by Toni Morrison
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
JR by William Gaddis
Desperate Characters by Paula Fox
Favorite (Living) Short Fiction Writers
Garielle Lutz
Joy Williams
Deborah Eisenberg
Diane Williams
John Keene
Favorite (Dead) Short Fiction Writers
Henry James
Lucia Berlin
Donald Barthelme
Richard Wright
John Cheever
Favorite (Living) Poets
Frank Bidart
Terrance Hayes
Sinéad Morissey
Carmen Giménez Smith
Franny Choi
Favorite (Dead) Poets
Emily Dickinson
Geoffrey Hill
Derek Walcott
Elizabeth Bishop
John Ashbery
Favorite Nonfiction Books (by Writers Living or Dead)
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans
The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm
Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman
The Sight of Death by T. J. Clark
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
Favorite (Living) Playwrights
Conor McPherson
Martin Crimp
Sarah Ruhl
Annie Baker
Martin McDonagh
Favorite (Dead) Playwrights
Tennessee Williams
August Wilson
Harold Pinter
Sarah Kane
Edward Albee
Favorite (Living) Philosophers
Stephen Yablo
Susan Wolf
Cora Diamond
Lisa Tessman
Samuel Scheffler
Favorite (Dead) Philosophers
Derek Parfit
J. L. Austin
William James
David Lewis
Hilary Putnam
Favorite, let’s say, Collections of Critical Essays (by Writers Living or Dead)
The Verbal Icon by W. K. Wimsatt
The Immediate Experience by Robert Warshow
Against Interpretation and Other Essays by Susan Sontag
The Possessed by Elif Batuman
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib
Favorite (Living) Writers We Love to Hate - Primarily Because We Want to Love Their Books, but They Always End Up Being Low-Key Annoying or High-Key Flawed in Some Sense or Another Such That We Can’t Say We Like Them But We Still Buy Their Books and End Up Incredibly Frustrated and Then Time Will Pass and We’ll Return to their Books and End Up Frustrated Again But Apparently Can’t Help Ourselves or Maybe There’s Something We Deeply Love About These People That’s Complicated in a Way We Don’t Quite Understand
Geoff Dyer
Leslie Jamison
William Vollman
Olivia Laing
Hilton Als
Favorite (Dead) Writers We Dislike Quite a Bit, but Return to Somewhat Regularly Waiting for the Love to Kick-In Because Surely It Must?
Jane Austen
George Orwell
V. S. Naipaul
John Steinbeck
William Faulkner
Favorite (Dead) Writers Who Haven’t Written a Singular Book We Adore, but We Like Them Very Much and Often More Than Anything
James Baldwin
Henry Green
Gwendolyn Brooks
Greg Tate
Joan Didion
We could keep inventing ever more arcane categories, but we’re just going to stop here. We’ll leave you to draw whatever conclusions you want.
Depending on how this is received, we’ll (eventually, after we recover) maybe venture to make other lists of music, movies, television, etc.
In the nearer term, we’ll be back to inscrutable and peculiar essays (?) about whatever strikes our fancy in or around or about Montreal(ish) very soon. Oh and speaking of which we just realized that there isn’t a single Montrealer (or even Canadian) on our lists which probably tells you something - but we’re not sure what.
Great list and it should keep me busy for a while. How about best movies? Maybe a Canadian director will make the cut. Thanks for sharing.
I *knew*, I KNEW with every fiber in my body that you were a Henry James fan. Tennessee Williams was also a great relief. Thank you for sharing the list; worry not, for were I even in an appropriate position to judge your taste, I do not know enough of what you've shared to be justified in making an answer.
I'll be saving this list for my own reference. Excellent choices, I think (at least, wherever I could recognize the author).