Here’s a list of deepest favorites:

Anna Burns, Milkman

Scholastique Mukasonga, Cockroaches

Alice Oswald, Memorial

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn

Danilo Kiš, Garden, Ashes

Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass

Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

Rachel Cusk, Outline, Transit, and Kudos (a trilogy) and Second Place

E. C. Osondu, This House Is Not for Sale and Voice of America

Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein’s Nephew, The Woodcutter, and The Loser (also his memoir Gathering Evidence)

Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths

Robert Walser, The Assistant

Magdalena Tulli, Dreams and Stones

José Saramago, The History of the Siege of Lisbon—and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis followed by Cees Nooteboom’s The Following Story

Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

Carolyn Chute, The Beans of Egypt, Maine and Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

Toni Morrison, The Song of Solomon

Franz Kafka, The Trial, The Castle, and every scrap of his short fiction

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!

Orhan Pamuk, Snow

Gina Berriault, Women in Their Beds

J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello followed by Slow Man

Ismail Kadare, The Accident and Chronicle in Stone

Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You and Cleanliness

Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

Njáls Saga—and The Saga of Erik the Red followed by William T. Vollmann’s The Ice Shirt (Seven Dreams, Book One)

Ayad Akhtar, The Homeland Elegies

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of White Folk

Martha Kinney, The Fall of Heartless Horse

Ernst Weiss, Georg Letham, Physician and Murderer

Henry James, The Ambassadors

Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

Upamanyu Chatterjee, August, English

Adolfo Bioy Cesares, The Invention of Morel

Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index and The News from Spain

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, The Gambler, and The Double

John Hawkes, The Cannibal

Edgar Allen Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, but only until Pym reaches “Antarctica”

Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist and Apex Hides the Hurt

Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman

Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part One

Cormac McCarthy, The Road and Blood Meridian

Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book One

Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Roger de Coverley Papers (from The Spectator)

William Gaddis, Carpenter’s Gothic

David Albahari, Checkpoint, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać

Maggie Nelson, Bluets

Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man

Dag Solstad, T. Singer

Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

Hanne Ørstavik, Love

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Shubha Sunder, Optional Practical Training (conflict of interest declared, yet even so . . .)