Forum / Your Essentials and Why

RW Spryszak
Aug 24, 01:54pm

I'm wading through five pages of submitted work via email for the Nov. Thrice. If any here have submitted be aware there's a slush pile as big as Pittsburgh. So I should be there working and not here playing. But so what.

What are your essentials and why are they? That is to say books or stories you feel can't be dispensed with? If you ran a course on writing, they'd be things you'd want your students to have as some kind of touchstone. Or things that you couldn't leave out of your personal library. Stuff you'd argue that others should read. Things you feel exist as a foundation for the art in a general sense. The essentials, as you see them.

And then why do you feel this way about them? What is it about these works that you believe makes them indispensable?

I have three. Briefly.

1. Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, because to my mind it is about as perfectly executed as anything can be. Concise, eminently lends itself to metaphor, and fulfilling.

2. Gogol's Dead Souls. Begins with a very odd premise and then displays the writer's craft and skill by running with it into every possible direction. Macabre, funny, intense, and neurotic all at the same time. Then it ends in mid-sentence when Gogol lost his mind. Compelling and instructive.

3. The Street of Crocodiles - Bruno Schulz. I've heard him described as Kafka with a sense of humor. But that barely touches it. The evocative scene in this series of shorts, each of which could stand alone of forced to, in which the upstairs room is opened for the first time and hundreds of birds rise into the air startled by the door is (for me) one of the most well-written and perfectly executed work I think I've seen.

Okay I lied about the "briefly."

I'd be VERY interested in seeing what others come up with. I don't know what sparked this question while looking at submissions, but there you are.

Joani Reese
Aug 24, 06:47pm

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy--about as close to and perfect a prose poem as a work of fiction can be.

White Noise by Don Delillo--Captures the irony and the exhaustion of our fragmented age.

...and I don't have time to explain them all, but here is a list of touchstone works I could not live without:

Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver
The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor
Up in Michigan by Ernest Hemingway
The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot
The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
All of Euripides
The Oresteia by Aeschylus
The Oedipus Plays by Sophocles
Hamlet, MacBeth, Othello, and all of Shakespeare's sonnets
The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas
Other Voices Other Rooms by Truman Capote
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Independence Day by Richard Ford
Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe
All the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Shara McCallum, Brian Turner, Sam Rasnake, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman.

I know I have left out hundreds more I could name, but those are the works that immediately come to mind. I am a book person. I own more than three thousand books and every one of them is important to me. I purge them regularly, but then I just buy more to take their place. I am hopelessly enamored of the printed page.

James Claffey
Aug 24, 07:51pm

1: the things they carried. o'brien

brilliant, episodic, almost a musical sort of a book. the way he plays with rhythm and refrain is marvelous.

2: mariette in ecstasy. hansen

on both structural and linguistic levels this is a gem. hansen conveys so much in the spaces between speech, the quiet moments, sublime writing.

3: the shipping news. proulx

setting and character in perfect harmony. proulx weaves a hell of a tale with a main character with some real issues.

Julie Innis
Aug 24, 11:20pm

So many of my favorites here, and reminders to read others yet unread. Thank you for this.

James Lloyd Davis
Aug 24, 11:37pm

The Nick Adams stories of Hemingway were the match that struck my desire to write at the age of sixteen. Dostoevski threw logs on the fire, as did William Saroyan.

I do agree with Joani on the perfection of Blood Meridian, though Don DeLillo's Libra was my favorite from him. I spent a lot of time researching the period and the people surrounding the imagined events of Kennedy's assassination, waded through reams of recently issued release of secret documents and transcripts. There found the most bizarre facts among the fiction... as though DeLillo had already read them. However his art was in the convincing way he drew the story... as though he'd been there. Masterful, more so considering the sources I've seen were not available when he wrote the book.

I second James' choice of The Things They Carried and Shipping News. The Things They Carried is the concept of novel as ballad, so direct and uninfluenced by all that went before it, a work of pure art from the veins that spilled the vitality of that epoch.

I would like to add Carson McCullers and William Saroyan to the mix of magical ingredients, writers with a direct line to the human heart and unashamed exposition thereof.

Robert Vaughan
Aug 24, 11:45pm

Joani Reese and I love lists like these, of faves. Harkens one of my favorite lists Fictionauters created earlier in 2012 during Poetry Month. A great list already started here, so thanks everyone!

I would have to add Carver, Alice Monroe, Tennessee Williams, Patti Smith, Simon Perchik, Dorianne Laux, Cheever, Derek Jarman, Marie Howe, Barthelme, and David Wojnarowicz.

Joani Reese
Aug 25, 12:53am

I loved Libra, too, James. It was masterful. Two more in that ilk are Anthony Burgess' Napoleon's Symphony and Gore Vidal's Burr.

Julie Innis
Aug 25, 08:28pm

Just stumbled across this bracket: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/22/what-is-the-best-novel-ever-written_n_1821952.html?utm_hp_ref=books

Joani Reese
Aug 26, 01:15am

Julie-- Who chose the contenders? Wow. Not.

Julie Innis
Aug 26, 02:11am

The People, I think. And yes, what the...???

Wanted to add that the first half of McCarthy's The Crossing is one of my Essentials. Odd to like only half of a book and still be able to endorse it, but so it goes.

James Claffey
Aug 27, 04:13am

i'm a suttree man.

Gessy Alvarez
Aug 28, 01:03am

If I get stuck while writing a short story, I always find myself turning to one of the best short story collections out there: The Art of the Story: An International Anthology of Contemporary Short Stories, edited by David Halpern. This one never fails to inspire.

Of course I've got my oldies to keep me company: Tolstoy, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Pound, Rilke, Lorca, Calvino, Jean Rhys, Flannery O'Connor, Djuna Barnes, Hempel, and of course, Woolf and Lydia Davis, I love me some Lydia Davis...

James Lloyd Davis
Aug 28, 02:46am

Julie..?? What was wrong with the second half of The Crossing? I can't remember the plot just now, but I don't recall disliking anything.

Just curious and I don't want to read it again.

Gary Hardaway
Aug 28, 02:48am

Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon
Most incredible American novel yet written

The Complete Poems of Elizabeth Bishop
The best American poet who ever breathed

The Tempest, By William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's extraordinary parting gesture

Robert Vaughan
Aug 28, 02:51am

Gessy: Lydia Davis...yes! I adore her collected stories! So glad we share her.

Meg Pokrass
Aug 28, 07:20am

Bobbie Ann Mason.. "In Country", "Shiloh and Other Stories"

Jayne Anne Phillips "Black Tickets"

Mona Simpson's "Anywhere But Here"

Justin Torres's 2011 debut and masterpiece "We the Animals"

whoops that was 4..

Julie Innis
Aug 28, 09:55am

hey there JLD - nothing wrong with The Crossing's second half (well, technically, the second and third border crossings), the first half (first border crossing) was just so magical and self-contained, it read like a great novella - the second part works, same incredible prose, but hard to beat the Boy and His Dog (or, in this case, a wolf) story of the first crossing. Big fan of dog stories.

Christian Bell
Aug 28, 11:23am

Don Delillo’s “Underworld”: Particularly the “Pafko at the Wall” intro, which I find the most stunning intro to a book and not just because it involves baseball, the world’s best sport (imho). Delillo overall is essential, and I’d throw in “Libra,” and “Mao II” into the mix with “Underworld.”

Mark Leyner’s “Et Tu, Babe”: My go-to funny book. Hilariously self-indulgent and over the top romp starring Leyner himself as a ridiculous over-inflated super-celebrity writer. It’s a great exercise in fast-paced, surreal comedic writing. Did I mention in a grad school class, I did a presentation on Leyner?

Brady Udall’s “The Wig”: Okay, not a book but a flash fiction story (originally appearing in the Summer 1994 issue of Story and later in Mr. Udall’s collection, “Letting Loose the Hounds”). For me, the gold standard of flash fiction, even though—go figure—Udall has admitted that he’s not a flash fiction writer. Shameless self-promo: I’m actually Brady Udall. No, that’s not true and besides, that would be a confession. Seriously, a few years ago, I did a write-up of “The Wig” on my blog and it’s the most visited entry of my blog. Every now and then, I still get people emailing about it.

And I'd also agree with many of the other selections others have posted here, though I'd have to say I like the first 1/5th of The Crossing, along with the middle 1/4th, and the last 1/3rd.

Julie Innis
Aug 28, 11:28am

nicely played, Bell, nicely played.

Julie Innis
Aug 28, 11:29am

and thanks for the reminder that I want to read Leyner. Have you read Charles Portis? Hilarious. Always on the lookout for funny writers, if you, or any other jokers here, have any recs. to share.

See ya
Aug 28, 11:49am

Ron Rash - Saints at the River

Knockemstiff - Donald Ray Pollock

In the Devil's Territory - Kyle Minor

Dear Everybody - Michael Kimball

Just some recent reads that knocked me into next week.

David Ackley
Aug 28, 02:05pm

Sadly, aside from the shining example of yourself, Julie, funny writers seem to be getting fewer and farther between. Barthelme, the Donald one, is one though--as you of course know. But if you don't know his "Critique de la Vie Quotidienne," get it, quick, a contender for the funniest story ever written. I like also Witold Gombrowicz( FERDYDUKE.)HEART OF A DOG, by Bulgakov. Gogol, bien sur.Old Thurber had his moments. George Saunders can hit the sweet spot, time to time, though in my opinion he has a fatal craving for treacle. Steve Martin had a knockout piece--literally, I hit my head on a table falling to the floor--in the New Yorker examining the side effects of a medication. You can imagine.

David Ackley
Aug 28, 02:07pm

I may not be a reliable witness, though: I think Beckett is pretty comical.

Julie Innis
Aug 28, 02:08pm

scribbling down all these recs, David, thanks!

James Lloyd Davis
Aug 28, 02:42pm

David, I think Becket is comical in the sense that circus is comedy but one step removed from utter, shivery, and demonically influenced chaos.

But yes, comical.

Misti Rainwater-Lites
Aug 28, 03:05pm

Oh god. My ever growing wish list at amazon.com just became an anaconda, if it is true that an anaconda is a really long snake.

1. Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger is a book I return to time and time again. It's just that good.
2. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut is a novel I love so much I got a tattoo of the tombstone illustration on my left arm. "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."
3. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston...just found this gem a couple of years ago. I wish I'd been assigned this book in high school instead of The Great Gatsby.
4. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers...wish I had been assigned this beauty in high school instead of Great Expectations.
5. The Urinals of Hell by Joe Pachinko. I had a signed copy, cherished it for years, then finally gave it to a friend because it hurt me too much to keep it. Of all the poetry books I've ever read, The Urinals of Hell is the truest. I felt those poems like a motherfucking heart attack. Still feel them.

Christian Bell
Aug 28, 03:13pm

It's hard to find good comedic writers that are laugh out loud funny. Other writers that I find fairly funny at times include Philip Roth, Elmore Leonard, Thomas Pynchon, T.C. Boyle, George Saunders, Kurt Vonnegut, and George Singleton.

I'll have to come up with a list of decidedly unfunny authors. I'm sure Ayn Rand would be near the top.

John Riley
Aug 28, 03:24pm

David, I'm reading Cosmos by Gombrowicz. It's funny if you can hang on.

I'm too fickle to pick three essentials. Chekhov won't go away. There are several of his stories I read over again when I think I'd rather be reading something new. So I guess he's at the top of the list.

Clarice Lispector's "The Smallest Woman in the World" is my favorite story right now.

Misti Rainwater-Lites
Aug 28, 03:55pm

This book made me laugh myself sick:
http://www.amazon.com/Emails-hole-People-Being-Stupid/dp/1402778279/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346169191&sr=1-1&keywords=E-mail+stupid

(but I'm pretty puerile)

Darryl Price
Aug 28, 04:28pm

Absolutely Vonnegut,absolutely Hemingway,Absolutely Dickinson(I will so include a poet!),absolutely Borges...

Joani Reese
Aug 28, 04:50pm

Just reread Vonnegut's Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons. These essays were compiled in the mid-seventies, but if you simply gave certain countries, like Biafra, other names, they are just as fresh, just as sad, and just as insightful when re-imagined for our current dilemmas. He is one of my heroes. The essay on Biafra, "Biafra: A People Betrayed" is as trenchant a piece of reportage as I have ever read. I miss him in the world.

RW Spryszak
Aug 28, 06:20pm

For me, Gombrowicz takes an awful lot of work though. Sort of like Musil but for different reasons.

strannikov
Aug 29, 01:39am

This post marks my first Forum foray, after eight months' residence here. (I hesitate to post still.) I'm gratified that so many of you have cited so many fine authors, so many fine works, but I'm saddened by what strike me as stark omissions. Inasmuch as our thread's author RW Spryszak (to whom as to the rest of you, greetings) solicited "essentials", I propose taking this summons seriously enough to reply in terms of "quintessentials" (not out of loyalty to the Pythagoreans, though), five authors of English writing (so's not to complicate the issue with translated works, without slighting the welcome and necessary work of able translators) not cited in the preceding thirty-two posts (as of when I began this note, anyway):

1. Edgar Allen Poe.

2. Jonathan Swift.

3. William Faulkner.

4. Saki.

5. Christopher Marlowe.

Poe's omission thus far is easily the most incredible. The most creative and original literary genius this country has yet produced. The first full-blooded "American" author, who made it his life to ride the antebellum country from Boston to Charleston. Acknowledged master of the short story, inventor of the detective story. Able practitioner of speculative fiction. Underrated comic writer (O'Connor fans have no excuse for being unaware of her debt to him). I won't say much for his criticism, except to say that he was an accomplished editor in his day. I won't say anything about his poetry, since what expertise I possess is limited to prose.

Swift. Greatest prose satirist of English to date. Deep and profound insight into the single subject of all literature, humanity. Engagement with his day, with a full measure of devotion to all that came before and a saving skepticism for all that was contemporary and merely fashionable.

Faulkner. Perhaps easy to appreciate the decline in his appeal over the past generation, but even though I can claim no close devotion to him or his work, I know what a writer he is, if only on the basis not of one of his notable novels but on the example of his story "Red Leaves", which in the full measure of the anachronism and atavism it exemplifies and elicits hearkens to the antebellum fervor of Poe himself.

Saki. (H. H. Munro.) Easily neglected, easily overlooked second-tier, minor writer. Nevertheless: first-rate comic writer, consistently so. Inimitable stylist. Keen observer and social critic. An actual wit exhibiting good taste within the constraints of modesty.

Marlowe. For the life of me, I do not see or understand how Marlowe is not seen as The Man of the Moment at our historic juncture: our entire moment is in Marlowe. His topicalities of religious fervor, intellectual ambition and overreach, the seductions of learning and power, the geographies and topographies of espionage and security paranoia.

Due apologies for injured toes or for my failure to resist temptation.

Dolemite
Aug 29, 02:01am

I haven't read any of the above responses, so these have probably all been mentioned by now, but (in no particular order) my essential, must-have-on-hand writers would be:

Edgar Allen Poe
Jonathan Swift
William Faulkner
Saki
Christopher Marlowe

RW Spryszak
Aug 29, 11:35am

lol...

Sam Rasnake
Aug 29, 02:32pm

My three...

poetry:
Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III
Jorge Luis Borges, El hacedor
Matsuo Bashō, Ono no Komachi

Linda Simoni-Wastila
Aug 30, 10:52pm

My essentials?

THE SOUND AND THE FURY. Faulkner for his stream-of-consciousness style and perfect description of setting.

THE FEAST OF LOVE. Baxter for his close takes on relationships in middle America.

ANYTHING by Tobias Wolff for telling it like it is, straight and neat.

EVERYTHING by Amy Hempl for telling it efficiently.

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED. My latest essential'. I've read the first story, but never the entire book. THE THINGS THEY CARRIED is not only a masterful collection of stories, it is a treatise on craft. I carry this with me everywhere, for I am writing war, and I am writing linked stories. What better master?

Enjoying everyone's essentials, so many commonalities, and unique influences, too.
Peace...

David Ackley
Aug 31, 02:31pm

Linda,

The literature of war has many essential works.

Along with THE THINGS THEY CARRIED another great piece from the Vietnam war is Michael Herr's DISPATCHES reporting with all the drama, character, theme and intensity of great fiction.

Can't overlook THE ILIAD, of course, first and still the best in many ways.
WAR & PEACE, THE GOOD SOLDIER SCHWEIK, ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, THE NAKED AND THE DEAD,PARADE'S END just a few to consider.

Best of luck with yours. I'm looking forward to it.

d.

Linda Simoni-Wastila
Sep 02, 01:50am

Ah, thanks David! I just picked up Herr's DISPATCHES last week, so glad it has your endorsement. Some of the others, will revisit or visit. I've had a hankering to reread ALL' QUIET...

The beauty of THE THINGS THEY CARRIED is the amazing way O'Brien circles around his story, telling and then retelling the key details. He layers each story in an amazing way, almost poetry, and then bits of each story get told in other stories, so the entire effect stultifies. I've been dissecting and dissecting, and all I can say it is effing brilliant and irreproducible.

Not so much out there on the Aghanistan war, so went memoir (LONE SURVIVOR) and non-fiction (WAR by Sebastian Junger-whoa! The powerful companion documentary RESTREPO by the late and great Tim Hetherington--double whoa).

I think I just finished the second draft and am putting him to rest for a bit. Can't do war no more. Peace...

Joani Reese
Sep 02, 02:38am

Dispatches is one of the finest pieces of war reporting/ memoir I have ever read. I keep it close to hand and reread it every few years. Linda--You are fortunate to have a copy to appreciate.

strannikov
Sep 02, 02:43am

War lit nomination: Dalton Trumbo's not utterly forgettable Johnny Got His Gun.

M. F. Sullivan
Sep 02, 04:37am

That's difficult. There are a good few authors I find indispensable for a good few reasons, but if I had to narrow it down, hm...

1. LOLITA - Nabokov was an absolute wizard with the English language and that book is out of this world.

2. NAKED LUNCH - Burroughs is always brilliant, from JUNKY to THE NOVA TRILOGY, but NAKED LUNCH is of particular significance for obvious historical reasons and a stand-out example of non-linear storytelling in literature.

3. ASK THE DUST - As much as I love Bukowski, I understand why he loved Fante so well. The man is a master of linguistic economy, and the stories he tells are simply marvelous.

4. WAITING PERIOD - When people say Selby Jr. most people are thinking REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, and though that novel is magnificent, WAITING PERIOD is significant for its viewpoint narrator, who is an unreliable narrator in the extreme. An excellent example of writing from the point of view of someone suffering severe mental illness without resorting to Easton Ellis-esque shlock.

I want to put Pessoa's THE BOOK OF DISQUIET in the third slot, but I haven't finished it yet, so I can't. Maybe it can fit into 3.5.
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