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10. If you have an online Club, give your visitors a free membership for one year. People want to belong to something that benefits them, why not your online club. It could be a game club, video club, music club, writing club, etc. You could also give away a free e-zine for club members only. If your content is really unique, think about charging a monthly membership fee.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
100 English Language Books of Fiction
Larry McCaffery's "20th C. Greatest Hits"
(100 English-Language Books of Fiction)
[Larry McCaffery teaches American literature at San Diego State University and is co-editor of the journal Fiction International. Thanks to Carl Molina for contributing this list. --Ed.].
1. Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire (1962)
The most audaciously conceived novel of the century--and the most perfectly execute--this is also the book whose existence could have been the most difficult to anticipate in the year 1900.
2. Joyce, James. Ulysses (1922)
Not so much the beginning of anything as the culmination of the great 19th century symbolic realist tradition
3. Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Like Ulysses, Pynchon's masterpiece has cast an enormous, intimidating shadow across the entire literary landscape.
4. Coover, Robert. The Public Burning (1977)
A book controversial enough that its publisher almost immediately took it out of print (where stayed for over 15 years), this novel featured a surprisingly sympathetic Richard Nixon as its principle narrator and used the Rosenberg case as a means of examining just about everything worth examining about America during the McCarthy era; excessive and encyclopedic, dazzling in its range of styles, bitterly angry and bitingly humorous, this is the most brilliant and original "political novel" ever published in America.
5. Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury (1929)
Along with raising Southern gothic to an art form, this book ranks with Pale Fire in terms of its audacious treatment of point of view and created in Jason Compson perhaps the most memorable villain of the century.
6. Beckett, Samuel. Trilogy (Molloy 1953 , Malone Dies 1956, The Unnamable 1957).
Beckett took self-consciousness, solipsism, ultimacy, and minimalism to the brink of silence--where he, thankfully, retreated just in time.
7. Stein, Gertrude. The Making of Americans (1925)
Stein's prose is Stein's prose is Stein's prose. This sprawling novel is still one of the most perceptive examinations of American life and values. Like her other mature work, this book is rich with puns, rhythmic phrases, and word repetitions; it is also a vibrant, breathtaking expression of Stein's lifelong love affair with individual words and a demonstration that the music, rhythm, and repetitive power of words matters just as much as their representational qualities. As with Burroughs' experiments a half century later, Stein's methods were so truly radical that it would take several generations before authors got around to figuring out how they might be applied to their own writing.
8. Burroughs, William. Nova Trilogy (The Soft Machine 1962, Nova Express 1964, The Ticket that Exploded, 1967).
Space odysseys, Uranium Willy and the Heavy Metal Kid, image banks and silence viruses, protopunk "wild boys" engaged in an apocalyptic guerrilla-warfare, body and mind invasion, the Nova Mob matching wits with the Nova police (hampered by the corrupt Biologic Courts) for control of The Reality Studio--these hallucinatory SF elements interact with shards of poetry by Rimbaud, Shakespeare and Eliot (and much, much more) to fuel Burroughs' atomic powered strap-on, which probes the asshole of society with more glee and wicked humor than anyone since Swift.
9. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita (1955)
A richly humorous, satiric look at American life in the late 40s, a profound (and profoundly disturbing) commentary about the ability of the creative mind to transform the monstrous into breathtaking art, Lolita is above all this century's most passionate and most memorable lover story.
10. Joyce, James. Finnegans' Wake (1941)
The greatest unreadable novel ever written.
11. Federman, Raymond. Take It or Leave It (1975)
The first--and still the definitive--poststructuralist novel written in English, Federman's crazed journey to chaos and erasure ranks, along with Kerouac's The Open Road , and Wright's Going Native, as the greatest of all American road novels.
12. Morrison, Toni. Beloved (1986)
A poetically rendered cry of pain and a plea for forgiveness and understanding, this book won for Morrison a Nobel Prize (though not a place in the Modern Library List).
13. Wright, Stephen. Going Native (1994).
Robert Coover's blurb says it all: "A sensational, prime-time novel. Imagine a pornographic twilight zone of beebee-eyed serial killers, drug-stunned pants-dropping road warriors and marauding armies of mental vampires, a nightmarish country of unparalleled savagery, where there is no longer any membrane between screen and life and the monster image feed in inexhaustible and the good guys are the scariest ones of all."
14. Lowery, Malcolm. Under the Volcano (1949)
The hell of alcoholism and the self has never been rendered more passionately or convincingly.
15. Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse (1927)
The most extreme and poetic of Woolf's treatments of the stream of consciousness motif
16. Gass, William H.. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968)
Gass is arguably America's greatest living prose writer, and this collection includes two stories--"The Pederson Kid" and "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country"--which rank among the finest achievements in the short story form.
17. Gaddis, William. JR (1975)
Gaddis's humor, his ear for the music of American idioms, his brilliant orchestration of materials, and his sure-handed treatment of the ways capitalism controls every aspect of our lives insures that JR will be one of the most discussed novels during the 21st century.
18. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man (1952)
Ellison's blues-drenched, symbol-and-idiom rich depiction of the development of youth into maturity, disillusionment, and self-realization not only sums up the ways that black people have been preyed on by whites throughout American history but illuminates the process that transforms us all into invisible people.
19. DeLillo, Don. Underworld (1997)
The best novel by the author who has produced the most significant body of work of all post-WWII American writers, Underworld is at once a brilliant analysis of the fate of America's hopes and dreams as it approaches the millennium and a haunting, lovingly presented lament for the lost lives and words the 50s.
20. Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. (1926)
Employing a startlingly innovative method of rendering the lives and attitudes of a "lost generation" of Americans seeking some sort of substitute for the values and meanings had been destroyed by WWI, this novel would also have a decisive impact on Raymond Carver and other American "minimalists" later in the century.
21. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
Probably the most taught novel of them all, still one of the great initiation novels, and also one of the most expressive descriptions of what all great writers must leave behind in order to follow the muse, Portrait's early experimentations with stream-of-consciousness helped lay the groundwork for Joyce's far grander forays into human consciousness in Ulysses .
22. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby (1925).
A novel whose gorgeous flights of lyricism is matched only by its ability to tease out what is most debased about the American Dream--and what is most enduring as well.
23. James, Henry. The Ambassadors (1903).
The style found in the late-James novels was as intricate, psychologically nuanced, and attuned to the inner workings of the mind as those developed somewhat later in the stream-of-consciousness techniques employed by Joyce, Faulkner and others.
24. Lawrence, D.H.. Women in Love (1921)
The book where Lawrence finally achieved his goal of finding a means of rendering the non-verbal operations determining the interactions of men and women.
25. Barthelme, Donald. 60 Stories (1981).
Barthelme's surrealist, avant-pop treatments of life in a media-drenched Manhattan are still unrivaled in their ability to suggest how an aesthetics of trash could effectively conjure up a convincing vision of American life generally.
26. Vollmann, William T.. The Rifles (1993)
Vollmann leads readers into a labyrinthine, nightmarish descent into madness, cannibalism, death, and self-confrontation--all depicted by in excruciatingly vivid and emotionally honest detail; we also become witness to one man's ability to test what is best about himself, to confront the personal weaknesses most people deny, and the ways that even what is best in ourselves--our desire to seek the truth about ourselves and the world, to know and help others--can frequently lead to unmitigated disaster for everyone concerned.
27. Gaddis, William. The Recognitions (1955)
Gaddis' grand encyclopedic portrait of the (counterfeiting) artist quest-narrative managed to incorporate just about all the major 20th century motifs, while also evoking (among other things) every major era of history, as well as the history of literature, painting and music; little read when it appeared, The Recognitions was a major influence on the young Thomas Pynchon and thus on postmodern fiction generally.
28. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness (1902).
This short, prismatically told odyssey transcends its colonial context to become one of the century's most compelling studies of the permeable membrane separating the bestial from the noble.
29. Heller, Joseph. Catch 22 (1961)
More than any other book, this novel's arrival signaled that a new generation of innovative American authors had arrived; things were never quite the same afterwards.
30. Orwell, George. 1984 (1949).
Orwell's prophecies concerning life under Big Brother didn't come true by 1984, but stay tuned.
32. Hurston, Zora Neal. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
For all those readers who were moved by the passion , brutality, and intimacy of Alice Walker's widely hailed The Color Purple, Hurston's novel should be required reading.
32. Faulkner, William. Absalom Absalom! (1936)
Faulkner combines Quentin Compson's search for himself with a reconstruction of the myth of the Southern past, and in the process confronts the racial hierarchy and abuse that shapes both the actual and imagined historical South. Among other things, this novel has been convincingly cited by critic Brian McHale as marking the dividing line between modernism and postmodernism.
33. Delany, Samuel R.. Dhalgren (1975)
This massive (nearly 900 pages), ambitious, unclassifiable novel transfers the exoticism of other worlds to a surreal, nightmarish urban landscape, a twisted, disrupted vision of Harlem and America's other decaying inner cities; part myth, part dream, part verbal labyrinth, Dhalgren's central character is an artist whose doomed efforts to make sense of the chaos surrounding him become an emblem of all our similar attempts.
34. Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Steinbeck's famous novel about the migration of the Joad family from the Dust Bowl to broken dreams, misery, and a stubborn endurance in California; what may surprise readers today are the many innovative features Steinbeck employs to render this odyssey.
35. Ducornet, Rikki. The Four Elements Tetrology (earth: The Stain 1984, fire: Entering Fire 1986, water: The Fountains of Neptune 1992, and air: The Jade Cabinet 1993).
Using each of the four primal elements as central controlling metaphors, this ambitious tetrology are many different things: vivid and often hilarious portraits of malice, depravity and evil in the tradition of Bosch or Brueghel; ecological and political parables about the 20th century's predilection for war and mass extinction; allegories about mankind's fear of transmutation, chaos, and death and the devastation and misery these fears engender; deeply moving meditations about the mysteries of sex, time, and consciousness; metafictional investigations about the perils and attractions of fabulating, creating, and remembering.
36. Gibson, William. Cyberspace Trilogy (Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988).
Neuromancer's was the novel that not only launched a thousand cyberpunk literary ships but which first found a means of metaphorizing a means of successfully navigating through the "space" of data.
37. Miller, Henry. Tropic of Cancer (1934).
Miller's blend of autobiography and fiction, his refusal to indulge in interpretations or in creating full portraits of his characters, his receptivity and openness to experience generally--not to mention his unabashed, exuberant exploration of sexuality--all helped open up the form and content of novelistic experimentation for postmodernist writers in the second half of this century.
38. Keroac, Jack. On the Road (1957)
Keroac's classic saga of youth adrift in the gray-flannel-suited America, traveling the highways, exploring the midnight negro streets of the cities, passionately searching the vast expanse of America in search of themselves; the novel was literally mind-expanding and helped turn on the generation of youths who would be out on the streets creating the counter-culture revolution of the 60s.
39. McElroy, Joseph. Lookout Cartridge (1974)
McElroy is most important of all "unknown" postmodernist American authors; vaguely analogous to Antonioni's Blow Up, Cartridge is a fascinating, gigantic mystery novel that demonstrates the cross fertilization that has been recently occurring between film and prose fiction.
40. Ballard, J. G.. Crash (1973)
The colonization and seduction of our subconscious by the mediascape, the erotic thrill of violence, the secret satisfactions of watching machines go hay-wire, and the numbing power of mass-produced imagery have never been presented more convincingly.
41. Rushdie, Salmon. Midnight's Children (1981)
A grand romp across the history of that populous and multicultural Mother India, Children draws from sources ranging from myth, to Tristram Shandy, to Bombay's rich film industry.
42. Barth, John. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960).
The greatest of all 18th century novels written in the 20th century, Barth's monumental farce is also a brilliant commentary about the slippery nature of identity.
43. Metcalf, Paul. Genoa (1965)
Metcalf invents a narrative structure--part mosaic, part history, part genealogy, part invention--which appropriates generous selections of materials drawn from the Christopher Columbus myth, Moby Dick, a myriad other sources to develop a narrative that reveals a whole host of connections between the greed and blood-lust of our founding fathers and contemporary Americans.
44. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World (1932)
In this greatest of all 20th century dystopian novels, Huxley develops a chillingly accurate forecast about a civilization which willingly gives itself over not to preestablished human goals but to the self-augmenting, self-perpetuating needs of new technologies which, in his words, "tend always to obey the laws of its own logic."
45. Forster, E. M.. A Passage to India (1924)
In his last and best-known novel, Forster takes the relationships between the English and Indians in India in the early 1920s as a background against which to erect his most searching and complex exploration of the possibilities and limitations, the promises and pitfalls, of human relationships.
46. Federman, Raymond. Double or Nothing (1972).
This obsessive, hilarious, sad, unreadable, wildly inventive metafictional novel-in-the-form-of-200+ concrete-poems (i.e., every page has a different typographical design) is also the most original Holocaust novel yet published.
47. O'Brien, Flann. at swim two birds (1951).
This is a book about a book about a man writing a book about characters who write a book about him; not even Borges or Nabokov ever matched the richness, preposterousness, humor, and linguistic bravado of O'Brien's treatment of the Chinese boxes narrative structure.
48. McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian (1965),
Rendered in a blood-stained prose style that is as unique and instantly recognizable as that of Hemmingway's or Faulkner's, McCarthy's unrelentingly horrific Sam Peckinpah-meets-Hieronymus Bosch novel deconstructs not only the familiar Western archetypes of cowboys and Indians but also the revisionist versions that transform white men into villains and red men into good-guy victims.
49. Hawkes, John. The Cannibal (1949)
Nowhere has the nightmare of human terror and the deracinated sensibility been more concisely analyzed than in this groundbreaking novel (Hawkes' first), which helped usher in the postmodern era of literary experimentalism.
50. Wright, Richard. Native Son (1940)
No other black author of this century took greater risks than Wright in this harrowing novel, where he creates a protagonist (Bigger Thomas) who murders a white woman--and then demands that we understand and even empathize with this act.
51 West, Nathaniel. The Day of the Locust (1939)
This remains the Hollywood novel, as well as one of the finest apocalyptic/millennial works of the 20th century.
52. Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood.
In this haunting, dream-like novel, Barnes uses homosexuality as a metaphor for the condition of the human soul.
53. Robinson, Marilynn. Housekeeping (1981).
In this haunting, lyrical ode to loss, the eruption of the past into the present and the illusory nature of any attempt at permanence help shape the personality of one of contemporary fiction's most memorable narrators.
54. Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. Slaughterhouse Five (1969).
Vonnegut here reinvents his own experiences, both as witness to and novelistic chronicler of the greatest massacre in human history (the fire-bombing of Dresden). So it goes. As much as any other novel from the 60s, Slaughterhouse Five established metafiction as the postmodernist literary form capable of offering writers an escape from the stifling fantasies of traditional "realism."
55. DeLillo, Don. Libra (1986)
This novel depicts the ambiguous personalities and events that culminated in the central mythological event that lies at the heart of the mystery of postmodern America: the assassination of Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald.
56. O'Conner, Flannery. Wise Blood (1952).
O'Conner explores the twisted longings, violence, religious fervor, and derangements of life in America's rural South in a manner that reminds one of Kafka, Carver, and (inevitably) Faulkner.
57. LeGuin, Ursula K.. Always Coming Home (1985).
Part initiation story, part political allegory, part philosophical mediation, this book introduces a rich variety of cultural artifacts of an imaginary culture, including recipes, music (some editions included an audiocassette), drama, folktales, descriptions of native flora and fauna, and drawings.
58. Dos Passos, John. USA Trilogy (The 42nd Parallel 1930, 1919 1932, and The Big Money 1936).
These "collective novels" depict the vast panorama of post WWI American life by describing the destinies of the masses of men and women rather than individuals; Dos Passos relied on an array of innovative formal devices influenced by the rise of mass media, Camera eyes, newsreels, quick flash techniques, capsule biographies and other mixtures of news stories, bits of song lyrics, and newspaper headlines.
59. Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook (1961)?
Metafictional impulses are evident in many of this century's great novels, and Lessing's is one example which demonstrates that writing-about-writing need not preclude psychological investigation or an active engagement in politics.
60. Salinger, J.D.. The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Still holding the record for the book responsible for the most firings of American high school teachers, Salinger's memorable and poignant initiation novel evoked the emptiness and phoniness of post WWII American life with conviction and humanity; it also captured the poetry of American teenage lingo better than any book since Huckleberry Finn.
61. Hammett, Dashiell. Red Harvest (1929)
The Maltese Falcon is the best known of Hammett's work, partly due to the great film version, but it was Red Harvest which almost single-handedly shaped the premises of hard-boiled fiction that would be endlessly reworked by authors throughout the rest of the century.
62. Carver, Raymond. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)
Carver writes about troubled people on the outs--out of work, out of love, out of touch--whose confusions, turmoils, and poignancy are conveyed through an interplay of surface detail; here he pushed this elliptical, spare style to its most extreme form--and created a collection that would have a decisive impact on the short story form during the last quarter of this century.
63. Joyce, James. Dubliners (1915)
These intricately intertwined stories are not only vividly drawn, meticulously accurate sketches of turn-of-the-century Dublin but collectively allowed Joyce to come directly to terms with the life he had rejected and the ways this rejection might be figured in art; like his later, more ambitious books, Dubliners is also a book that transcends its immediate focus to become microcosms, small-scale models of all human life, of all history, and geography.
64. Toomer, Jean. Cane (1925)
Blending poetry, theater, and fiction, this landmark experimental novel of the 20s movingly portrayed the rootlessness of black life in white America and made Toomer a leading figure of the Harlem Literary Renaissance.
65. Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth (1905)
While Wharton raises questions about American capitalism, class structure, and gender relations that would endure throughout the century, it is her artistry--her eloquence and control as a stylist, her nuanced employment of the comedy of manners mode that only James rivals that makes this book, in its own time and ours, such a broad and major accomplishment.
66. Hoban, Russell. Ridley Walker (1982)
Set in a nightmarish post-nuclear British landscape and presented in one of the most memorable and original voices conceived in this century, this novel is also, along with Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, the closest contemporary counterpart to Twain's Huck Finn
67. William Eastlake Checkerboard Trilogy (Go in Beauty 1955,The Bronc People
1958, Portrait of the Artist with 26 Horses 1962).
Back in the late 50s and early 60s, William Eastlake was single-handedly changing the scope, poetic range, thematic assumptions, and treatment of character--especially that of Native Americans--of the Western genre. His surreal, humorous, was a decisive influence on later novelists such as Larry McMurtry and Tom McGuane.
68. Elkin, Stanley. The Franchiser (1976).
This novel perfectly embodies Elkin's greatest literary accomplishment: the creation of wonderfully rich and excessive language which serves to unmask the beauty and wonder that is normally locked within the vulgar, disheartening, and ordinary aspects of contemporary life.
69. Auster, Paul. New York Trilogy (City of Glass 1985, Ghosts 1986, The Locked Room 1986).
Auster's Trilogy introduced a new literary figure (described by Dennis Drabbelle as the "post-existential private-eye") and a form of storytelling emphasizing the formal peculiarities and epistemological quandaries of the genre while simultaneously presenting a haunting evocation of the noisy, bewildering and crowded anonymity of New York City--the only constant character in the Trilogy.
70. Robbins, Tom. Skinny Legs and All (1986)
Robbins uses the Dance of the Seven Veils as a kind of elaborate framing device to examine many of the most basic issues that define our existence: what is the nature of sexuality, and what is the relationship between the male a female aspects we all share? how can people break free of the systems (political, spiritual, social) that repress our natural passions and sense of play, that rigidify belief into dogma, that encourage us to stop personal exploration?
71. Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest (1995).
This unwieldy but very highly engaging novel ambitiously explores themes encompassing politics, philosophy, gender roles, and personal identity. These themes are presented through a range of unusual and poetic voices and narrative structures designed to model the difficulties involved in distinguishing pop-cultural appearance from reality or establishing meaningful connections between media-generated images and their referents.
72. Marcus, Ben. The Age of Wire and String (1996).
The first full replenishment of the language since the works of Burroughs and Gass in the 1960s and the most completely original work of fiction to appear in the 90s.
73. Mathews, Harry. Tlooth (1966).
Along with Frank Norris' McTeague, this is the greatest of all "dentist novels." Like his French counterpart, Georges Perec, Mathews has been heavily influenced by his involvement in the OULIPO group of radical European avant-gardists; and as with Perec, there is a great deal more going on here than the brilliance of his elegant language, word play, and intricate formal design.
74. Coover, Robert. Pricksongs and Descants (1969)
The most exuberant display of innovation using the short story form of any collection of fictions from the first wave of postmodernism, this collection ultimately had an even greater impact on writers in the 70s and 80s than Lost in the Funhouse or Barthelme's Unspeakable Practices.
75. Dick, Phillip K.. The Man in the High Castle (1962)
Working as he did on the treadmill of genre SF, Dick never wrote a single work which can be termed a "masterpiece," although this alternate world novel--with its many surprising twists and equally surprisingly
and surprisingly subtle treatment of Asian themes--comes close.
76. Ellis, Brett Easton. American Psycho (1988)
The most notorious and widely denounced American novel of the 80s, American Psycho is also a brilliantly inventive , wickedly funny novel whose monumentally excessive depiction of media imagery becomes a devastating critique of the horror and banality that characterizes an American life dominated by the cultural logic of hyperconsumer capitalism.
77. Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969).
At once a meticulously rendered Victorian novel and a metafictional deconstruction of such novels, this work also used its 19th century materials as a means of exploring gender, class and existential dilemmas that were as common in the 60s as they were when Charles Dickens was writing.
78. Wolfe, Gene. The Book of the New Sun Tetrology (The Shadow of the Torturer 1980, The Claw of the Conciliator 1981, The Sword of Lictor 1982, The Citadel of the Autarch 1982), Gene Wolfe
In this sprawling series of interrelated novels set in some distant future Wolfe conjures up an epic adventure that unfolds as a series of sensuously rendered, fabulous micro-quests and mock summaries of cultural artifacts reminiscent of Borges or Calvino.
79. Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange (1962)
Burgess invents a marvelously appropriate language to depict a nightmarish, dystopian version of an England populated by the same sort of angry, nihilist "ultra-violent," figures that Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols would later celebrated during punk's mid-70s heyday.
80. Albany Trilogy (Legs 1976, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game 1978, Ironweed 1983), William Kennedy
Kennedy's Trilogy is a remarkable fusion of a real landscape of loud, swinging speakeasies, all-night diners, and hobo jungles--with the landscape of his imagination, where the dead walk side by side with the living, and a bowling alley or pool hall can become a scene of truly epic proportions; like the Dublin of Joyce's imagination, Kennedy's Albany is recreated with meticulous attention to detail but is also imbued with a universality that allows us to recognize something of our own fears, guilt, passions, and ambitions.
81. Gass, William H.. The Tunnel (1995)
As this monumental novel's narrator digs into his own past, his own loves and hatred, and that of Nazi Germany, he creates a hole driven into both language and the book's central theme: the fascism of the heart.
82. Gass, William H. Omensetter's Luck.
From page one until its conclusion, Gass delights and amazes by reeling off one sensuous, loving constructed sentence after another.
83. Bowles, Paul. The Sheltering Sky (1948)
Bowles plunges his readers into a desert landscape whose awe inspiring beauty and indifference to humanity has never been rendered so lovingly--or so harrowingly.
84. Theroux, Alexander. Darcanonville's Cat (1981)
Theroux uses love the way Melville used his white whale-- a metaphor to be exhausted, improvised, played with, and otherwise endlessly explored until it eventually reveals the utter inexhaustibility and mystery of life itself.
85. Sukenick, Ronald. Up (1968)
This wildly inventive, comic novel unfolds as collages of desperate elements: surreal depictions of alienation in the manner of Kafka and Orwell, didactic commentaries about politics, metaphysics, culture, and (of course) literature, flights of fantasy that included numerous outrageous sexual episodes, and reflexive metafictional asides about the book we're reading and the status of the novel generally in the era of post realism; Up's wit and intelligence, its formal extremity--and the appropriateness of its experiments for allowing Sukenick to investigate his own life and the larger context of the disruptions occurring in America during the 60s--made this book among the most daring books of the first wave of pomo innovation.
86. Reed, Ishamel. Yellow Back Radio Broke Down (1972)?
Reed's brash, hoodoo-meets-horse-opera approach to the Wild West signaled the arrival of the first major Black voice in postmodernism.
87. Anderson, Sherwood. Winesberg Ohio (1919)
One of the first books to convincingly employ Freudian psychology to revealing the inner workings of ordinary characters, this collection used a small-town setting as a means of examining the neuroses and obsessions of American life in a manner that has only been rivaled by Flannery O'Conner for sheer intensity and insight.
88. Vollmann, William T.. You Bright and Risen Angels (1987)
In the most ambitious and original debuts since Pynchon's V., Vollmann develops a dense, sprawling novelistic "cartoon" in which bugs and electricity become motifs used to explore the revolutionary impulses that have arisen in response to the evils of industrialism. Moving across vast areas of history and geography, filled with arcane information and surrealist literalizations of sexual longings and violence, and blending together autobiography and fictive invention in a typically po-mo manner, this book's wild flights of improvisational prose and intensity of vision signaled the arrival America's most gifted novelist of the century's last 25 years.
89.Mailer, Norman. The Naked and the Dead (1948)
As is well known, Mailer departed for WWII convinced that his experiences would provide him with the ingredients for writing the great novel about this century's greatest conflagration. This novel proved him to be right.
90. Coover, Robert. The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968).
The greatest "sports novel" of the century (only Don DeLillo's End Zone is even in the same 'ballpark") , The UBA used baseball as an elaborate framing device that allows him to explore American culture, history, and politics from various fascinating angles; along the way, he also develops an elaborate and brilliantly conceived metaphor of the relationship of man to God and the fictional systems man has created (myth, literature, philosophy, religion) to make sense of the world.
91.Katz, Steve. Creamy and Delicious (1971).
The most extreme and perfectly executed fictional work to emerge from the Pop Art scene of the late 60s, this collection also includes one of the great undiscovered treasures of the postmodern short story form, the Raymond Roussel-influenced gem, "3 Satisfying Stories"; also notable for Katz's success in creating po-mo's first successful literary analogue to "the Big Crunch"-see p. 43.
92. Coetzee, J. M.. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)
Narrated by a middle-aged magistrate of an unspecified colonial outpost, this hallucinatory allegory of imperialism poetically chronicles the interconnections existing between power-wielders and their victims.
93. Sturgeon, Theodore. More than Human (1951)
Anyone who isn't aware that SF has produced some great prose writers need only go to page one of this Sturgeon classic evocation of "homo gestalt" to educate themselves.
94. Sorrentino, Gilbert. Mulligan Stew (1979)
Sorrentino's epic, obsessive, metafictional "tour de farce" includes bits of detective fiction, a masque, letters (including a generous selection of the dozens of rejection letters the book piled up), poetry, porn, and a great deal else; in the end, the book becomes a fascinating, humorous meditation on the comic possibilities of the modern literary imagination-- well as an angry denunciation of the ways these possibilities are subverted in today's publishing industry.
95. Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel (1929).
In an age of hard-boiled realism, this enormous, rough edged beast of novel was a lyrical, uncontrolled, Whitmanesque cry of yearning that remains of the most important statements of American's sense of hope, alienation, memory, and (above all) voracious appetite for new experiences.
96. Dreiser, Theodore. An American Tragedy (1925)
This novel's significance lies partly in Dreiser's ability to use Clyde Griffith's soul-hunger and eventual destruction to describe a uniquely American form of tragedy while also suggesting something about the more universal plight of individuals caught up in vast socio-economic forces which they are only dimly aware of.
97 Mooney, Ted. Easy Travels to Other Planets (1981).
Blending mainstream's emphasis on psychological depth with an eerie ambiance of SF (an impending war in the Antarctic, information sickness) this haunting, lyrical novel perfectly exemplifies the blend of the postmodern mainstream and SF to be found in the other two novels (i.e., DeLillo's White Noise and Gibson's Neuromancer) which best captured the vast, media-driven transformations at work in American life during the 80s.
98.Erickson, Steve. Tours of the Black Clock (1989)
This novel combined Faulkner's mesmerizing ability to explode time and space with Marquez's magical realist ability to magically exaggerate aspects of the familiar until they can be seen clearly once again; the result is a haunting and grotesque evocation of the shattered nature of 20th century life and its ongoing love affair with fascism and violence.
99. Acker, Kathy. In Memorium to Identity (1990)
By the time this--her most moving and effective novel--appeared, Acker had already published nearly a dozen books whose punk-influenced, demolition derby approach to writing fiction had already had the greatest impact on writing by women of anyone of her generation.
100. Delany, Samuel R.. Hogg (1996)
The most shocking novel published in the 20th century.
(100 English-Language Books of Fiction)
[Larry McCaffery teaches American literature at San Diego State University and is co-editor of the journal Fiction International. Thanks to Carl Molina for contributing this list. --Ed.].
1. Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire (1962)
The most audaciously conceived novel of the century--and the most perfectly execute--this is also the book whose existence could have been the most difficult to anticipate in the year 1900.
2. Joyce, James. Ulysses (1922)
Not so much the beginning of anything as the culmination of the great 19th century symbolic realist tradition
3. Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Like Ulysses, Pynchon's masterpiece has cast an enormous, intimidating shadow across the entire literary landscape.
4. Coover, Robert. The Public Burning (1977)
A book controversial enough that its publisher almost immediately took it out of print (where stayed for over 15 years), this novel featured a surprisingly sympathetic Richard Nixon as its principle narrator and used the Rosenberg case as a means of examining just about everything worth examining about America during the McCarthy era; excessive and encyclopedic, dazzling in its range of styles, bitterly angry and bitingly humorous, this is the most brilliant and original "political novel" ever published in America.
5. Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury (1929)
Along with raising Southern gothic to an art form, this book ranks with Pale Fire in terms of its audacious treatment of point of view and created in Jason Compson perhaps the most memorable villain of the century.
6. Beckett, Samuel. Trilogy (Molloy 1953 , Malone Dies 1956, The Unnamable 1957).
Beckett took self-consciousness, solipsism, ultimacy, and minimalism to the brink of silence--where he, thankfully, retreated just in time.
7. Stein, Gertrude. The Making of Americans (1925)
Stein's prose is Stein's prose is Stein's prose. This sprawling novel is still one of the most perceptive examinations of American life and values. Like her other mature work, this book is rich with puns, rhythmic phrases, and word repetitions; it is also a vibrant, breathtaking expression of Stein's lifelong love affair with individual words and a demonstration that the music, rhythm, and repetitive power of words matters just as much as their representational qualities. As with Burroughs' experiments a half century later, Stein's methods were so truly radical that it would take several generations before authors got around to figuring out how they might be applied to their own writing.
8. Burroughs, William. Nova Trilogy (The Soft Machine 1962, Nova Express 1964, The Ticket that Exploded, 1967).
Space odysseys, Uranium Willy and the Heavy Metal Kid, image banks and silence viruses, protopunk "wild boys" engaged in an apocalyptic guerrilla-warfare, body and mind invasion, the Nova Mob matching wits with the Nova police (hampered by the corrupt Biologic Courts) for control of The Reality Studio--these hallucinatory SF elements interact with shards of poetry by Rimbaud, Shakespeare and Eliot (and much, much more) to fuel Burroughs' atomic powered strap-on, which probes the asshole of society with more glee and wicked humor than anyone since Swift.
9. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita (1955)
A richly humorous, satiric look at American life in the late 40s, a profound (and profoundly disturbing) commentary about the ability of the creative mind to transform the monstrous into breathtaking art, Lolita is above all this century's most passionate and most memorable lover story.
10. Joyce, James. Finnegans' Wake (1941)
The greatest unreadable novel ever written.
11. Federman, Raymond. Take It or Leave It (1975)
The first--and still the definitive--poststructuralist novel written in English, Federman's crazed journey to chaos and erasure ranks, along with Kerouac's The Open Road , and Wright's Going Native, as the greatest of all American road novels.
12. Morrison, Toni. Beloved (1986)
A poetically rendered cry of pain and a plea for forgiveness and understanding, this book won for Morrison a Nobel Prize (though not a place in the Modern Library List).
13. Wright, Stephen. Going Native (1994).
Robert Coover's blurb says it all: "A sensational, prime-time novel. Imagine a pornographic twilight zone of beebee-eyed serial killers, drug-stunned pants-dropping road warriors and marauding armies of mental vampires, a nightmarish country of unparalleled savagery, where there is no longer any membrane between screen and life and the monster image feed in inexhaustible and the good guys are the scariest ones of all."
14. Lowery, Malcolm. Under the Volcano (1949)
The hell of alcoholism and the self has never been rendered more passionately or convincingly.
15. Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse (1927)
The most extreme and poetic of Woolf's treatments of the stream of consciousness motif
16. Gass, William H.. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968)
Gass is arguably America's greatest living prose writer, and this collection includes two stories--"The Pederson Kid" and "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country"--which rank among the finest achievements in the short story form.
17. Gaddis, William. JR (1975)
Gaddis's humor, his ear for the music of American idioms, his brilliant orchestration of materials, and his sure-handed treatment of the ways capitalism controls every aspect of our lives insures that JR will be one of the most discussed novels during the 21st century.
18. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man (1952)
Ellison's blues-drenched, symbol-and-idiom rich depiction of the development of youth into maturity, disillusionment, and self-realization not only sums up the ways that black people have been preyed on by whites throughout American history but illuminates the process that transforms us all into invisible people.
19. DeLillo, Don. Underworld (1997)
The best novel by the author who has produced the most significant body of work of all post-WWII American writers, Underworld is at once a brilliant analysis of the fate of America's hopes and dreams as it approaches the millennium and a haunting, lovingly presented lament for the lost lives and words the 50s.
20. Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. (1926)
Employing a startlingly innovative method of rendering the lives and attitudes of a "lost generation" of Americans seeking some sort of substitute for the values and meanings had been destroyed by WWI, this novel would also have a decisive impact on Raymond Carver and other American "minimalists" later in the century.
21. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
Probably the most taught novel of them all, still one of the great initiation novels, and also one of the most expressive descriptions of what all great writers must leave behind in order to follow the muse, Portrait's early experimentations with stream-of-consciousness helped lay the groundwork for Joyce's far grander forays into human consciousness in Ulysses .
22. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby (1925).
A novel whose gorgeous flights of lyricism is matched only by its ability to tease out what is most debased about the American Dream--and what is most enduring as well.
23. James, Henry. The Ambassadors (1903).
The style found in the late-James novels was as intricate, psychologically nuanced, and attuned to the inner workings of the mind as those developed somewhat later in the stream-of-consciousness techniques employed by Joyce, Faulkner and others.
24. Lawrence, D.H.. Women in Love (1921)
The book where Lawrence finally achieved his goal of finding a means of rendering the non-verbal operations determining the interactions of men and women.
25. Barthelme, Donald. 60 Stories (1981).
Barthelme's surrealist, avant-pop treatments of life in a media-drenched Manhattan are still unrivaled in their ability to suggest how an aesthetics of trash could effectively conjure up a convincing vision of American life generally.
26. Vollmann, William T.. The Rifles (1993)
Vollmann leads readers into a labyrinthine, nightmarish descent into madness, cannibalism, death, and self-confrontation--all depicted by in excruciatingly vivid and emotionally honest detail; we also become witness to one man's ability to test what is best about himself, to confront the personal weaknesses most people deny, and the ways that even what is best in ourselves--our desire to seek the truth about ourselves and the world, to know and help others--can frequently lead to unmitigated disaster for everyone concerned.
27. Gaddis, William. The Recognitions (1955)
Gaddis' grand encyclopedic portrait of the (counterfeiting) artist quest-narrative managed to incorporate just about all the major 20th century motifs, while also evoking (among other things) every major era of history, as well as the history of literature, painting and music; little read when it appeared, The Recognitions was a major influence on the young Thomas Pynchon and thus on postmodern fiction generally.
28. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness (1902).
This short, prismatically told odyssey transcends its colonial context to become one of the century's most compelling studies of the permeable membrane separating the bestial from the noble.
29. Heller, Joseph. Catch 22 (1961)
More than any other book, this novel's arrival signaled that a new generation of innovative American authors had arrived; things were never quite the same afterwards.
30. Orwell, George. 1984 (1949).
Orwell's prophecies concerning life under Big Brother didn't come true by 1984, but stay tuned.
32. Hurston, Zora Neal. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
For all those readers who were moved by the passion , brutality, and intimacy of Alice Walker's widely hailed The Color Purple, Hurston's novel should be required reading.
32. Faulkner, William. Absalom Absalom! (1936)
Faulkner combines Quentin Compson's search for himself with a reconstruction of the myth of the Southern past, and in the process confronts the racial hierarchy and abuse that shapes both the actual and imagined historical South. Among other things, this novel has been convincingly cited by critic Brian McHale as marking the dividing line between modernism and postmodernism.
33. Delany, Samuel R.. Dhalgren (1975)
This massive (nearly 900 pages), ambitious, unclassifiable novel transfers the exoticism of other worlds to a surreal, nightmarish urban landscape, a twisted, disrupted vision of Harlem and America's other decaying inner cities; part myth, part dream, part verbal labyrinth, Dhalgren's central character is an artist whose doomed efforts to make sense of the chaos surrounding him become an emblem of all our similar attempts.
34. Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Steinbeck's famous novel about the migration of the Joad family from the Dust Bowl to broken dreams, misery, and a stubborn endurance in California; what may surprise readers today are the many innovative features Steinbeck employs to render this odyssey.
35. Ducornet, Rikki. The Four Elements Tetrology (earth: The Stain 1984, fire: Entering Fire 1986, water: The Fountains of Neptune 1992, and air: The Jade Cabinet 1993).
Using each of the four primal elements as central controlling metaphors, this ambitious tetrology are many different things: vivid and often hilarious portraits of malice, depravity and evil in the tradition of Bosch or Brueghel; ecological and political parables about the 20th century's predilection for war and mass extinction; allegories about mankind's fear of transmutation, chaos, and death and the devastation and misery these fears engender; deeply moving meditations about the mysteries of sex, time, and consciousness; metafictional investigations about the perils and attractions of fabulating, creating, and remembering.
36. Gibson, William. Cyberspace Trilogy (Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988).
Neuromancer's was the novel that not only launched a thousand cyberpunk literary ships but which first found a means of metaphorizing a means of successfully navigating through the "space" of data.
37. Miller, Henry. Tropic of Cancer (1934).
Miller's blend of autobiography and fiction, his refusal to indulge in interpretations or in creating full portraits of his characters, his receptivity and openness to experience generally--not to mention his unabashed, exuberant exploration of sexuality--all helped open up the form and content of novelistic experimentation for postmodernist writers in the second half of this century.
38. Keroac, Jack. On the Road (1957)
Keroac's classic saga of youth adrift in the gray-flannel-suited America, traveling the highways, exploring the midnight negro streets of the cities, passionately searching the vast expanse of America in search of themselves; the novel was literally mind-expanding and helped turn on the generation of youths who would be out on the streets creating the counter-culture revolution of the 60s.
39. McElroy, Joseph. Lookout Cartridge (1974)
McElroy is most important of all "unknown" postmodernist American authors; vaguely analogous to Antonioni's Blow Up, Cartridge is a fascinating, gigantic mystery novel that demonstrates the cross fertilization that has been recently occurring between film and prose fiction.
40. Ballard, J. G.. Crash (1973)
The colonization and seduction of our subconscious by the mediascape, the erotic thrill of violence, the secret satisfactions of watching machines go hay-wire, and the numbing power of mass-produced imagery have never been presented more convincingly.
41. Rushdie, Salmon. Midnight's Children (1981)
A grand romp across the history of that populous and multicultural Mother India, Children draws from sources ranging from myth, to Tristram Shandy, to Bombay's rich film industry.
42. Barth, John. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960).
The greatest of all 18th century novels written in the 20th century, Barth's monumental farce is also a brilliant commentary about the slippery nature of identity.
43. Metcalf, Paul. Genoa (1965)
Metcalf invents a narrative structure--part mosaic, part history, part genealogy, part invention--which appropriates generous selections of materials drawn from the Christopher Columbus myth, Moby Dick, a myriad other sources to develop a narrative that reveals a whole host of connections between the greed and blood-lust of our founding fathers and contemporary Americans.
44. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World (1932)
In this greatest of all 20th century dystopian novels, Huxley develops a chillingly accurate forecast about a civilization which willingly gives itself over not to preestablished human goals but to the self-augmenting, self-perpetuating needs of new technologies which, in his words, "tend always to obey the laws of its own logic."
45. Forster, E. M.. A Passage to India (1924)
In his last and best-known novel, Forster takes the relationships between the English and Indians in India in the early 1920s as a background against which to erect his most searching and complex exploration of the possibilities and limitations, the promises and pitfalls, of human relationships.
46. Federman, Raymond. Double or Nothing (1972).
This obsessive, hilarious, sad, unreadable, wildly inventive metafictional novel-in-the-form-of-200+ concrete-poems (i.e., every page has a different typographical design) is also the most original Holocaust novel yet published.
47. O'Brien, Flann. at swim two birds (1951).
This is a book about a book about a man writing a book about characters who write a book about him; not even Borges or Nabokov ever matched the richness, preposterousness, humor, and linguistic bravado of O'Brien's treatment of the Chinese boxes narrative structure.
48. McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian (1965),
Rendered in a blood-stained prose style that is as unique and instantly recognizable as that of Hemmingway's or Faulkner's, McCarthy's unrelentingly horrific Sam Peckinpah-meets-Hieronymus Bosch novel deconstructs not only the familiar Western archetypes of cowboys and Indians but also the revisionist versions that transform white men into villains and red men into good-guy victims.
49. Hawkes, John. The Cannibal (1949)
Nowhere has the nightmare of human terror and the deracinated sensibility been more concisely analyzed than in this groundbreaking novel (Hawkes' first), which helped usher in the postmodern era of literary experimentalism.
50. Wright, Richard. Native Son (1940)
No other black author of this century took greater risks than Wright in this harrowing novel, where he creates a protagonist (Bigger Thomas) who murders a white woman--and then demands that we understand and even empathize with this act.
51 West, Nathaniel. The Day of the Locust (1939)
This remains the Hollywood novel, as well as one of the finest apocalyptic/millennial works of the 20th century.
52. Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood.
In this haunting, dream-like novel, Barnes uses homosexuality as a metaphor for the condition of the human soul.
53. Robinson, Marilynn. Housekeeping (1981).
In this haunting, lyrical ode to loss, the eruption of the past into the present and the illusory nature of any attempt at permanence help shape the personality of one of contemporary fiction's most memorable narrators.
54. Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. Slaughterhouse Five (1969).
Vonnegut here reinvents his own experiences, both as witness to and novelistic chronicler of the greatest massacre in human history (the fire-bombing of Dresden). So it goes. As much as any other novel from the 60s, Slaughterhouse Five established metafiction as the postmodernist literary form capable of offering writers an escape from the stifling fantasies of traditional "realism."
55. DeLillo, Don. Libra (1986)
This novel depicts the ambiguous personalities and events that culminated in the central mythological event that lies at the heart of the mystery of postmodern America: the assassination of Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald.
56. O'Conner, Flannery. Wise Blood (1952).
O'Conner explores the twisted longings, violence, religious fervor, and derangements of life in America's rural South in a manner that reminds one of Kafka, Carver, and (inevitably) Faulkner.
57. LeGuin, Ursula K.. Always Coming Home (1985).
Part initiation story, part political allegory, part philosophical mediation, this book introduces a rich variety of cultural artifacts of an imaginary culture, including recipes, music (some editions included an audiocassette), drama, folktales, descriptions of native flora and fauna, and drawings.
58. Dos Passos, John. USA Trilogy (The 42nd Parallel 1930, 1919 1932, and The Big Money 1936).
These "collective novels" depict the vast panorama of post WWI American life by describing the destinies of the masses of men and women rather than individuals; Dos Passos relied on an array of innovative formal devices influenced by the rise of mass media, Camera eyes, newsreels, quick flash techniques, capsule biographies and other mixtures of news stories, bits of song lyrics, and newspaper headlines.
59. Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook (1961)?
Metafictional impulses are evident in many of this century's great novels, and Lessing's is one example which demonstrates that writing-about-writing need not preclude psychological investigation or an active engagement in politics.
60. Salinger, J.D.. The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Still holding the record for the book responsible for the most firings of American high school teachers, Salinger's memorable and poignant initiation novel evoked the emptiness and phoniness of post WWII American life with conviction and humanity; it also captured the poetry of American teenage lingo better than any book since Huckleberry Finn.
61. Hammett, Dashiell. Red Harvest (1929)
The Maltese Falcon is the best known of Hammett's work, partly due to the great film version, but it was Red Harvest which almost single-handedly shaped the premises of hard-boiled fiction that would be endlessly reworked by authors throughout the rest of the century.
62. Carver, Raymond. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)
Carver writes about troubled people on the outs--out of work, out of love, out of touch--whose confusions, turmoils, and poignancy are conveyed through an interplay of surface detail; here he pushed this elliptical, spare style to its most extreme form--and created a collection that would have a decisive impact on the short story form during the last quarter of this century.
63. Joyce, James. Dubliners (1915)
These intricately intertwined stories are not only vividly drawn, meticulously accurate sketches of turn-of-the-century Dublin but collectively allowed Joyce to come directly to terms with the life he had rejected and the ways this rejection might be figured in art; like his later, more ambitious books, Dubliners is also a book that transcends its immediate focus to become microcosms, small-scale models of all human life, of all history, and geography.
64. Toomer, Jean. Cane (1925)
Blending poetry, theater, and fiction, this landmark experimental novel of the 20s movingly portrayed the rootlessness of black life in white America and made Toomer a leading figure of the Harlem Literary Renaissance.
65. Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth (1905)
While Wharton raises questions about American capitalism, class structure, and gender relations that would endure throughout the century, it is her artistry--her eloquence and control as a stylist, her nuanced employment of the comedy of manners mode that only James rivals that makes this book, in its own time and ours, such a broad and major accomplishment.
66. Hoban, Russell. Ridley Walker (1982)
Set in a nightmarish post-nuclear British landscape and presented in one of the most memorable and original voices conceived in this century, this novel is also, along with Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, the closest contemporary counterpart to Twain's Huck Finn
67. William Eastlake Checkerboard Trilogy (Go in Beauty 1955,The Bronc People
1958, Portrait of the Artist with 26 Horses 1962).
Back in the late 50s and early 60s, William Eastlake was single-handedly changing the scope, poetic range, thematic assumptions, and treatment of character--especially that of Native Americans--of the Western genre. His surreal, humorous, was a decisive influence on later novelists such as Larry McMurtry and Tom McGuane.
68. Elkin, Stanley. The Franchiser (1976).
This novel perfectly embodies Elkin's greatest literary accomplishment: the creation of wonderfully rich and excessive language which serves to unmask the beauty and wonder that is normally locked within the vulgar, disheartening, and ordinary aspects of contemporary life.
69. Auster, Paul. New York Trilogy (City of Glass 1985, Ghosts 1986, The Locked Room 1986).
Auster's Trilogy introduced a new literary figure (described by Dennis Drabbelle as the "post-existential private-eye") and a form of storytelling emphasizing the formal peculiarities and epistemological quandaries of the genre while simultaneously presenting a haunting evocation of the noisy, bewildering and crowded anonymity of New York City--the only constant character in the Trilogy.
70. Robbins, Tom. Skinny Legs and All (1986)
Robbins uses the Dance of the Seven Veils as a kind of elaborate framing device to examine many of the most basic issues that define our existence: what is the nature of sexuality, and what is the relationship between the male a female aspects we all share? how can people break free of the systems (political, spiritual, social) that repress our natural passions and sense of play, that rigidify belief into dogma, that encourage us to stop personal exploration?
71. Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest (1995).
This unwieldy but very highly engaging novel ambitiously explores themes encompassing politics, philosophy, gender roles, and personal identity. These themes are presented through a range of unusual and poetic voices and narrative structures designed to model the difficulties involved in distinguishing pop-cultural appearance from reality or establishing meaningful connections between media-generated images and their referents.
72. Marcus, Ben. The Age of Wire and String (1996).
The first full replenishment of the language since the works of Burroughs and Gass in the 1960s and the most completely original work of fiction to appear in the 90s.
73. Mathews, Harry. Tlooth (1966).
Along with Frank Norris' McTeague, this is the greatest of all "dentist novels." Like his French counterpart, Georges Perec, Mathews has been heavily influenced by his involvement in the OULIPO group of radical European avant-gardists; and as with Perec, there is a great deal more going on here than the brilliance of his elegant language, word play, and intricate formal design.
74. Coover, Robert. Pricksongs and Descants (1969)
The most exuberant display of innovation using the short story form of any collection of fictions from the first wave of postmodernism, this collection ultimately had an even greater impact on writers in the 70s and 80s than Lost in the Funhouse or Barthelme's Unspeakable Practices.
75. Dick, Phillip K.. The Man in the High Castle (1962)
Working as he did on the treadmill of genre SF, Dick never wrote a single work which can be termed a "masterpiece," although this alternate world novel--with its many surprising twists and equally surprisingly
and surprisingly subtle treatment of Asian themes--comes close.
76. Ellis, Brett Easton. American Psycho (1988)
The most notorious and widely denounced American novel of the 80s, American Psycho is also a brilliantly inventive , wickedly funny novel whose monumentally excessive depiction of media imagery becomes a devastating critique of the horror and banality that characterizes an American life dominated by the cultural logic of hyperconsumer capitalism.
77. Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969).
At once a meticulously rendered Victorian novel and a metafictional deconstruction of such novels, this work also used its 19th century materials as a means of exploring gender, class and existential dilemmas that were as common in the 60s as they were when Charles Dickens was writing.
78. Wolfe, Gene. The Book of the New Sun Tetrology (The Shadow of the Torturer 1980, The Claw of the Conciliator 1981, The Sword of Lictor 1982, The Citadel of the Autarch 1982), Gene Wolfe
In this sprawling series of interrelated novels set in some distant future Wolfe conjures up an epic adventure that unfolds as a series of sensuously rendered, fabulous micro-quests and mock summaries of cultural artifacts reminiscent of Borges or Calvino.
79. Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange (1962)
Burgess invents a marvelously appropriate language to depict a nightmarish, dystopian version of an England populated by the same sort of angry, nihilist "ultra-violent," figures that Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols would later celebrated during punk's mid-70s heyday.
80. Albany Trilogy (Legs 1976, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game 1978, Ironweed 1983), William Kennedy
Kennedy's Trilogy is a remarkable fusion of a real landscape of loud, swinging speakeasies, all-night diners, and hobo jungles--with the landscape of his imagination, where the dead walk side by side with the living, and a bowling alley or pool hall can become a scene of truly epic proportions; like the Dublin of Joyce's imagination, Kennedy's Albany is recreated with meticulous attention to detail but is also imbued with a universality that allows us to recognize something of our own fears, guilt, passions, and ambitions.
81. Gass, William H.. The Tunnel (1995)
As this monumental novel's narrator digs into his own past, his own loves and hatred, and that of Nazi Germany, he creates a hole driven into both language and the book's central theme: the fascism of the heart.
82. Gass, William H. Omensetter's Luck.
From page one until its conclusion, Gass delights and amazes by reeling off one sensuous, loving constructed sentence after another.
83. Bowles, Paul. The Sheltering Sky (1948)
Bowles plunges his readers into a desert landscape whose awe inspiring beauty and indifference to humanity has never been rendered so lovingly--or so harrowingly.
84. Theroux, Alexander. Darcanonville's Cat (1981)
Theroux uses love the way Melville used his white whale-- a metaphor to be exhausted, improvised, played with, and otherwise endlessly explored until it eventually reveals the utter inexhaustibility and mystery of life itself.
85. Sukenick, Ronald. Up (1968)
This wildly inventive, comic novel unfolds as collages of desperate elements: surreal depictions of alienation in the manner of Kafka and Orwell, didactic commentaries about politics, metaphysics, culture, and (of course) literature, flights of fantasy that included numerous outrageous sexual episodes, and reflexive metafictional asides about the book we're reading and the status of the novel generally in the era of post realism; Up's wit and intelligence, its formal extremity--and the appropriateness of its experiments for allowing Sukenick to investigate his own life and the larger context of the disruptions occurring in America during the 60s--made this book among the most daring books of the first wave of pomo innovation.
86. Reed, Ishamel. Yellow Back Radio Broke Down (1972)?
Reed's brash, hoodoo-meets-horse-opera approach to the Wild West signaled the arrival of the first major Black voice in postmodernism.
87. Anderson, Sherwood. Winesberg Ohio (1919)
One of the first books to convincingly employ Freudian psychology to revealing the inner workings of ordinary characters, this collection used a small-town setting as a means of examining the neuroses and obsessions of American life in a manner that has only been rivaled by Flannery O'Conner for sheer intensity and insight.
88. Vollmann, William T.. You Bright and Risen Angels (1987)
In the most ambitious and original debuts since Pynchon's V., Vollmann develops a dense, sprawling novelistic "cartoon" in which bugs and electricity become motifs used to explore the revolutionary impulses that have arisen in response to the evils of industrialism. Moving across vast areas of history and geography, filled with arcane information and surrealist literalizations of sexual longings and violence, and blending together autobiography and fictive invention in a typically po-mo manner, this book's wild flights of improvisational prose and intensity of vision signaled the arrival America's most gifted novelist of the century's last 25 years.
89.Mailer, Norman. The Naked and the Dead (1948)
As is well known, Mailer departed for WWII convinced that his experiences would provide him with the ingredients for writing the great novel about this century's greatest conflagration. This novel proved him to be right.
90. Coover, Robert. The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968).
The greatest "sports novel" of the century (only Don DeLillo's End Zone is even in the same 'ballpark") , The UBA used baseball as an elaborate framing device that allows him to explore American culture, history, and politics from various fascinating angles; along the way, he also develops an elaborate and brilliantly conceived metaphor of the relationship of man to God and the fictional systems man has created (myth, literature, philosophy, religion) to make sense of the world.
91.Katz, Steve. Creamy and Delicious (1971).
The most extreme and perfectly executed fictional work to emerge from the Pop Art scene of the late 60s, this collection also includes one of the great undiscovered treasures of the postmodern short story form, the Raymond Roussel-influenced gem, "3 Satisfying Stories"; also notable for Katz's success in creating po-mo's first successful literary analogue to "the Big Crunch"-see p. 43.
92. Coetzee, J. M.. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)
Narrated by a middle-aged magistrate of an unspecified colonial outpost, this hallucinatory allegory of imperialism poetically chronicles the interconnections existing between power-wielders and their victims.
93. Sturgeon, Theodore. More than Human (1951)
Anyone who isn't aware that SF has produced some great prose writers need only go to page one of this Sturgeon classic evocation of "homo gestalt" to educate themselves.
94. Sorrentino, Gilbert. Mulligan Stew (1979)
Sorrentino's epic, obsessive, metafictional "tour de farce" includes bits of detective fiction, a masque, letters (including a generous selection of the dozens of rejection letters the book piled up), poetry, porn, and a great deal else; in the end, the book becomes a fascinating, humorous meditation on the comic possibilities of the modern literary imagination-- well as an angry denunciation of the ways these possibilities are subverted in today's publishing industry.
95. Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel (1929).
In an age of hard-boiled realism, this enormous, rough edged beast of novel was a lyrical, uncontrolled, Whitmanesque cry of yearning that remains of the most important statements of American's sense of hope, alienation, memory, and (above all) voracious appetite for new experiences.
96. Dreiser, Theodore. An American Tragedy (1925)
This novel's significance lies partly in Dreiser's ability to use Clyde Griffith's soul-hunger and eventual destruction to describe a uniquely American form of tragedy while also suggesting something about the more universal plight of individuals caught up in vast socio-economic forces which they are only dimly aware of.
97 Mooney, Ted. Easy Travels to Other Planets (1981).
Blending mainstream's emphasis on psychological depth with an eerie ambiance of SF (an impending war in the Antarctic, information sickness) this haunting, lyrical novel perfectly exemplifies the blend of the postmodern mainstream and SF to be found in the other two novels (i.e., DeLillo's White Noise and Gibson's Neuromancer) which best captured the vast, media-driven transformations at work in American life during the 80s.
98.Erickson, Steve. Tours of the Black Clock (1989)
This novel combined Faulkner's mesmerizing ability to explode time and space with Marquez's magical realist ability to magically exaggerate aspects of the familiar until they can be seen clearly once again; the result is a haunting and grotesque evocation of the shattered nature of 20th century life and its ongoing love affair with fascism and violence.
99. Acker, Kathy. In Memorium to Identity (1990)
By the time this--her most moving and effective novel--appeared, Acker had already published nearly a dozen books whose punk-influenced, demolition derby approach to writing fiction had already had the greatest impact on writing by women of anyone of her generation.
100. Delany, Samuel R.. Hogg (1996)
The most shocking novel published in the 20th century.
Monday, October 8, 2007
French Grammar
ADJECTIVES, ARTICLES & DETERMINERS
- Agreement of adjectives (GCSE French)
Adjective (Adjectif)
French Adjective Agreement (Quia java games)
Les adjectifs (Orthogram)
Les adjectifs de couleur
La place des adjectifs qualificatifs
Adjectives that preceed the noun
Les adjectifs (placement exercise)
Les adjectifs qualificatifs (placement exercise)
Placement of the Adjective
Les Adjectifs (interactive exercise)
Adjectifs interrogatifs et exclamatifs
Interrogative adjectives (leçon 25 quel etc)
Accorde de l'adjectif qualificatif épithète
L'accord des noms et des adjectifs qualificatifs au pluriel - Pour le 2e cycle du premier
Expressions de la comparaison
Exercise de TennesseeBob - Une comparaison de quatre individus
Comparatifs
Superlatif
Adjectives and Plural: Lesson 4 of "You Too Can Learn French"
Les articles (Grimoire FRE)
PARTS OF THE BODY DEFINITE ARTICLES VS. POSSESSIVE ADJECTIVES
Leçons de grammaire - Les articles
Articles-1 (interactive exercise)
Ecrivez l'article approprié (interactive exercise)
Du/de/des... (Au restaurant, exercise)
Les Articles-3 (interactive exercise)
The Definite and Indefinite Articles
Les Articles définis - Definite Articles (About.com)
FRENCH ARTICLES (Definite vs. Partitive + exercise)
Demonstrative adjectives (leçon 25 ce etc)
Déterminants
GRAMMAIRE: II.Les mots de la phrase/L1adjectif/Adjectifs qualificatifs
GRAMMAIRE: II.Les mots de la phrase/L1adjectif/Adjectifs non qualificatifs
Participe présent et adjectif verbal
Pluriel des noms et des adjectifs qualificatifs qui se terminent en "AL"
Adjectifs possessifs - Possessive Adjectives (About.com)
Adjectifs possessifs (Synapse-fr)
Les adjectifs possessifs (interactive quiz)
EXERCICE ADJECTIFS POSSESSIFS
Les adjectifs possessifs (interactive translation exercise)
Possessive adjectives (leçon 24 mon ma mes etc)
le mot "tout"
Tout/toute/tous/ toutes/tout le monde
Tout, Toute, Tous, Toutes - Test
The use of articles to express referring cases: towards a mentalist explanation
ADVERBS AND ADVERBIAL NOTIONS
- L'adverbe
L'adverbe
Les adverbes
Introduction to adverbs
Adverbs: formation and placement
Formation of Adverbs (exercise)
Adverbes
Adverbes (Français en affaires)
L'adverbe et la locution adverbiale
Adverbes et locutions adverbiales
[Exercice sur les] Adverbes
EXERCICE - ADVERBES DE MANIERE
Adverbes de négation
Les Négatifs [exercices interactifs]Adverbes n�gatifs - French Negative Adverbs (About.com)
Les Négations (interactive exercise)
Les Phrases négatives (interactive exercise)
Les expressions négatives (interactive exercise)
The Syntax of French Adverbs without Functional Projections
CONJUNCTIONS
- Conjonctions
Conjunctions Les conjonctions
Conjonctions - French Conjunctions (About.com)
Conjonctions (le français en affaires)
Les conjonctions (exercice 1)
Conjunctions and Linking Phrases (Conjonctions et Phrases Conjonctives)
Français 230 - CONJONCTIONS
French Conjunctions requiring the Subjunctive
MIXED & GENERAL
- A propos de la correction grammaticale et des correcteurs informatiques
About.com - The French Language
ANALYSE : table des matiegrave;res
Bonjour de France - Index grammaire
BOF - Bréviaire d'orthographe française
101 questions du fran�ais vivant
Connectigramme
COMPLEX SENTENCES REVIEW (+ exercise)
CyberProf au service de l'apprentissage du français
Cours de français
Descriptive Grammar of the Standard French Language
Didactique de la grammaire
Le dossier grammaire
EDUCASERVE - plus de 200 leçons de français, 1000 exercices et jeux
L'enseignement de la grammaire
Exercices de français
EXERCICES DE GRAMMAIRE (Vassar College, self scoring)
EXERCICES DE GRAMMAIRE UTILES
Fiches pratiques de grammaire française
Foire Aux Questions du forum fr.lettres.langue.francaise
FORME GRAMMATICALE (Ce qui varie selon le contexte: genre, nombre, personne et temps.)
Forme grammaticale. Elle se fond avec la personne
Le Français en immersion - Le roman policier (grammar in context)
Le Français et la grammaire - une conjugaison compliquée
FRANÇAIS: GRAMMAIRE - FRENCH: GRAMMAR
Français intermédiaire (grammar site)
Le français sans prétention ou le Petit Imbeau
Français 232 -- Exercices supplémentaires
Français 300 exercices de corrigés
French Grammar (Univ. of Victoria)
French Grammar (Directory.co.uk))
French Grammar Exercises (realfrench.net)
French Grammar for Speakers of English
French grammar guides and exercises
French Grammar Help Online
French Grammar Lessons and Resources
French Grammar Modules
French Grammar Sites
French Language Exercises
French Language Course
FrenchLesson.org - TUTORIALS WITH INTERACTIVE PRACTICE (grammar included)
French Online Grammar Quizzes to Accompany Allons-y (30 of them!)
FREN 215: Introduction à la linguistique française
French Resources
French Revision
The French Tutorial (Helio.org)
La grammaire
Grammaire [exercises]
La grammaire à l'écrit en réseau
Grammaire au CM
Grammaire - Classe de CM1 de Blain
La grammaire en deuxième secondaire
La grammaire en questions
Grammaire française
Grammaire française (Voilier)
Grammaire française en quatre pages
Grammaire française interactive
La Grammaire Française (Zac's French Grammar Review)
La Grammaire Virtuelle (PROTIC3)
Grammar Exercises and References (realfrench.net)
Grammar Guidebook - French
Grammar help for French for Erasmus students
Grimoire FLE - Grammaire
Guide de la phrase complexe
Le Jeu de l'oie
Langue au Chat
Langue Française
Langue Française (Ministère de Culture)
Learning French and French grammar
Le module de grammaire
La monstration - Leçons de grammaire
Office de la langue française du Quebec - foire aux questions linguistiques (grammaire/vocabulaire)
Des outils pour améliorer l'orthographe
Pages de grammaire anglaise
Parallel Grammar Project
PolarFLE
The Part 2 Grammar Course (Department of French Studies)
Les pôles d'influence pour l'analyse des unites de la phrase
Practice Your French On-line
PROJET: COURS DE F.L.E. - GRAMMAIRE
Quelques Eléments de Grammaire
Quia French Grammar exercises (210)
Quia French Top 20 exercises
REALLY USEFUL FRENCH TEACHING SITE
Répertoire des ressources en français
Resources for Learning French (John Walker)
Le Site de l'Orthographe
STP CALL: French
La Subordination en grammaire prédicative: Le Proposition relative en français
Tex's French Grammar
Table des exercices sur l'analyse grammaticale (des mots) - 14
Testez vos connaissances - Dictées et Dictées à trous
Traité d'analyse grammaticale, par César Jouannet
235 - FRENCH GRAMMAR REVIEW
YAHOO! France - Grammaire, usage et stylistique
MORPHOLOGY
- L'analyseur de Langues d'Emmanuel (French, English, Spanish, German)
Bibliographie sur les Préfixes
ARTFL Project: Morphological Analysis Using the INFL Analyzer
French Morphology (About.com)
French Morphology (in Language-Master Downloads)
French Writing and Morphology
Guide de la grammaire française: Morphologie
Chapitre 4: La morphologie
NOUNS
- Compound Nouns - Noms composés
L'écriture des toponymes
French Gender: Logical Gender
Gender [French Grammar Help Online]
Le genre des noms
Leçons de grammaire - Le genre grammatical (FRE 180Y)
Le Nom
Noms composés
LES NOMS DES LIEUX ET DES PEUPLES
Noun (Nom)
Nouns (Standard Grade French Revision)
Nouns and adjectives -- gender
Le pluriel des noms composés
Le pluriel des noms composés (cyberprof)
Rectifications de l'orthographe et pluriel des noms composés
SEXUAL DIFFERENCE, GENDER, AND THE FRENCH LANGUAGE
"Le Truc de Genres", par John Walker
PREPOSITIONS
- Contez fleurette sans faire de faute (exercise)
Les Etats-Unis et les prépositions de lieu
D'honnêtes Prépositions)
Prepositions (Les Prépositions)
Les Prépositions
Les Prépositions (Point FLE)
Les Prépositions (interactive exercise)
LES PREPOSITIONS
PREPOSITIONS DE LIEU
prépositions de lieu
prépositions de lieu (Cary Academy)
Prépositions avec pays et continents (About.com)
PRONOUNS
- Les différentes catégories de pronoms
La Carte des Pronoms
Pronoms
Pronoms
Les pronoms personnels
Pronouns (French Grammar Help Online)
La Carte des Pronoms (ressource BEPP/Laval)
LES PRONOMS DEMONSTRATIFS ET LES PRONOMS RELATIFS (+ exercise)
PEOPLE OR THINGS INDIRECT OBJECT EN and Y, DISJUNCTIVE PRONOUNS
Les Pronoms d'Objet Direct-1 (interactive exercise)
Les Pronoms d'Objet Direct-2 (interactive exercise)
Ordre des pronoms avant le verbe
Ordre des pronoms après le verbe
Interactive exercises on direct & indirect object pronouns
Les pronoms compléments
Les Pronoms d'Objet Direct (activity)/A>
Les pronoms interrogatifs
INTERROGATIVE PRONOUNS
Pronoms négatifs - French Negative Pronouns
Les Pronoms personnels (object pronoun exercise)
Pronoms réfléchis - French Reflexive Pronouns
Pronoms relatifs - French Relative Pronouns
Exercice de trous [pronoms relatifs]
Les Pronoms relatifs
Les Pronoms relatifs (PROPOSITIONS RELATIVES)
Les Pronoms relatifs
RELATIVE PRONOUNS I Dont, Ce dont + exercise
RELATIVE PRONOUNS III (A + qui, A+lequel, A + quoi + exercise)
RELATIVE PRONOUNS IV ("Pour qui," "dans lequel," and "(ce) sur quoi" + exercise)
RELATIVE PRONOUNS V - REVIEW (with exercise)
RELATIVE PRONOUNS I Dont, Ce dont
Pronoms Relatifs-1 (interactive exercise)
Les Pronoms Relatifs: Qui ou Que (interactive exercise)
Les pronoms relatifs
Les pronoms relatifs (review exercise)
Les pronoms sujets(interactive exercise)
RG13 - Les pronoms sujets et compléments
Tonic / Disjunctive pronouns
Pronoms disjoints - French Stressed Pronouns
Disjunctive (tonic) pronouns
[Subject] Pronouns and Verbs (lesson 3 of You too can learn French)
TERMINOLOGY
- DICO (French/English glossary, with parts of speech)
FICHES DE TERMINOLOGIE GRAMMATICALE
Glossaire des principaux termes orthographiques, grammaticaux et lexicaux
Glossary of Grammatical Terms
Lexique-Grammaire
HyperGrammar
LEXIQUE GRAMMATICAL (Cliquez sur "lexique grammatical")
Lexique grammatical (cursif)
Listes de mots communs (300,000 avec indications grammaticales, sans définitions)
On-line English Grammar
LES PARTIES DU DISCOURS
Jean Veronis, Liliane Khouri, "Etiquétage grammatical multilingue: modèle"
VERBS (INDIVIDUAL)
- aller, être, avoir, faire, prendre
Expressions avec aller
Avoir and Etre -- Meanings
Avoir expressions
connaître vs. savoir
connaître" ou "savoir" [exercise]
connaître et savoir [exercise]
le verbe "connaître" [exercise]
Etre et Avoir - Pratiquez deux verbes irréguliers!
-er stem change verbs
Etre
Faire
Faire expressions
Exercice 2 - Expressions avec le verbe "faire"
Causitive "faire"
Special uses of "faire" and "rendre" (with exercise)
mettre, permettre, promettre
Pouvoir, Vouloir, Devoir (interactive exercise)
-re verbs (irregular) like prendre
present tense of prendre, comprendre, apprendre
le verbe "savoir" [exercise]
Les Verbes Comme Vendre (interactive exercise)
Verbes irréguliers: être, avoir, aller, faire, prendre
Chapitre 4 - Le verbe "vouloir"
VOULOIR + INFINITIVE vs. VOULOIR + QUE (+ exercise)
VERB CONJUGATORS
- ARTFL Project Verb Conjugation
Ça peut servir: conjugaison
BIBLIOZONE conjugaison automatique
La conjugaison (Grammaire, Momes.net)
Conjugaison en ligne
Conjugaison automatique
Conjugaison verbale
Conjugaison française
Conjugaison verbale
Le Conjugueur
Conjuguez n'importe quel verbe...
Conjuin(s) - Online French Verb Conjugator
Le Devoir conjugal [French verb conjugator+, well designed]
French VerbBasic
French verb conjugation reference
FRENCH VERBS INDEX (8469)
John's Home Page French Verbs (conjugator at the bottom)
OEF conjugaison
Temps littéraires - French Literary Tenses
Verba Universal Conjugator
Le Verbe Français
Verbix - Kreyol Louisianne verb conjugator
Verbix - French verb conjugator
VERBS IN GENERAL
Agreement, Tense, Mood, Voice
Accord des verbes (exercices interactifs)
Accord du verbe avec un seul sujet
Conjugation of the Verbs - Simple Tenses
Intro to tense, aspect, voice, mood
Tenses (Temps)
VOIX - Voice - French Verbs
LA VOIX PASSIVE
LA VOIX PASSIVE (+exercise)
Voix passive - French Passive Voice
Infinitif
Leçons de grammaire - L'infinitif (FRE 180Y)
Verbs Followed by an Infinitive
TABLE DES EXERCICES SUR LA FORMATION DES VERBES - 25 en tout
Le temps [du verbe + l'heure] - lesson 9 of You too can learn French - focus on passé composé
Série accord du verbe
Accord du verbe qui précède ses sujets
GRAMMAIRE - conjugaison
Encyclopédie de verbes
French verb conjugation
Introduction to verbs
Verb (Verbe)
Present Participle
Participe présent (Polar FLE)
Participe présent en anglais (expliqué en français)
Le participe présent et le gérondif (1)
Le participe présent et le gérondif (2)
Le participe présent et le gérondif (3)
The Present Participle
Accord des formes en -ant
Participe présent et adjectif verbal
Participe présent - French Present Participle
DEPUIS, ETC. (+ exercise)
depuis vs. il y a...que, ça fait..que and voilà...que
Rappel grammatical: Expressions de temps: Depuis, pendant, il y a (exercise interactif)
Verbs and Reporting
Direct and Indirect Discourse
Direct / Indirect Discourse (Learn French)
89. Direct and Indirect Discourse
Direct / Indirect Discourse (Learn French)
INDIRECT DISCOURSE IN THE PAST
Le discours indirect
Regular Verbs & Irregular Patterns
-er verbs
-er verbs (regular)
-er verbs (stem changing)
-ir verbs (regular)
Regular -IR Verbs
Regular -IR Verbs
-ir verbs
-ir verbs (irregular) like "ouvrir"
-ir verbs (irregular) partir, sortir, dormir
-IR & -RE conjugated verbs (leçons 27 & 28)
-re verbs (regular)
-re verbs (irregular) like "prendre"
-re verbs (irregular) like "mettre"
-re verbs (irregular), like "suivre"
Present Indicative
LE PRESENT DES VERBES (interactive exercise)
Présent de l'indicatif
PRESENT DE L'INDICATIF (Jaser2)
Présent de l'indicatif - Terminaisons en [-e, -es, -e], ou [-s, -s, -t
Leçons de grammaire - Le présent (FRE 180Y)
The Present indicative (French Grammar Help Online)
The Present Tense of French Verbs
Pronominal Verbs
Voix pronominale - French Pronominal Voice
Verbes à sens réciproque - French Reciprocal Verbs
VERBES PRONOMINAUX AVEC PRONOM REFLECHI OBJET DIRECT
VERBES PRONOMINAUX AVEC PRONOM REFLECHI OBJET INDIRECT
Chapitre 4 - Les verbes pronominaux: 1
Chapitre 4 - Les verbes pronominaux: 2
Unit 19: Pronominal verbs (realfrench.net)
Les verbes pronominaux (Synapse)
Les verbes pronominaux (activité)
Les verbes pronominaux an présent
VERBES PRONOMINAUX AVEC PRONOM REFLECHI OBJET INDIRECT
Les Verbes Réfléchis
Accord du participe passé des verbes pronominaux
Les Verbes Réfléchis Rouge 1
Rouge-Unité 1-Partie 2-Le passé composé des verbes réfléchis
Le Passé composé des verbes réfléchis
Passé Composé and Surcomposé
FRENCH PERFECT TENSES (unit 6 of realfrench.net)
passé composé with avoir
Le cauchemard des écoliers français...("avoir" comme auxilliare + COD)
passé composé with être
ETRE ou ne pas ETRE, Savoir poser la Question ("ETRE" comme auxilliaire)
passé composé of pronominal verbs
EXERCICE: Le passé composé
Le participe passé
participe passé dans un verbe pronominal
Accord du participe passé des verbes pronominaux
AGREEMENT IN FRENCH COMPOUND TENSES
Mettez les phrases suivantes au passé composé (interactive exercise)
Leçons de grammaire - Le passé composé (FRE 180Y)
Passé composé of regular & irregular avoir verbs
L'ACCORD DU PARTICIPE PASSE (règle pratique)
L'ACCORD DU PARTICIPE PASSE (exercice)
Table des exercices sur l'accord du participe passé (6 en tout)
Accord du participe passé
Accord du participe passé avec avoir
Accord du participe passé avec être
L'accord de participe passés (les 3 règles de base)
L'accord de participe passés (suivi d'un infinitif)
L'accord de participe passés (verbes pronominaux)
L'accord de participe passés (verbes impersonnels)
L'accord de participe passés (et le pronom "en")
L'accord de participe passés (des temps surcomposés)
Participe passé des temps surcomposé�s
Plus-que-parfait
Le plus-que-parfait
Le plus-que-parfait: exercice 1
EXERCICE: Le plus-que-parfait
Plus-que-parfait - French Pluperfect - Test
Pluperfect (Plus-que-Parfait)
Pluperfect (plus-que-parfait), from "French Language Tools"
Plus-que-parfait (jeu en quatre étapes)
Le Plus-que-parfait (Quia exercise)
Passé simple, Passé antérieur
Passé simple
FORMS OF THE PASSE SIMPLE
Passé simple (conjugaisons with audio)
Ecrivez au passé simple les verbes entre parenthèses (exercise)
FRENCH LITERARY TENSES
Temps littéraires - French Literary Tenses
Imparfait ou passé simple?
La Formation du passé simple et du passé antérieur
passé antérieur
Passé antérieur - French Past Anterior
Imperative
Impératif
Impératif - The French Imperative
L'Impératif
Chapitre 3 - L'impératif
Chapitre 4 - L'impératif des verbes pronominaux
La 2ème personne du singulier de l'impératif présent
The Imperative (interactive exercise)
Futur Proche, Futur, Futur Antérieur
Le Futur (futur proche, futur simple, futur simple ou futur proche?, futur ant�rieur)
Le Futur (aller + infinitive, Quia activity)
Le Futur proche - Near Future
futur proche
Le Futur proche (exercice)
Le Futur proche
Le Futur proche (exercice, Polar FLE)
simple future: regular
Futur de l'indicatif (3 groupes)
simple future: irregular
Préparation de la séance de français sur le futur de l'indicatif
futur antérieur
Futur antérieur - French Future Perfect
QUAND + FUTURE (+ exercise)
Les temps verbaux exprimant le futur en français
Le Futur français : la Modalité en anglais
Verb Tense Coordination
Concordance des temps
LA CONCORDANCE DES TEMPS
La concordance des temps
La concordance des temps (Mot clé CCDMT)
La concordance des temps (fiche de Mlle Roux)
La concordance des temps (Francité)
La concordance des temps (Grammaire Softissimo)
Conditional Sentences: Real and Unreal
Valeurs des temps du récit
Conditional Sentences: Real and Unreal
La proposition conditionnelle
French Language - Si Clauses
FRENCH IF-CLAUSES (+ exercise)
Si Clauses - French If-Then Clauses
Si clauses (French 107 activities)
Si clauses & future
SYNTAXE - LA SUBORDINATION: CONCORDANCE DES TEMPS [350-354]
Le verbe - concordance des temps
Contexts Mixing the Imperfect & the passé composé
Exercices sur l'emploi des temps du passé
Un conte de fée moderne [exercice passé composé / imparfait
Imparfait / passé composé - Multiple-choice exercise
Imparfait / passé composé 2 - Exercices à trous
Imparfait / passé composé
Leçons de grammaire - L'imparfait (FRE 180Y)
L'IMPARFAIT-1 (interactive exercise)
Narration - passé composé vs. imparfait
Passé composé et imparfait - Aspects et modalit�s
Chapitre 9 - L'imparfait ou le passé composé ?
Imparfait - Passé composé
Ecrivez les verbes à l'imparfait ou au assé composé
Exercice supplémentaire 1: Le passé composé et l'imparfait
L'opposition imparfait / passé composé
Passé composé / imparfait (link page)
Passé composé et imparfait (1st review exercise)
Passé composé et imparfait (2nd review exercise)
Passé composé / imparfait (interactive exercise)
Passé composé ou imparfait?-2 (interactive exercise)
Passé composé/Imparfait-3 (interactive exercise)
Narration: assé composé vs. Imparfait
Imperfect vs. Passé Composé
[Imperfect vs. Passé Composé exercise with a paragraph from Anatole France]
Passé composé ou imparfait (Quia exercise)
Le Passé - French Past Tenses
Pratique de l'imparfait / passé composé
LES TEMPS DU PASSE: PASSE COMPOSE, IMPARFAIT, PLUS-QUE-PARFAIT, CONDITIONNEL (+ exercise)
The Conditional Mood
Le Conditionnel
Le Conditionnel (Synapse)
Le Conditionnel - Conditional
Conditional
Conditionnel - French Conditional - Formation
Conditionnel (Le Point du FLE)
The conditional tense (LinguaWeb)
conditional (with an irregular stem chart)
le conditionnel dans ces propositions indépendantes
Exploitation du conditionnel et des structures conditionnelles
Rouge 5 Formez le conditionnel
Rouge 5 Formez le conditionnel passé
Conditionnel passé - French Conditional Perfect
Past Conditional
Ecris les verbes au passé du condionnel
Subjunctive Mood
EXERCICE - SUBJONCTIF/ INFINITIF
Forms of the Present Subjunctive (French Grammar Help Online)
Uses of the Present Subjunctive (French Grammar Help Online)
Il faut que je comprenne le subjonctif!!!
Subjonctif - French Subjunctive - Regular verb forms
"Que" indicatif ou subjonctif?
Le Subjonctif
Le Subjonctif: Les Locutions Conjonctives
Le Subjonctif (Synapse)
Le Subjonctif - emploi du subjonctif
Le Subjonctif: oui ou non?
Uses of the Present Subjunctive (French Grammar Help Online)
French Conjunctions requiring the Subjunctive
Les conjonctions et le subjonctif [exercices interactifs]
Le subjonctif dans les propositions indépendantes
The Subjunctive and the Conditional in French - It's all about moods
SUBJUNCTIVE WITH PERSONAL SUBJECTS (+ exercise)
SUBJUNCTIVE WITH IMPERSONAL "IL"="It"/"One" (+ exercise)
LE SUBJONCTIF
La Formation du Présent du Subjonctif
Le Subjonctif: Les Verbes Réguliers
Le Subjonctif des Verbes Irréguliers [activités]
Imparfait du subjonctif - Imperfect Subjunctive
Plus-que-parfait du subjonctif - Pluperfect Subjunctive
L'utilisation des temps du subjonctif
WORD ORDER
Adjectifs irréguliers - La bonne place (exercise a)Adjectifs irréguliers - La bonne place (exercise b)
Adjectifs irréguliers - La bonne place (exercise c)
Les adjectifs qualificatifs: Place - Détails
Analyse Syntaxique Automatique
Une brève introduction aux concepts de la syntaxe générative
Centre d'analyse de texte par ordinateur
Cours de Syntaxe Formelle et de Syntaxe Générative du Français
Etudes portant sur la syntaxe
French Word Order and the Word Phrase Distinction
French Word Order and Lexical Weight
Introduction à la syntaxe du français
La maturité syntaxique
PERMUTATION DE MOTS DANS UNE PHRASE
La place des adjectifs qualificatifs 1 (excercise)
La place des mots dans la phrase: la phrase négative et la phrase interrogative
"Langue: Et la syntaxe?", Raymond CUBY
"Ordre des mots - French Word Order (About.com)
L'ordre des mots dans la phrase..(Exercice 1)
L'ordre des mots dans la phrase..(Exercice 2)
L'ordre des mots dans la phrase..(Exercice 3)
L'ordre des mots dans la phrase..(Exercice 4)
Ordre des pronoms personnels
Quel est l'ordre des pronoms personnels dans une phrase ?
Questions with inverted word order (French)
Syntaxe à la une : la structure des titres de journaux français et britanniques
Chapitre 7: La syntaxe (Introduction à la linguistique française)
Syntaxe française [12 pp., 2-column course bibliography]
Syntaxe française - French Syntax
SYNTAXE - PHRASE SIMPLE [320-330]
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