THE BOOK LIST

Three categories, 100 books, 1 year and a 3 day take home exam to top it all off.

From March of 2024 to April of 2025, I wrote about the process of taking my preliminary exams for my English PhD.

During your third year of a PhD exam, you are asked to undertake your “preliminary exam reading list” — a list of 100 books on subjects relating to your dissertation.

In English literature, 80% of your texts are traditional forms of writing and 20% are historical/critical texts.

Bolded books have been read!

In my program (English with an emphasis in Creative Writing), this is interesting territory. Do you pick subject areas relating to your academic interests or your writerly interests? I still don’t know the answer but I’ve made the list and I will now read ‘em (and weep!).

Let’s get to it!

Major Field: The United States Novel after 1945

1.     Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)

2.     The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1952)

3.     Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)

4.     The Outsider by Richard Wright (1953)

5.     Fahrenheit-451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)

6.     The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)

7.     Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell (1954) CUT from list

8.     Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov (1955)

9.     No-No Boy by John Okada (1957)

10.  To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

11.  Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

12.  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (1962)

13.  Big Sur by Jack Kerouac (1962)

14.  The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)

15.  The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (1966)

16.  The Man Who Cried I Am by John A. Williams (1967)

17.  House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday (1968)

18.  Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion (1970)

19.  My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok (1972)

20.  Sula by Toni Morrison (1973)

21.  Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)

22.  Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson (1980)

23.  The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982)

24.  White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985)

25.  City of Glass by Paul Auster (1987)

26.  The Secret History by Donna Tartt (1992)

27.  The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides (1993)

28.  The Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon (1995)

29.  The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams (2000)

30.  Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2002)

31.  The Known World by Edward P. Jones (2005)

32.  The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (2013)

33.  The Sellout (2015) by Paul Beatty (2015)     

34.  Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (2017)

35.  The Biography of X by Catherine Lacey (2023) ADDED

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Minor Field 1: Anglophones Writing About France

1.     Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes by Robert Louis Stevenson (1879)

2.     The Ambassadors by Henry James (1903)

3.     The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham (1919)

4.     The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)

5.     Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell (1933)

6.     Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934)

7.     Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)

8.     Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys (1939)

9.     Paris, France by Gertrude Stein (1940)

10.  The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham (1944)

11.  Molloy by Samuel Beckett (1951)

12.  A Fable by William Faulkner (1954)

13.  Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1956)

14.  Shakespeare and Company by Sylvia Beach (1956)

15.  A Sport and A Pastime by James Salter (1967)

16.  Our Paris by Edmund White (1994)

17.  Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant (2002)

18.  Pictures at an Exhibition by Sara Houghteling (2010)

19.  The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2021)

Short stories and essays:

1.     “Letter from Paris” by Frederick Douglass

2.     “A Canary for One” by Ernest Hemingway (1927)

3.     “A New Leaf” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1931)

4.     “Babylon Revisted” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1931)

5.     “American Negroes in France” by Richard Wright (1951)

6.     “I Choose Exile” by Richard Wright (1951)

7.     “Gnossienne” by Julian Barnes (1995)

8.     “A Last Tango With Paris” by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2013)

9.     “Paris Disappointed Me—and I Am Glad For It” by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2013)

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Minor Field 2: The Memoir

1.     The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein (1933)

2.     Black Boy by Richard Wright

3.     Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov (1951)

4.     Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin (1953)

5.     Nisei Daughter by Monica Sone (1953)

6.     The Pillar of Salt by Albert Memmi (1955)

7.     Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir (1958)

8.     A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (1964)

9.     I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1969)

10.  I Remember by Joe Brainard (1970) CUT

11.  Yield: The Journal of An Artist by Anne Truitt (1974)

12.  Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz (1977)

13.  Dictée by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1982)

14.  Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde (1982)

15.  L’amant by Marguerite Duras

16.  The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston

17.  Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick (2005)

18.  DV by Diana Vreeland (2003)

19.  Bluets by Maggie Nelson (2009)

20.  The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit (2013)

21.  An Extraordinary Theory of Objects by Stephanie LaCava (2013)

22.  Pedigree: A Memoir by Paul Modiano (2015)

23.  I’m Supposed to Protect You From This by Nadja Spiegelman (2016)

24.  Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon (2019)

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Critical texts:

(If you’d like a copy of a PDF to read any of these, shoot me an email (thefwarg at gmail dot com) or DM me here!)

US Novel after 1945:

Critical texts (6 books, 4 selections, 6 essays)

1.     Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (selection on alienation) (1844)

2.     “Art as Technique” by Victor Shlovsky (1917)

3.     “The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism” from Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel by Mikhail Bakhtin (1936-1938)

4.     “Against Interpretation” by Susan Sontag (1966)

5.     The History of Sexuality, vol 1. (selected chapters) by Michel Foucault (1976)

6.     “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste” by Pierre Bourdieu (1984)

7.     Postmodern Fiction by Brian McHale (1987) CUT

8.     Playing in the Dark by Morrison, Toni (1993)

9.     “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” by Gayle S. Rubin (1998)

10.  Practicing New Historicism by Greenblatt and Gallagher (2001)

11.  “The Loss of Face” by Charles Baxter (2003)

12.  The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work by Andrew Hoberek (2005) CUT

13.  Adolescence, America, and Postwar Fiction by R. McLennan (2008)

14.  The Lives of the Novel (selections) by Thomas Pavel (2015)

15.  Postmodern/Postwar—And After (selected chapters) by edited Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek and Daniel Worden (2016)

16.  “Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship” by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (2020)

Anglophones:

1.      “Salon of 1845” (1845), “Salon of 1846” (1846), “Salon of 1859” (1859), “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863) by Charles Baudelaire

2.     “The Aesthetic Hypothesis” by Clive Bell from Art (1914)

3.     American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Moment Modernism and Place by Donald Pizer (1996)

4.     Flesh and Stone (chapters 5 and 9 on Paris, 10 on displacement) by Richard Sennett (1996)

5.     “James Baldwin in Paris: Exile, Multiculturalism and the Public Intellectual” by Lloyd Kramer (2001)

6.     “Americans in Paris” by Adam Gopnik (2004)

7.     Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars by Brooke L. Bower (2011)

8.     Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light by Tyler Stovall (2012)

Memoir:

1.     The Interpretation of Dreams (excerpts on memory) by Sigmund Freud (1900)

2.     “On the Nature and Form of the Essay” by Georg Lukács (1910)

3.     “A Preface to Transgression” by Michel Foucault (1977 translation)

4.     Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis  by Richard Terdiman (1993)

5.     “Essaying the Feminine: From Montaigne to Kristeva” by Nancy Mairs (1994)

6.     Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Second edition, selected chapters) by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (2010)

7.     Reality Hunger by David Shields (2010)

8.     Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant (2011)

9.     “Part III: Narrative and Identity in Memoir” from David Mura’s A Stranger's Journey (2018)