Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province

The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
Bellow’s democratic sensibility—his ability to make relevant references to Greek historians and Chicago meat packers in the same paragraph—attests to the roving intellect and brashly original style at work in this novel, as impressive as the story they create: of a young man on the make, with the grandness of American experience as his temptation and challenge.

Abasalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
Faulkner’s unflinching gaze at the burdens of southern life, as they are felt by individuals equally burdened by family relations, is the prose equivalent of a ruined cathedral. But page-long sentences give way, in the end, to a sparse exchange between characters that leaves a real sense of history’s weight, and of the weakened but enduring voice of man trying to speak against and beyond that weight.

A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul
A searing depiction of modern Africa that, for all of its political action and cultural criticism, finds its lasting force in a portrayal of two people talking to each other about private matters, a conversation that demonstrates the primacy of the human above the array of social conflicts responsible for his diminishment.

The “Linnet Muir” story sequence, Mavis Gallant
A series of interconnected short stories that move through scenes from a thoughtful woman’s life, with a Proustian intensity of remembrance and evocation that’s balanced by an economy of precision and depth.

Confessions, St. Augustine
An exacting testament to the limits of living one’s life by one’s own passing standards, and to the difficult reward of then measuring that life anew, by a more permanent mark.

Clifford Chase, Winkie

The Dead Father, Donald Barthelme
For its anger and its tenderness, for its radical inventiveness, for its fearless pursuit of a gigantic metaphor: a Gulliver-size Dead Father—who is also sort of alive—being dragged by workers to the grave. Barthelme, who came to prominence in the late ’60s, is due for a revival.

The Pilgrim Hawk, Glenway Wescott
A largely forgotten masterpiece from 1940. (Its forgotten-ness is reason enough to love it.) Another extraordinary extended metaphor, turned over and over in the narrator’s mind: a woman’s pet hawk and what it might say about both her troubled marriage and love in general.

In Youth Is Pleasure, Denton Welch
For its utter simplicity and clarity. Reading Welch (who published in the ’40s and died young) is like looking down into the clearest pond you’ve ever seen.

Maps to Anywhere, Bernard Cooper
A strikingly innovative memoir that turns life into pure art. Cooper’s first book (published in 1990) reinvented the essay and won a PEN award for fiction.

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, César Aira
What begins as a dull historical study of a German landscape painter, travelling in Argentina in 1847, suddenly turns suspenseful and grotesque when the painter is struck by lightning. This tiny novel contains some of the most amazing descriptive passages I’ve ever read.

Nell Freudenberger, The Dissident

Middlemarch, George Eliot
Eliot has an almost surgical precision in extracting the interior lives of her characters and presenting them to the reader. In her novels, you read about emotional experiences that are immediately familiar, that you’ve never seen written down elsewhere. It’s incredible to me that this can happen in books that are now almost 150 years old.

Illywhacker, Peter Carey
This is the great storyteller Peter Carey’s great novel about storytelling. Carey can make you believe in the preposterous, one of the best talents in a novelist.

A House for Mr. Biswas, V.S. Naipaul
Naipaul’s novel is a good reminder for a writer that making a character beloved by the reader does not necessarily involve making him lovable.

Collected Stories, Grace Paley
Paley is the best New York writer I know, and also the most genuinely colloquial. I vastly admire her, but I don’t think other writers can learn to do what she does. She sounds like no one else.

Rong Rong’s East Village, Rong Rong and Wu Hung
This is a new favourite, a book my husband gave me for my birthday. It’s a record of Beijing artist Rong Rong’s life in a rundown section of that city in the early ’90s, and of his development as an artist, told through journal entries and his own astonishing photographs.