Kent Haruf's Top Ten List

    Reader Bio

    Kent Haruf(born 1943) is an award-winning American novelist whose books explore the lives and moral quandaries of the plainspoken residents of the fictional town of Holt, Colorado. The title of his debut novel suggests the heart of his fiction: The Tie That Binds (1984, Whiting Foundation Award). His other novels include Where You Once Belonged (1990), Plainsong (1999, National Book Award finalist), a sequel to that novel, Eventide (2004, Colorado Book Award), and Benediction (2013). His honors include the Dos Passos Prize for Literature and the Wallace Stegner Award.





    5. Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961). Love and war, childhood and adolescence, and initiation and experience are recurring themes in these journalistically spare, often autobiographical stories. Some, including “A Very Short Story,” are merely snapshots, barely a page long. Others, such as Snows of Kilimanjaro” are multi-layered stories within a story. Among the best are those featuring Hemingway’s doppelganger Nick Adams, whose youthful innocence in an Edenic Michigan becomes an almost jaded stoicism through combat and failed romance.



    8. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1953). Two vagabonds, Vladimir and Estragon, “blathering about nothing in particular,” provoke, challenge, and defend each other while they wait for the appearance of the mysterious Godot. Twice the tramps ponder hanging themselves from the branches of a nearby willow tree; twice they try to make sense of a stranger named Pozzo and his leashed servant Lucky. All the characters abide in a world peculiar for its absences: of meaning, rationality, consolation, and of course the slyly named Godot.



    New List

    Francine Prose

    1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877).
    6. The stories of Mavis Gallant (1922– ).
    7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851).
    8. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871–72).


    Classic List

    Amy Bloom


    1. The Deptford trilogy by Robertson Davies (1983).
    2.Persuasion by Jane Austen (1817).
    4.The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (1995).
    6. The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro (1978).
    7. The Plot Against Americaby Philip Roth.
    8. The Hours by Michael Cunningham (1998).
    9. Fancies and Goodnights by John Collier (1951).
    10. Larry’s Party by Carol Shields (1997).


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