A Reading List: Prose Stylists
I received terrific responses to my call for a list of notable women prose sentence-makers. It’s always striking with reading lists how pantheons differ and one person’s favorites are another’s also-rans or never heard-ofs. It’s strange to me to think how no one could hope to read all the books published in even a single year; and the extent to which anyone’s sense of a larger cultural tradition, even one’s own, is necessarily fragmentary. Which is why, as vapid as they can be, I do like reading lists: most bring to mind something unforeseen.
After the jump, the compiled list (it’s pretty long for Tumblr dashboards), alphabetized by author, a few with stories or books that to me stood out from the writer’s body of work, or that I find myself bearing in mind when I write (please add yours!). I also marked with an asterisk writers that others suggested whom I haven’t read—the beginning of a much longer list.
- Renata Adler: Speedboat
- Julia Alvarez*
- Pat Barker
- Ann Beattie
- Aimee Bender
- A.S. Byatt
- Bonnie Jo Campbell: American Salvage
- Angela Carter: “Peter and the Wolf,” “Fall River Axe Murders”
- Lucy Corin: “Rich,” “My Favorite Dentist,” “The Way She Loved Cats”
- Elizabeth Crane: “The Archetype’s Girlfriend” [review in the Boston Review]
- Lydia Davis
- Joan Didion: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Where I Was From, The Year of Magical Thinking
- Annie Dillard
- Deborah Eisenberg: “Lessons in Traveling Light,” “Rafe’s Coat,” “Rosie Gets a Soul,” “Mermaids,” “Some Other, Better Otto”
- Penelope Fitzgerald
- Paula Fox: Desperate Characters
- Mary Gaitskill
- Mavis Gallant
- Nadine Gordimer: The Pickup, “The Diamond Mine”
- Elizabeth Hardwick: Sleepless Nights, American Fictions
- Amy Hempel
- Patricia Highsmith*
- Noy Holland
- Zora Neale Hurston*
- Mary Karr*
- A.L. Kennedy
- Theodora Keogh*
- Jhumpa Lahiri: “A Temporary Matter,” “The Third and Final Continent”
- Janet Malcolm
- Katherine Mansfield: “Prelude,” “Bliss,” “The Garden Party”
- Mary McCarthy
- Carson McCullers
- Susan Minot: Evening, “The Break-up”
- Lorrie Moore
- Toni Morrison
- Iris Murdoch
- Alice Munro
- Antonya Nelson: Female Trouble
- Sigrid Nunez: A Feather on the Breath of God
- Joyce Carol Oates
- Susan Orlean
- Grace Paley
- Katherine Anne Porter: “The Grave,” “Noon Wine”
- Flannery O’Connor
- Mary Robison
- Marilynne Robison
- Carol Shields
- Muriel Spark
- Getrude Stein
- Zadie Smith
- Rebecca West
- Virginia Woolf
