Greatness

The editors of This Recording recently took it upon themselves to rank the one hundred greatest writers (ever). I know that these lists, by their very nature, are highly subjective and informed by the compilers respective biases (nationality/ethnicity/language(s) spoken and read/gender/sexual preference/socio-economic background/etc.). So while it was no mean feat, and their chutzpah (hubris?) is commendable (and I'm a little tickled that Byron placed so highly - 25 - although even I think it's ridiculous) , their inclusion of some questionably great writers has to be challenged (but it should also be said that their list certainly made me think about what makes a writer, or a work of literature, great, and that I waited with bated breath to read each installment and to see if, and where, my favourite writers made the cut). Robert A. Heinlein? Mary Shelley? Henry Miller? Lorene Niedecker? These are some of the greatest writers to have lived? I can easily think of dozens of writers I'd have opted for before any of these. And of the hundred writers, seventy-two wrote in English, fifty-five are Twentieth-Century and thirty-nine are American (no Canadians, of course, unless Saul Bellow or Malcolm Lowry are guilty by association). Which is simply absurd. Which is why I'm posting my own list (I suppose I'm as defenceless as anyone against hubris or self-indulgence). Not exactly of the one hundred greatest writers (because how can anyone decide what and who is great - apart from Shakespeare, of course, who, by the way, came in third on This Recording's list, so, clearly, it's complete nonsense), it's a list of my favourite (i.e. what I've read) novels, poets, dramatists, non-fiction works, short fiction collections and works of speculative fiction (in no particular order). But I'll preface it with a dozen (thirteen, actually) writers I think are nonpareil, and didn't make the cut at This Recording. 

John Crowley

Robertson Davies

Jane Austen 

Lao Tzu

Edith Wharton

A.R. Ammons

C.P. Cavafy

Yehuda Amichai 

Pablo Neruda

Robert Browning

José Saramago

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Anne Carson

Fiction

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

The Deptford Trilogy - Robertson Davies

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

Light Years - James Salter

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

Properties of Light - Rebecca Goldstein

Quarantine - Jim Crace

The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel García Márquez

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez

Justine/Balthazar - Lawrence Durrell

Alice's Adventure in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll

The Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake

Little, Big - John Crowley

Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne

Cancer Ward - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut

The Passion - Jeanette Winterson

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

Emma - Jane Austen

The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins

The Leopard - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers

The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford

Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

V. - Thomas Pynchon

Nostromo - Joseph Conrad

Ægypt sequence - John Crowley

The Conversations at Curlow Creek - David Malouf

Written on the Body - Jeanette Winterson

The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje

Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley

Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon

Still Life with Woodpecker - Tom Robbins

Put Out More Flags - Evelyn Waugh

Scoop -Evelyn Waugh

Vile Bodies - Evelyn Waugh

Persuasion - Jane Austen

The Brief History of the Dead - Kevin Brockmeier

A Scientific Romance - Ronald Wright

The Translator - John Crowley

The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Baron in the Trees - Italo Calvino

Narcissus and Goldmund - Hermann Hesse

Notes from the Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal

Thousand Cranes - Yasunari Kawabata

Poets

Anne Carson

Charles Wright

Rita Dove

Seamus Heaney

Anthony Hecht

J.D. McClatchy

Anne Michaels

e.e. cummings

John Donne

Edward Thomas

Mark Strand

Wallace Stevens

A.R. Ammons

Andrew Marvell

John Keats

Yehuda Amichai

Pablo Neruda

Emily Brontë

Eugenio Montale

Yves Bonnefoy

Pedro Salinas

W.B. Yeats

Catullus

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Walt Whitman

C.P. Cavafy

Ezra Pound

Octavio Paz

Eugénio de Andrade

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Robert Browning

Elizabeth Bishop

Alexander Pope

Lord Byron

Lars Gustafsson

Robert Herrick

W.S. Merwin

Derek Walcott

Cesare Pavese

Galway Kinnell

George Seferis

Rafael Alberti

Czeslaw Milosz

Robert Penn Warren

Fernando Pessoa

Louise Bogan

Charles Baudelaire

Joseph Brodsky

Vicente Aleixandre

Jean Follain

Drama

King Lear - William Shakespeare

Long Day's Journey into Night - Eugene O'Neill

Hamlet - William Shakespeare

Othello- William Shakespeare

Angels in America - Tony Kushner

Iphegeneia at Aulis - Euripides

Antigone - Jean Anouilh

The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde

She Stoops to Conquer - Oliver Goldsmith

The Recruiting Officer - George Farquhar

The Beaux' Stratagem - George Farquhar

Tartuffe/The Misanthrope - Molière

Ondine/The Madwoman of Chaillot - Jean Giraudoux

Uncle Vanya - Anton Chekhov

Galileo - Bertolt Brecht

Non-Fiction

Rubicon - Tom Holland

Melodies Unheard - Anthony Hecht

The Lives of a Cell - Lewis Thomas

The Island of the Colorblind - Oliver Sacks

Religio Medici/Hydriotaphia - Sir Thomas Browne

Patrimony - Philip Roth

The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics - Bernard Knox

The Gutenberg Elegies - Sven Birkerts

The Mirror of Myth - Jasper Griffin

What Am I Doing Here - Bruce Chatwin

Speculative Fiction

Novelties and Souvenirs - John Crowley

The Earthsea Trilogy - Ursula K. Le Guin

Map of Desires - M. Rickert

Shadow of Ashland - Terence M. Green

Tigana - Guy Gavriel Kay

On Wings of Song - Thomas M. Disch

The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin

Dragonsinger/Dragonsong - Anne McCaffrey

Davy - Edgar Pangborn

The Lions of Al-Rassan - Guy Gavriel Kay

Short Fiction

Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You - Alice Munro

A Fanatic Heart - Edna O'Brien

Collected Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges

Collected Stories - Katherine Mansfield

The Stories - John Cheever

'My Year in Lists' Los Campesinos!