Having recently moved into a new apartment, I have been presented with one of the great toils, but also great joys, of relocation: moving all my goddamn books. It’s a chore, to be certain, one so notoriously laborious it leads many bibliophiles to shed large portions of their libraries in the interest of avoiding the worst of it. But screw that, I say! I will cart these stupid things with me every place I live, and what’s more, my labor continually increases, as I now receive books in the mail on a daily basis from publishers, editors and even the writers themselves, and I still purchase books (mostly used, which pretty much translates to bulk). But I don’t care. The weight is worth the lifting.
But even for those who loathe the process of moving a library, once the boxes are firmly stacked in the new digs, you get to create a whole new one, and this is the great joy I referred to. Most literary types acquire so many new books that whatever system they’d installed in their old place inevitably breaks down and becomes overrun with precarious stacks of the dreaded unshelved. In a new home, though, we get to start afresh, create a new system. It can be tedious and tempestuous but it’s ultimately cathartic. At least for me, I mean, shit, I don’t know you.
Anyway, so I spent my Superbowl Sunday organizing the most important section of any critic’s collection: literary criticism and biography. Not only is this my favorite shit to read, but I also refer to them so often that they’re also the most practically necessary. After I finished, I posted a photo of the beautifully and temporarily full shelves (I’ve already pulled like six books off that I’m using for current pieces) on Twitter, and someone asked me if I had any particular favorites. I wasn’t at home when I got the tweet, so to even consider responding at the time was unthinkable. I pondered for a few seconds before immediately becoming overwhelmed. When I returned later and stared at the shelves, it occurred to me that I’ve been asked this question quite a few times. Perhaps this is because as a self-identifying literary critic there isn’t much else for people to ask me—this field doesn’t exactly make for the most riveting party talk. But whatever the reason, I thought I’d put together a list of the criticism that I most admire and to which I repeatedly refer. This is, of course, an extremely limited list, taken exclusively from books I own. Also for the sake of my sanity, I excluded all single-subject biographies and criticism on film or music; only fiction, poetry, and drama. Memoirs counted only if they directly involve other writers and/or the literary landscape of the era. It is in no way meant to be a list of the world’s indispensible literary criticism, only my own, and only so far.
So to that guy on Twitter, and to those who’ve asked me before, here is my belated reply.
(NB: list is in alphabetical order by author, or subject for biographies, except for two anthologies at the start of the list, which are alphabetical by title.)
(also NB: this shit was hard. I initially wanted to do 50 but my first list stretched to nearly 175 titles. These 102 are, believe it or not, a compromise.)
102 Indispensible Volumes of Literary Criticism
A New Literary History of America, ed. Greil Marcus & Werner Sollors
The Paris Review Interviews, Vols. 1—4, ed. Philip Gourevitch
White Girls, Hilton Als
Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose, 1983—2005, Margaret Atwood
Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, Lester Bangs, ed. Greil Marcus
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, Elif Batuman
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Walter Benjamin, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn
Selected Non-Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges, ed. Eliot Weinberger
Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998—2003, Roberto Boláno, ed. Ignacio Echevarría, trans. Natasha Wimmer
Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America, Christopher Bram
Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir, Anatole Broyard
Passions of the Mind: Selected Essays, A.S. Byatt
Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote, Truman Capote
Maps & Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, Michael Chabon
Inner Workings: Literary Essays, 2000—2005, J.M. Coetzee
Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979—1989, Stanley Crouch
The Lifespan of a Fact, John D’Agata & Jim Fingal
The White Album, Joan Didion
Bound to Please: An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education: Essays on Great Writers and Their Books, Michael Dirda
Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993—2006, E.L. Doctorow
Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews, Geoff Dyer
Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, Geoff Dyer
Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Zizek and Others, Terry Eagleton
Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives, Joseph Epstein
How to Be Alone: Essays, Jonathan Franzen
How to Read a Novelist, John Freeman
Finding a Form: Essays, William H. Gass
The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Bad Feminist: Essays, Roxane Gay
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt
Scoundrel Time, Lillian Hellman
Arguably: Essays, Christopher Hitchens
Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, Christopher Hitchens
Ten Years in the Tub: A Decade of Soaking in Great Books, Nick Hornby
Cultural Cohesion: The Essential Essays, 1968—2002, Clive James
No Other Book: Selected Essays, Randall Jarrell, Brad Leithauser, editor
Selected Essays from the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler, Samuel Johnson, W.J. Bate, editor
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King
Small Wonder: Essays, Barbara Kingsolver
The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination, Ursula K. Le Guin
Reading for My Life: Writings, 1958—2008, John Leonard
The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, etc., Jonathan Lethem
Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books, Wendy Lesser
Time Bites: Views and Reviews, Doris Lessing
About Burt Britton, John Cheever, Gordon Lish, William Saroyan, Isaac B. Singer, Kurt Vonnegut, and Other Matters, Morris Lurie
Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays, Norman Mailer
Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, Janet Malcolm
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, Janet Malcolm
The Outermost Dream: Essays and Reviews, William Maxwell
Ideas and the Novel, Mary McCarthy
What We See When We Read, Peter Mendelsund
Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944-2000, Arthur Miller
Sexual Politics, Kate Millett
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison
Lectures on Literature, Vladimir Nabokov
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, Azar Nafisi
(Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities, Joyce Carol Oates
Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose, Joyce Carol Oates
Mystery and Manner: Occasional Prose, Flannery O’Connor
A Collection of Essays, George Orwell
The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker, ed. Marion Meade
Where I’m Reading From: The Changing World of Books, Tim Parks
The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, Stephen Pinker
Under Review: Further Writings on Writers, 1946-1990, Anthony Powell
The Tale Bearers, V.S. Pritchett
Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and For Those Who Want to Write Them, Francine Prose
Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine
In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays, Katie Roiphe
Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, Claudia Roth Pierpont
Reading Myself and Others, Philip Roth
Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991, Salman Rushdie
Joseph Anton: A Memoir, Salman Rushdie
“What Is Literature?” and Other Essays, Jean-Paul Sartre
The Braindead Megaphone: Essays, George Saunders
The Novel: A Biography, Michael Schmidt
Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life, Dani Shapiro
A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, Elaine Showalter
13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, Jane Smiley
Artful, Ali Smith
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, Zadie Smith
Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit
Against Interpretation: And Other Essays, Susan Sontag
Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag
Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives, John Sutherland
Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, Lewis Thomas
What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, Lynne Tillman
New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families, Colm Tóibín
The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews, 1965—75, Lionel Trilling
Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism, John Updike
More Matter: Essays and Criticism, John Updike
The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry, Helen Vendler
Both Flesh and Not: Essays, David Foster Wallace
Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, David Foster Wallace
The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews, Eudora Welty
The Essential Ellen Willis, Ellen Willis, Nona Willis Aronowitz, editor
Axel’s Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930, Edmund Wilson
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe
How Fiction Works, James Wood
A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All, C.D. Wright