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John Irving

Top Ten Books

For the American novelist, John Irving, international success arrived in 1978 with The World According to Garp, now published as a Modern Library edition, along with three of his other celebrated works--The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and A Widow for One Year. This November he publishes his 15th novel, Avenue of Mysteries. Below are John Irving’s favorite books, available to purchase as a set or individually. See the full list...

10

The Scarlett Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)

In Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, those churchwomen gossiping about what they would do to Hester - not mark her clothes but brand her forehead, or kill her - would later drive me to make sexual explicitness and sexual minorities features of many of my novels.

9

Moby Dick

Herman Melville

Melville's Moby-Dick - particularly, Queequeg and his coffin/life buoy - taught me that foreshadow is the storytelling companion to fate.

8

The Mayor of Casterbridge

Thomas Hardy (1886)

As for fate, and how you can't escape yours: Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge is pretty harsh. A guy sells his wife and daughter to a sailor in the first chapter; he can never atone for that. And Hardy's critics wanted him to write more uplifting endings!
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Alan Hollinghurst
$171.79
The Blue Flower

by Penelope Fitzgerald
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Edmund White
$168.90
The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Richard Flanagan
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Sarah Waters
$160.64
Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm

Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm
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Frank Rich
$156.47
The Brigadier and the Golf Widow

John Cheever
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Erica Jong
$174.73
To the End of the Land

David Grossman