Novels:

• Absalom, Absalom!; As I Lay Dying; Light in August; The Sound and the Fury; William Faulkner
• Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle; Lolita; Pale Fire; Vladimir Nabokov
• All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
• Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
• East of Eden, John Steinbeck
• Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
• Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
• Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
• Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich
• Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon
• The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
• The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
• The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
• White Noise, Don DeLillo

Short story collections:

• A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, Flannery O'Connor
• CivilWarLand in Bad Decline; Pastoralia; George Saunders
• Family Furnishings, Alice Munro
• Ficciones; Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings; Jorge Luis Borges
• The Complete Stories, Franz Kafka
• The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien

Poetry:

• Collected Poems, W.H. Auden
• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems; The Wasteland and Other Poems, T.S. Eliot

Nonfiction & essays:

• Shadow & Act, Ralph Ellison
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
• The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, Virginia Woolf