Holy Bible

     But only selected stories. See Harold Bloom, The Book of J.

 Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron

     Dirty stories about monks and nuns.

 François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel

     Dirty stories about everything.

 Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote

     How can you call yourself an educated person if you haven’t read this, at least up to the windmill scene?

 Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Wife of Bath: Prologue and Tale” from The Canterbury Tales

     A portrait of the first feminist in English literature.

 Nicollo Machiavelli, The Prince

     Some think this was intended as a satire. Read it that way to see why.

 Voltaire, Candide

     Voltaire! thou should’st be living at this hour: America hath need of thee.

 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

     Many have called Swift the greatest satirist ever. Some have even called him the greatest prose writer in the English language. Others (e.g., television producers) think this book is a children’s story. God help us.

 Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

     The first great English novel. Lengthy. Take it along on your next vacation to a desert island.

 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

     The first great English anti-novel. Desert island material. Warning: Just as some sentences cannot be diagrammed, so some novels cannot be outlined; in this case, it’s all for the better.

 Jane Austen, Emma; Pride and Prejudice

     For those who prefer their comedy subtle, none better than Ms. Austen.

 Lord Byron, Don Juan

     This is satire set to rhyme;

     It was naughty in its time.

 Nicholai Gogol, Dead Souls

     Forget Dostoevsky. Forget even Tolstoy. Gogol’s your 19th century Russian writer.

 Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

     Wall-to-wall comedy. Then the author discovered the commercial value of sentimentality and mixed the two.

 Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Letters from the Earth

     We’ve read the one in our youths; the other is for adults.

 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses

     Joyce’s Portrait a comic novel? Read it closely to find out why. Ulysses? Desert island.

 Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds

     A parody of Joyce’s Portrait. Has anyone ever written a funnier anti-novel? (Maybe Sterne?)

 Franz Kafka, The Trial

     When Kafka read it aloud to friends, he laughed. Why shouldn’t we?

 Evelyn Waugh, Scoop

     Near the top of the twentieth-century English comic novelists.

 James Thurber, The Thurber Carnival

     The New Yorker has never been the same.

 Dorothy Parker. Anything by or about her you can lay your hands on.

     The mistress of the quip turned her talents to the brief piece.

 William Saroyan, My Name is Aram

     Give it to those who think they don’t like literature.

 Nabokov, Lolita

     Pedophilia made elegant. Handle with care. Nabokov did.

 Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find

     Theology by means of comedy. Warning: She might make a believer out of you.

 John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

     Did himself in because nobody would publish this novel. Then it got discovered and won a Pulitzer. He could not be reached for comment.

 Donald Barthelme, Forty Stories

     Inventive short pieces by a master wordsmith.

 William Kennedy, Legs, Ironweed, Very Old Bones

     He’s Irish. He’s a writer. He’s funny.

 Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

     He’s English, by way of Japan. He’s a writer. He’s funny, if you know how to read him.

 Armin Wiebe, The Salvation of Yasch Siemens

     Ethnic eccentrics. (No relation. Wish he were.)

 Sir V. S. Pritchett, Complete Selected Stories

     What Dickens could have done if he hadn’t gone for the teardrop at the edge of the eyelid.

 William Trevor, The Collected Stories

     It’s all tragedy, but often of a funny sort. Is sardonic the word?

 Jack Cady, The Off Season

     Fantasy has seldom been so much fun.

 Ernest Hemingway, The Torrents of Spring

     Knocked this one off in one week; if he’da kept it up, he coulda been a contendah.

 Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes

     Those who read it for the vicarious suffering are missing the fun. And yes, it’s a memoir; but all memoirs are at least half fiction.