THE FOLLOWING “100 BEST WORKS OF FICTION” LIST WAS PUBLISHED IN SPRING OF 2002 IN ENGLAND’S “THE GUARDIAN” NEWSPAPER – THIS LIST WAS DETERMINED BY 100 NOTED WRITERS FROM 54 COUNTRIES [Listed by book title, author and birth/death year AND the double ** indicates the books I’ve read]

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe, Nigeria (b. 1930)
Fairy Tales and Stories - Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark (1805-1875)
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen, England (1775-1817) **
Old Goriot - Honore de Balzac, France (1799-1850)
Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable - Samuel Beckett, Ireland (1906-1989)
Decameron - Giovanni Boccaccio, Italy (1313-1375) **
Collected Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina (1899-1986)
Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë, England (1818-1848) **
The Stranger - Albert Camus, France (1913-1960)
Selected Poems and Prose - Paul Celan, Romania/France (1920-1970)
Journey to the End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand Celine, France (1894-1961)
Don Quixote de la Mancha - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Spain (1547-1616) **
Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer, England (1340-1400) **
Selected Stories - Anton P. Chekhov, Russia (1860-1904)
Nostromo - Joseph Conrad, England (1857-1924)
The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri, Italy (1265-1321)
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens, England (1812-1870) **
Jacques the Fatalist and His Master - Denis Diderot, France (1713-1784)
Berlin Alexanderplatz - Alfred Döblin, Germany (1878-1957)
Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky, Russia (1821-1881)
Middlemarch - George Eliot, England (1819-1880)
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison, United States (1914-1994)
Medea - Euripides, Greece (circa 480-406 B.C.)
Absalom Absalom, The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner, United States (1897-1962)
Madame Bovary, A Sentimental Education Gustave Flaubert, France (1821-1880) **
Gypsy Ballads - Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain (1898-1936)
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia (b. 1928)
The Epic of Gilgamesh - Mesopotamia (circa 1800 B.C.)
Faust - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany (1749-1832)
Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol, Russia (1809-1852)
The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass, Germany (b. 1927)
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands - Joao Guimaraes Rosa, Brazil (1880-1967)
Hunger - Knut Hamsun, Norway (1859-1952)
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway, United States (1899-1961) **
The Iliad, The Odyssey - Homer, Greece (circa 700 B.C.) **
A Doll's House - Henrik Ibsen, Norway (1828-1906)
The Book of Job - Israel (600-400 B.C.)
Ulysses - James Joyce, Ireland (1882-1941)
The Complete Stories, The Trial, The Castle - Franz Kafka, Bohemia (1883-1924)
The Recognition of Sakuntala - Kalidasa, India (circa 400)
The Sound of the Mountain - Yasunari Kawabata, Japan (1899-1972)
Zorba the Greek - Nikos Kazantzakis, Greece (1883-1957)
Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence, England (1885-1930)
Independent People - Halldor K. Laxness, Iceland (1902-1998)
Complete Poems - Giacomo Leopardi, Italy (1798-1837)
The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing, England (b. 1919)
The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking - Astrid Lindgren, Sweden (1907-2002) **
Diary of a Madman and Other Stories - Lu Xun, China (1881-1936)
Mahabharata - India (circa 500 B.C.)
Children of Gebelawi - Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt (b. 1911)
Buddenbrook, The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann, Germany (1875-1955)
Moby Dick - Herman Melville, United States (1819-1891) **
Essays - Michel de Montaigne, France (1533-1592)
History - Elsa Morante, Italy (1918-1985)
Beloved - Toni Morrison, United States (b. 1931)
The Tale of Genji - Murasaki Shikibu, Japan (973-1025?)
The Man Without Qualities - Robert Musil, Austria (1880-1942)
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov, Russia/United States (1899-1977)**
Njaal's Saga - Iceland (circa 1300)
1984 - George Orwell, England (1903-1950) **
Metamorphoses - Ovid, Italy (circa 43 B.C.)
The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa, Portugal (1888-1935)
The Complete Tales - Edgar Allan Poe, United States (1809-1849) **
Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust, France (1871-1922) **
Gargantua and Pantagruel - Francois Rabelais, France (1495-1553)
Pedro Paramo - Juan Rulfo, Mexico (1918-1986)
Mathnawi - Jalal ad-din Rumi, Afghanistan (1207-1273)
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie, India/Britain (b. 1947)
The Orchard - Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi, Iran (circa 1200-1292)
Season of Migration to the North - Tayeb Salih, Sudan (b. 1929)
Blindness - Jose Saramago, Portugal (b. 1922)
Hamlet, King Lear, Othello - William Shakespeare, England (1564-1616) **
Oedipus the King - Sophocles, Greece (496-406 B.C.)
The Red and the Black - Stendhal, France (1783-1842) **
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne, Ireland (1713-1768)
Confessions of Zeno - Italo Svevo, Italy (1861-1928)
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift, Ireland (1667-1745) **
War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories - Leo Tolstoy, Russia (1828-1910) **
Tales from a Thousand and One Nights - India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt (700-1500)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain, United States (1835-1910) **
Ramayana - Valmiki, India (circa 300 B.C.)
The Aeneid - Virgil, Italy (70-19 B.C.)
Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman, United States (1819-1892)
Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf, England (1882-1941)
Memoirs of Hadrian - Marguerite Yourcenar, France (1903-1987)

MESSAGE FROM JONATHAN TASINI IN NEW YORK STATE - A Different Course of Action This Election Day
Over the past few weeks, a number of people have told me that they simply have no desire to vote for the available candidates listed on the ballot for U.S. Senate in New York. They asked me: "Can we just write you in?" I didn't particularly focus on this idea until I received a letter from a senior citizen supporter who, in shaky handwriting, asked my permission to write in my name for the Senate race. Her letter was touching and passionate. So, while I will not make a big effort to push this idea, if you want to write in my name or, frankly, anyone else but the incumbent, please feel free to do so. The truth is that no one should have to vote for an incumbent who has supported a war that has killed more than 2,800 American men and women and 650,000 Iraqis, wounded hundreds of thousands more, destroyed a country and will end up costing our country as much as 2 trillion dollars.

Here is how you do that ... Locate the button over the column of numbered slots on the left of the voting machine and ... Depress the button and, while holding it in, open the slot opposite the office for which you wish to write in a candidate's name. Write the name of your preferred candidate in the slot. A pencil is provided. Cast your vote for other offices in the usual manner.
When you finish making your selection, leave the levers down and pull the large red handle all the way to the left. The write-in slot will close, the levers will return to their original position and your vote is recorded. If you need help, you can demand that the poll workers assist you.