eBranch Blog

May 25, 2006

Best American Fiction of Past 25 Years

The New York Times asked several hundred writers what they considered the "single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." On May 21, the results were published.

Winner:

Toni Morrison. Beloved
Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the decade.

Runners-up:

• Don DeLillo. Underworld
  
• Cormac McCarthy. Blood Meridian
  
• John Updike. Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels
  
• Philip Roth. American Pastoral
  

• John Kennedy Toole. A Confederacy of Dunces
  
• Marilynne Robinson. Housekeeping
  
• Mark Helprin. Winter's Tale
  
• Don DeLillo. White Noise
  
• Philip Roth. The Counterlife
  
• Don DeLillo. Libra
  
• Raymond Carver. Where I'm Calling From
  
• Tim O'Brien. The Things They Carried
  
• Norman Rush. Mating
  
• Denis Johnson. Jesus' Son
  
• Philip Roth. Operation Shylock
  
• Richard Ford. Independence Day
  
• Philip Roth. Sabbath's Theater
  
• Cormac McCarthy. Border Trilogy
  
• Philip Roth. The Human Stain
  
• Edward P. Jones. The Known World
  
• Philip Roth. The Plot Against America
  

Source: h20boro lib blog