To mark the occasion of Bookshop Santa Cruz’s golden anniversary, we thought it would be fun to look back at the incredible books published during our 50 years and come up with a list of 50 significant fiction titles. As you might imagine, selecting the 50 most notable works of fiction published since 1966 was a nearly impossible task. At first a delight to delve into the rich history of literature over the past several decades, it quickly became torturous, as we kept bumping up against the firm limit of 50 spaces. What a pleasure to think back on such commanding works as we considered them for inclusion—the power of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the weight of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried! And what pain to pass over so many others.
In the end, it is only a list, albeit our list, one that attempts to reflect the breadth of our reading here at Bookshop over time, our interests, and our perspective. We hope you enjoy it with the knowledge that it could be recreated with a hundred different titles with little hesitation. Isn’t it indeed a burden of plenty to have so many from which to choose? Because literature at its best is about being inclusive, not exclusive, please look around Bookshop Santa Cruz throughout the year for in-store displays of more “50 Notable” lists as we celebrate cooking, science fiction/fantasy, and more. Plus, we get to relish in our suffering all over again for our “50 Notable Works of Nonfiction” that will be featured in the winter newsletter. Enjoy!
Tell us which of these 50 notable works of fiction you've read
50 Notable Works of Fiction (In chronological order) |
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The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, 1966 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, 1967 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin, 1969 Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, 1971 Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, 1972 Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, 1973 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, 1973 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré, 1974 Turtle Island by Gary Snyder, 1974 Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich, 1978 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, 1979 Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, 1979 A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul, 1979 Maus by Art Spiegelman, 1980 A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, 1980 Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee, 1980 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, 1981 The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende, 1982 The Color Purple by Alice Walker, 1982 The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, 1984 Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, 1984 The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, 1985 All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, 1985 Watchmen by Alan Moore, 1986 Beloved by Toni Morrison, 1987 |
Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver, 1988 Sandman by Neil Gaiman, 1988 Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, 1989 The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, 1989 Postmortem by Patricia Cornwell, 1990 The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, 1990 The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, 1992 The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie, 1993 The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R. King, 1994 The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, 1994 View with a Grain of Sand by Wisława Szymborska, 1995 A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin, 1996 Selected Stories by Alice Munro, 1996 Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, 1996 Underworld by Don DeLillo, 1997 The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, 1998 Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, 1999 White Teeth by Zadie Smith, 2000 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, 2001 Snow by Orhan Pamuk, 2002 Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, 2004 The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, 2004 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson, 2005 A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, 2010 Citizen by Claudia Rankine, 2014 |