Fiction Past Readings

2025

    • Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
    • Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
    • Ignatio Padilla, Shadow Without a Name
    • Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum
    • Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!
    • Laszlo Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance
    • Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
    • Philip Roth, Nemesis

2024

    • J.F. Powers, Morte D’Urban
    • Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
    • Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
    • Ian McEwan, Amsterdam
    • Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
    • J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
    • Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
    • Olga Tokarczuk, Flights
    • Virginia Woolf, The Waves
    • G. Cabrera Infante, Three Trapped Tigers
    • Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust
    • Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

2023

    • Toni Morrison, Jazz

    • Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood

    • Scott Hawkins, The Library at Mount Char

    • Hernan Diaz, In the Distance

    • Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book

    • Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

    • Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar

    • Henry Green, Loving

    • Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule

    • Tom McCarthy, Remainder

    • Henry James, What Maisie Knew

    • Nikolai Gogol, The Nose

2022

    • Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

    • Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithdale Romance

    • Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

    • Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country

    • Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

    • Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master’s Son

    • Roberto Bolano, Cowboy Graves

    • Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

    • Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick

    • Walter Mosley, The Right Mistake

    • William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

    • Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun

2021

    • Jeff Schaara, Smoke at Dawn

    • Reynolds Price, A Long and Happy Life

    • Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

    • Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

    • Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

    • Herman Melville, Billy Budd

    • Graham Greene, The End of The Affair

    • Henry James, The Ambassadors

    • Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

    • Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

    • Octavia E. Butler, Kindred

    • Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

2020

    • Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings

    • Willa Cather, My Antonia

    • Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

    • Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar 

    • Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

    • Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 

    • Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

    • Stewart O’Nan, Henry, Himself

    • Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

    • Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

    • Virginia Woolf, Orlando

    • Penelope Fitzgerald, The Beginning of Spring

2019

    • Shelby Foote, Shiloh

    • James Baldwin, Another Country

    • Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country

    • Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

    • William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

    • Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red

    • Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

    • Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

    • Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

    • Anne Enright, The Gathering

    • Lawrence Norfolk, John Saturnall’s Feast

    • Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day

2018

    • Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

    • Jim Crace, Harvest

    • Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City

    • Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary

    • Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

    • Javier Marías, A Heart So White

    • Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

    • Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

    • Jane Gardam, Old Filth

    • Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

    • Zadie Smith, White Teeth

    • Joseph O’Neill, Netherland

2017

    • David Malouf​, Ransom 

    • Antonio di Benedetto​​, Zama

    • Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

    • George and Weedon Grossmith​, The Diary of a Nobody

    • Saadat Hasan Manto​, Bombay Stories

    • Richard Russo​, Straight Man

    • Tim O’Brien, July, July

    • Jim Harrison, Dalva

    • Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding

    • George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

    • Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to The End

    • Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

2016

    • John Williams, Augustus

    • Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

    • Doug Dorst and JJ Abrams, S

    • Richard Yates, The Easter Parade

    • Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel

    • Tom Rachman, The Imperfectionists

    • Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now

    • Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life

    • Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

    • William Maxwell, Time Will Darken It

    • Percival Everett, I Am Not Sidney Poitier

    • Magda Szabo, The Door

2015

    • John Williams, Stoner 

    • Italo Svevo, Zeno’s Conscience

    • Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn 

    • Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North 

    • Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace 

    • Stefan Zweig, The Post Office Girl 

    • Peter Carey, Parrot & Oliver in America 

    • Jan Morris, Hav

2014

    • Moshin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

    • Guy de Maupassant, Bel Ami

    • George Saunders, Tenth of December

    • Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

    • Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

    • William Faulkner, These 13

    • William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

    • Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

    • Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey

    • George Saunders, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

    • Guy de Maupassant, Pierre et Jean

    • Moshin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

2013

    • Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

    • Russell Banks, Continental Drift

    • Building Stories, Chris Ware

    • Philip K. Dick, Ubik

    • Matthew Kneale, English Passengers

    • Herman Koch, The Dinner

    • Martin Amis, Lionel Asbo:State of England

    • Herman Melville, Moby Dick

    • Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

    • Javier Marias, Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me

    • Mo Yan, Life and Death are Wearing Me Out: A Novel

    • Peter Temple, The Broker Shore

2012

    • Nokolai Gogol, Dead Souls

    • Chad Harback, The Art of Fielding

    • Paul Harding, Tinkers

    • W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

    • Yukio Mishima, The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea

    • Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Letter Killers Club

    • Dezso Kosztolanyi, Skylark

    • Cesar Aira, The Seamstress and the Wind

    • Halldor Laxness, Fish Can Sing

    • Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart Henry Roth, Call it Sleep

    • Keri Hulme, The Bone People

2011

    • Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

    • David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

    • John Banville, The Sea

    • Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

    • Jeff Eugenides, Middlesex

    • Georges Simenon, Maigret in Montmartre

    • Lev Grossman, The Magicians

    • John dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer

    • Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

    • Edith Wharton, House of Mirth

    • Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

    • Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

2010

    • Graham Greene, The Quiet American

    • Steve Hely, How I Became a Famous Novelist

    • Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteredge

    • Lydia Davis, Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

    • David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp

    • Victor LaValle, Big Machine

    • Knut Hamsun, Hunger

    • Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

    • Todd and Linda Shimoda, Oh! A mystery of ‘mono no aware’

    • Dan Chaon, Await Your Reply

    • Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, There once lived a woman who tried to kill her neighbor’s baby

    • Thomas Bernhard, The Loser