Novels, short stories, and narratives referred to or quoted from in this book are listed below. In the interest of evoking a sense of historical passage and context, I have ordered them by first date of publication in their original language. Translators have been credited in those cases in which I have quoted at any length from one particular translation.
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605 and 1615)
The Bible, King James Version (1611)
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (1742), Tom Jones (1749)
Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew (written in the 1760s, published in 1784)
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813) , Emma (1816), Persuasion ( 1818)
Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin (1823–31)
Stendhal, The Red and the Black (1830, translated by Margaret Shaw)
Honoré de Balzac, La Peau de chagrin (1831), Splendeurs et mis è res des courtisanes (1839–47)
Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma (1839)
Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time (1840)
Charlotte Brontë , Jane Eyre (1847)
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848)
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857, translated by Geoffrey Wall)
George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859)
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866)
Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education (1869, translated by Robert Baldick)
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude)
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–72)
Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877)
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne (1880)
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886)
Guy de Maupassant, Pierre and Jean (1888)
Knut Hamsun, Hunger (1890)
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)
Anton Chekhov, “Ward 6” (1892), “Rothschild’s Fiddle” (1894)
Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest (1894)
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
Henry James, What Maisie Knew (1897)
Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Little Dog” (1899)
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900)
Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (1901)
Anton Chekhov, “The Bishop” (1902)
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902)
Beatrix Potter, The Tailor of Gloucester (1903)
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910, translated by Stephen Mitchell)
Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murad (1912)
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin)
James Joyce, Dubliners (1914)
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (1915)
D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (1915)
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia (1921)
James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922)
Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)
Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno (1923)
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924)
Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
Isaac Babel, “My First Fee” (1928)
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930)
Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931)
Louis-Ferdinand Cé line, Journey to the End of the Night (1932)
Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March (1932)
Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (1939)
Robert McCloskey, Make Way for Ducklings (1941)
Henry Green, Loving (1945)
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1945)
Vladimir Nabokov, “First Love” (1948)
Cesare Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfire (1950)
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (1956)
Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957)
Claude Simon, The Flanders Road (1960)
V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas (1961)
Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
Julio Cortá zar, Hopscotch (1963)
John Updike, Of the Farm (1965)
John Williams, Stoner (1965)
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
Frederick Exley, A Fan’s Notes (1968)
B. S. Johnson, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973)
Italo Calvino, If on a writer’s night a traveler (1979)
Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein’s Nephew (1982)
José Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984)
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985)
Philip Roth, The Counterlife (1986)
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989)
Norman Rush, Mating (1991)
Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (1992)
W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants (1992)
Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater (1995)
Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower (1995)
Roberto Bolañ o, The Savage Detectives (1998)
Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001)
J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (2003)
Norman Rush, Mortals (2003)
Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude (2003)
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)
David Foster Wallace, Oblivion: Stories (2004)
Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day (2006)
John Updike, Terrorist (2006)
Lydia Davis, Collected Stories (2009)
Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle (2009–2011)
Alice Munro, Selected Stories (2011)
Teju Cole, Open City (2011)
Alejandro Zambra, Ways of Going Home (2011)
Denis Johnson, Train Dreams (2012)
Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (2012)
Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation (2014)
Ali Smith, How to Be Both (2014)