The end of December is a time when we are bombarded with end-of-year lists—so much so that they start to blur together. But what about the books that stay with us for years? In an effort to come up with a more enduring, definitive list, I reached out to some of my favorite contemporary writers and asked them to name the most important books published over the last two decades. To my surprise, there wasn’t a lot of overlap in their respective choices: only 14 titles were chosen by more than one author. The top three titles are Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, The Known World by Edward P. Jones, and fittingly (as we hurtle toward a Trumpian apocalypse?), The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Though no books by women made it into the top three, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, the Neopolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, I Love Dick by Chris Kraus, and The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis each received two votes.

The end to this year has left many of us in a state of shock and despair, but I took comfort in Toni Morrison’s words in The Nation: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

I’d add one other thing to that list: we read.

CONTRIBUTORS

Ann Patchett · Azar Nafisi · Ben Fountain · Colson Whitehead · Colum McCann · Curtis Sittenfeld · Eileen Myles · Geoff Dyer · Jane Smiley · Jesmyn Ward · Jess Walter · Jo Ann Beard · Jonathan Franzen · Jonathan Lethem · Kaitlyn Greenidge · Lauren Groff · Leslie Jamison · Maggie Nelson · Paul Harding · Peter Straub · Patti Smith · Porochista Khakpour · Rebecca Solnit · Rick Moody · Roxane Gay · Sarah Waters · Stewart O’Nan · Ruth Ozeki · Victor LaValle.

2666 by Roberto Bolaño (2)

A Big Enough Lie by Eric Bennett

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Against Identity by Leon Wieseltier

All Souls’ Rising, Master of the Crossroads, The Stone That the Builder Refused by Madison Smartt Bell

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2)

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo (2)

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans

Beneath the Roses by Gregory Crewdson

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain

Birds of America by Lorrie Moore

Blue Nights by Joan Didion

Brick Lane by Monica Ali

Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat

Building Stories by Chris Ware

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

Citizen by Claudia Rankine

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2)

Collected Stories by Lorrie Moore

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser

Conference of the Birds by Peter Sis

Counternarratives by John Keene

Debt: The First Five Thousand Years by David Graeber

Decreation by Anne Carson

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

Drown by Junot Díaz

Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben

Falling Out of Time by David Grossman

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

For the Relief of Unbearable Urges by Nathan Englander

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (2)

Global Crisis by Geoffrey Parker

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Hateship, Courtship, Loveship, Friendship, Marriage by Alice Munro

Head Off and Split by Nikky Finney

How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet

How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America by Kiese Laymon

I Love Dick by Chris Kraus (2)

Inferno by Eileen Myles

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (3)

Intoxicated By My Illness by Anatole Broyard

Jane by Maggie Nelson

Lovely Green Eyes by Arnost Lustig

Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capo Crucet

Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes

Mind of an Outlaw by Norman Mailer

My Perfect Life by Lynda Barry

My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard (2)

Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey

Neopolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante (2)

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

NW by Zadie Smith

Old Filth by Jane Gardam

One Big Self by CD Wright

Our Word Is Our Weapon: Selected Writings by Subcomandante Marcos

Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler

Paradise by Toni Morrison

Pastoralia by George Saunders (2)

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Power Politics by Arundhati Roy

Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish

Proxy by R. Erica Doyle

Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

Reason In A Dark Time by Dale Jamieson

Remainder by Tom McCarthy

Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald

Selected Poems by Eileen Myles

Selected Stories by Alice Munro

Solitude of Self by Elizabeth Cady Stanton (reprinted in 2001)

Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds

Steal Away by C.D. Wright

Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link

Tenth of December by George Saunders

Testo Junkie by Beatriz Preciado

The Activist by Renee Gladman

The Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

The Aegypt Quartet by John Crowley

The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer

The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All by Laird Barron

The Boat by Nam Le

The Book of Frank by CAConrad

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (2)

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

The Freddie Stories by Lynda Barry

The Givenness of Things by Marilynne Robinson

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

The Great Wave by David Hackett Fischer

The Human Stain by Philip Roth

The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead

The Known World by Edward P. Jones (3)

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright

The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily Danforth

The Moon Before Morning by W.S. Merwin

The Mooring of Starting Out by John Ashbery

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (2)

The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn

The Road by Cormac McCarthy (3)

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Undercommons by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

To The Wedding by John Berger

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

Underworld by Don DeLillo (2)

Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People by Jonathan

Schell

Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis

War by Sebastian Junger

We Others by Steven Millhauser

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch

White Girls by Hilton Als

Why the West Rules, For Now by Ian Morris

Wittgenstein’s Poker by David Edmonds and John Eidinow

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

A total of 128 books were mentioned by contributors; 56 of those were written by women; and 35 by writers of color.

Feature image: Adieu, by Guy Laramee.