“The Mayor of Casterbridge,” Thomas Hardy

As for fate, and how you can’t escape yours: Hardy’s “The Mayor of Casterbridge” is pretty harsh. A guy sells his wife and daughter to a sailor in the first chapter; he can never atone for that. And Hardy’s critics wanted him to write more uplifting endings!

Image John Irving Credit... Robert Spencer for The New York Times

“David Copperfield,” Charles Dickens

As for Dickens — well, yes, “Great Expectations” is his best novel. But, for sheer drama, nothing tops the “Tempest” chapter in “David Copperfield” — Steerforth’s body washing ashore, and Copperfield saying “I saw him lying with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie at school.”

“Madame Bovary,” Gustave Flaubert

When I first read Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” I was some years away from being married, and still a few years away from imagining I ever would be. What did the adulteries and suicide of a doctor’s wife in provincial France matter to me? A lot. As my first editor once said to me, “I’ve known a number of adulterous women.” (I didn’t doubt that he had.) “But the one I know best, and will never forget, is Emma Bovary.”

“Death in Venice,” Thomas Mann

In Thomas Mann’s novella “Death in Venice,” a great writer is as endangered by his repressed passions as he is by the cholera plague. I was a young fiction writer who wanted to be an artist at what I did. Why wouldn’t I be interested, as Mann was, in the nature of the artist?

“Giovanni’s Room,” James Baldwin

I was still too young to drive a car when I read James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room.” The concept of a devastating and doomed love story — one that was also modern — hadn’t occurred to me. I thought nothing would ever compare to “Romeo and Juliet,” but Baldwin’s story of “the night that is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life” became the saddest love story I know.