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The Official MFA Reading List

One of our commitments as an MFA program in Creative Writing and Translation is to immerse ourselves in various literary traditions and to encourage students to see themselves as members of a community of writers practicing a range of different styles, techniques, and writerly strategies. In the interest of placing student work in dialogue with the work of – in particular – 20th century writers, mostly working in English, mostly in the U.S., we have compiled a list of texts which we expect our students to read in time for their Orals Examination at the end of their four semesters of course work.

The reading list is separated into Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Non-Fiction and Translation. You should make a list of thirty texts: fifteen from your genre of focus, five from another genre, five from the criticism list and five outside texts not on the list of your own choosing.

These reading lists are meant to be an integral part of your writing process, not simply an exam list of required texts. We hope you will find, among them, a handful of texts that speak directly to your creative project. Finally, we post these lists in the interest of developing an area of common knowledge that will help generate a shared sense of intellectual and creative community in discussion in and outside the classroom.

Fiction: Short Stories | Novels | Criticisms

Poetry: Poetry | Criticism and Theory of Poetry | Anthologies

Drama: Plays | Criticisms

Non-Fiction: Memoir | Critical/Personal Essays and Reportage | Translation

Fiction

(In addition to the 20th century works listed below, students are expected to have a general awareness of the history of the novel, beginning with Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji and ranging through the end of the 19th century. We do not require but strongly encourage students to read a range of works published prior to 1900, with perhaps special reference to British, French, American, and Russian novels – and notable short stories – of the 19th century.)

Short Stories

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man

Donald Barthelme, Forty Stories

Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

Raymond Carver, Where I’m Calling From

John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever

Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman and Other Tales

Lydia Davis, Break It Down

Mavis Gallant, Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories

Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

James Joyce, Dubliners

Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories

Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield

Haruki Murakami, After the Quake

Lorrie Moore, Birds of America

Alice Munro, Selected Stories

Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O’Connor

Grace Paley, Complete Stories

Gertrude Stein, Three Lives

Eudora Welty, The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

John Edgar Wideman, The Stories of John Edgar Wideman

Novels

James Baldwin, Another Country

Willa Cather, My Antonia

Don DeLillo, White Noise

Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Nadine Gordimer, Burger’s Daughter

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

Nella Larsen, Passing

Micheline Aharonian Marcom, The Daydreaming Boy

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Toni Morrison, Beloved

Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater

Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo

Salman Rushdie, Shame

Jean Toomer, Cane

John Updike, Rabbit, Run

V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Richard Wright, Native Son

Criticisms

Charles Baxter, Burning Down the HouseMadison Smartt Bell, Narrative DesignE.M. Forster, Aspects of the NovelToni Morrison, Playing in the DarkFrank O’Connor, The Lonely VoiceFlannery O'Connor, Mystery and MannersNathalie Sarraute, The Age of Suspicion: Essays on the NovelGertrude Stein, “Poetry and Grammar” and “Composition as Explanation”

Poetry

Poetry

Primary Texts

John Berryman, The Dream Songs

Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III

Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected

Rita Dove, Thomas and Beulah

T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

Martin Espada, The Republic of Poetry

Allen Ginsberg, HOWL

Louise Gluck, The Wild Iris

Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

Linda Hogan, The Book of Medicines

Langston Hughes, Selected

Galway Kinnell, The Book of Nightmares

Bill Knott, [see his webite: http://billknott.typepad.com]

Yusef Komunyakaa, The Pleasure Dome

Philip Levine, What Work Is

Robert Lowell, Life Studies

Marianne Moore, Selected

Paul Muldoon, Moy Sand and Gravel

Marilyn Nelson, Wreath for Emmett Till

Sharon Olds, The Father

Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language

Alberto Rios, The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body

Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead

Sylvia Plath, Ariel

Anne Sexton, Transformations

C.K. Williams, Selected

William Carlos Williams, Selected

Charles Wright, Chickamauga

(NOTE: for Selected, read at least the latter half.)

Criticism and Theory of Poetry

T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent”

Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Daydreaming”

Seamus Heaney, “Feeling Into Words”

Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”

Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”

Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy

Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken”

Muriel Rukeyeser, The Life of Poetry

Gertrude Stein, “Poetry and Grammar”

Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens”

CD Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

[Also see the introductions to the anthologies below.]

Anthologies

Anonymous/ Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, Judy Yung, eds., Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940

Agha Shahid Ali, Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals

Kurt Brown and Harold Schechter, eds., Conversation Pieces

Eavan Boland and Mark Strand, eds., The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms

David Lehman, ed., Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present

Phillis Levin, ed., The Penguin Book of the Sonnet

Donald Allen and George F. Butterick, eds., The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revised

Camille Paglia, ed., Break Blow Burn

Drama

Plays

Aeschylus, The Agamemnon

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Krapp’s Last Tape

Bertolt Brecht, Baal, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagony, Mother Courage, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle

Anton Chekhov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, and The Three Sisters

Caryl Churchill, Top Girls and Cloud Nine

Euripides, Hippolytus, and The Bacchae

William Finn, Falsettos

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, and The Wild Duck

Tony Kushner, Angels in America and Caroline, or Change

Neal Labute, The Distance from Here

Tracy Letts, August: Osage County

David Mamet, American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, Oleana, and Speed the Plow

Arthur Miller, All My Sons and Death of a Salesman

Moliere, The Miser and The Misanthrope

Marsha Norman, ‘Night Mother

Suzan-Lori Parks, Tog Dog/Underdog

Eugene O’Neill, A Long Day’s Journey into Night

Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party, The Homecoming, and Betrayal

Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author

Jean Racine, Phaedre

Sam Shepard, Red Cross, La Turista, Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, and True West

William Shakespeare, The Complete Plays

George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara and Heartbreak House

Stephen Sondheim, Company, Follies, and Sweeney Todd

Sophocles, The Oedipus Trilogy (Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone)

Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and Rock ‘n’ Roll

August Strindberg, Miss Julie, The Father, and The Dream Play

Paula Vogel, How I Leaned to Drive

Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire

August Wilson, The Piano Lesson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and Fences

Criticisms

Aristotle, The Poetics

Antonin Artaud, “The Theatre of Cruelty” and “The Theatre and the Plague”

Eric Bentley, The Life of the Drama and The Playwright as Thinker

Henri Bergson, “On Laughter”

Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre (trans. John Willett)

Peter Brook, The Empty Space

Joseph Chaikin, “The Presence of the Actor”

Horace, “The Art of Poetry”

Hekrik Ibsen, Letters on the Theatre

Gotthold Lessing, “Hamburg Dramaturgy”

David Mamet, Writing in Restaurants and Three Uses of the Knife

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

Jean Racine, “Prefaces” to Andromache and Phaedra

George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy

Stendahl, “Racine” and “Shakespeare”

Maurice Valency, The Flower and the Castle and The Breaking String

Emile Zola, “Naturalism in the Theatre”

Non-Fiction

Memoir

Kathleen Alcalá, The Desert Remembers My Name

Tom Bissell, The Father of All Things

Jenny Boully, The Book of Beginnings and Endings

Truman Capote, Music for Chameleons

Mark Doty, Heaven’s Coast

Francisco Goldman, The Art of Political Murder

Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

Mary Karr, Cherry

Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior

Gregory Orr, The Blessing

Chuck Palahniuk, Stranger Than Fiction

Ann Patchett, Truth and Beauty

Samuel Pepys, The Unqualified Self

Andrew Pham, Catfish and Mandala

John Rechy, About My Life and the Kept Woman

Paisley Rekdal, The Day My Mother Met Bruce Lee

Sharman Apt Russell, An Obsession with Butterflies

Esmeralda Santiago, When I Was Puerto Rican

Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman and the Beauty of the Spirit

Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

Critical/Personal Essays and Reportage

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem

Pico Iyer, The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home

James Baldwin, Notes on a Native Son and Nobody Knows My Name

Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia

Mike Davis, City of Quartz

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album

Andrew Holleran, Ground Zero

Elizabeth Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal

Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song

Janet Malcolm, In the Freud Archives

Mary McCarthy, A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays

George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia, and A Collection of Essays

Ishmael Reed, Airing Dirty Laundry

Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, and On Photography

Gore Vidal, United States

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle

Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Translation

William Arrowsmith & Roger Shattuck, The Craft, and Context of Translation

Mona Baker, In Other Words: A Course Book on Translation)

John Felstiner, Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu

David Halpern, Dante’s Inferno: translations by twenty contemporary poets

Edwin Honig, The Poet's Other Voice: Conversations on Literary Translation

Donald Keene, Japanese Literature: an introduction for Western readers

Clifford E. Landers, Literary Translation, A Practical Guide

Peter H. Lee, The Silence of Love: twentieth-century Korean poetry

Andre Lefevere and Susan Bassnett. Translation, History, and Culture

James J.U. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry

Earl Miner, Japanese Poetic Diaries

Ivan Morris, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon

Manuela Perteghella and Eugenia Loffredo, Translation and Creativity: Perspectives on Creative Writing and Translation Studies

Gregory Rabassa, The World of Translation, PEN American Center

--- If this be treason: translation and its discontents (a memoir).

Douglas Robinson, Becoming a Translator: An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Translation

Hiroaki Sato, String of Beads: complete poems of Princess Shikishi

Rainer Schulte and Biguenet, The Craft of Translation

Rainer Schulte and Biguenet, Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida

Edward G. Seidensticker, Genji Days

George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman and the Beauty of the Spirit

Issues of Translation Review and Circumference: a bi-annual journal of poetry translation