Colonist Reading List

LAMINATION COLONY

Blake Butler

William Gass, Omensetter’s Luck & The Tunnel & “The Pedersen Kid”
Brian Evenson, The Wavering Knife & The Open Curtain
David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress
Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar
Christine Schutt, “The Blood Jet”
Kelly Link, “Stone Animals”
Stanley Elkin, The Magic Kingdom
Ken Sparling, Dad Says He Saw You At The Mall
Gordon Lish, Epigaph
Cormac McCarthy, Suttree & Blood Meridian
Steve Erickson, Amnesiascope
Barry Hannah, Ray & Bats Out of Hell
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
Eugene Marten, In the Blind
Stanley Crawford, Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest & “Mr. Squishy”
Jose Saramago, Blindness & The Double
Donald Barthelme, Snow White
Gary Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way
Ander Monson, Other Electricities
Yannick Murphy, Stories in Another Language
Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song
Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish
Eraserhead & INLAND EMPIRE
John D’Agata, ed., The Next American Essay
Lynne Tillman, American Genius
Jane Unrue, “The Snarl is on the Mask”



Robert Lopez

Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
Thomas Bernhard, The Voice Imitator
Robert Coover, Spanking the Maid
Joe Wenderoth, Letters to Wendy’s
Gary Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way
Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress
Alexander Trocchi, Young Adam
Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo
Padgett Powell, Typical
Leonard Michaels, I Would Have Saved Them If I Could
Barry Hannah, Ray and Airships
William Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
Diane Williams, This is About the Body, the Mind, etc.
Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories
Christian Gailly, The Passion of Martin Fissel-Brandt
Sam Lipsyte, Venus Drive
Mary Robison, An Amateur's Guide to the Night
Amy Hempel, Reasons to Live
Grace Paley, The Collected Stories
William Shakespeare, all the plays



Sam Pink

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
The letters of Albert Fish
Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
Sigmund Freud, Dora: A Case of Hysteria
the liner notes to any Slayer album, and the album Adrenaline Rush by Twista
Archie Ammons, Glare, Tape for the Turn of the Year, Bosh and Flapdoodle, Garbage
Daniel Bailey, East Central Indiana
Noah Cicero, The Human War
anything said by "the actual sam pink"
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
the game manual for the video game Arch Rivals
Richard Wright, Native Son
the cracks on my ceiling and the grain of my carpet and my own face in the bathroom mirror



Lily Hoang

Dubravka Ugresic, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender
Selah Saterstrom, The Pink Institution & The Meat & Spirit Plan
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper
Italo Calvino, Castle of Crossed Destinies & Invisible Cities
Tom Philips, A Humument
Steve Tomasula, Kate Bernheimer, & Lance Olsen (everything)



Roy Kesey

most of Cortazar, but especially Bestiario and Octaedro
Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina
William H. Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
Valerian Albanov, In the Land of White Death
pretty much everything by Borges, but especially El Aleph
pretty much everything by Donald Barthelme but especially City Life
Roberto Bolaño, Los detectives salvages
lots of Samuel Beckett but we can start with Murphy
Carlos Oquendo de Amat, 5 metros de poesia
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Durrell, quartet, especially Justine
Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter
Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History and Forgetting
Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms
Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son
Miroslav Holub, Vanishing Lung Syndrome
Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death
George Saunders, Civilwarland in Bad Decline
Steven Millhauser, The Knife Thrower
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman
Milorad Pavic, Landscape Painted with Tea
Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Marylinne Robinson, Housekeeping and Gilead
Rilke, Duino Elegies
Rulfo, Pedro Paramo and El Llano en llamas
so much by Sebald, but especially The Rings of Saturn and The Emigrants
Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust
David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men



Michael Kimball

Samuel Beckett, How It Is
Joe Brainard, I Remember
Stanley G. Crawford, Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine
Meredith Daneman, The Favourite
Don DeLillo, End Zone
B.S. Johnson, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry
Sam Lipsyte, Home Land
David Markson, Reader’s Block
Lydia Millet, My Happy Life
Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness
Coln Toibin, The Heather Blazing



Elizabeth Ellen

John O'Hara, Appointment In Samarra
John O'Hara, Butterfield 8
Jean Stafford, The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford
Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking
Dorothy Parker, The Portable Dorothy Parker
Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden
Frank O'Hara, Lunch Poems
Meridel Le Sueur, The Girl
John Fante, Ask the Dust
Charles Bukowski, Factotum
Charles Bukowski, Love Is A Dog From Hell
Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue



Brian Foley

William Golding, Lord of the Flies
James Tate, Return to the City of White Donkeys
David Berman, Actual Air
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
Zbigniew Herbert, The Collected Poems
Zachary Schomburg, The Man Suit
Dennis Cooper, Closer
Russel Edson, The Tunnel
Charles Simic, Selected Early Poems
Charles Simic, Unending Blues
Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
Adam Zagajewski, Without End
Mark Strand, Reasons for Moving
Michel Houellebecq, Platform
Charles Simic, ed., The Horse Has Six Legs: An Anthology of Serbian Poetry



Peter Markus

Frank Stanford, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You
James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Noy Holland, "Orbit"
William Faulkner, the opening paragraph of The Sound and the Fury
Gertrude Stein, To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays
Norman Lock, The Long Rowing Unto Morning
Gordon Lish, Peru
Yannick Murphy, Stories in Another Language
Victoria Redel, Where the Road Bottoms Out
Dawn Raffel, In the Year of Long Division
Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Pamela Ryder, "Hovenweep"
Barry Hannah, the stories
Agota Kristof, The Notebook
Stuart Dybek, "Pet Milk"
Ben Marcus, "The Weather Killer"
William Gass, "The Pedersen Kid"
Rudy Wilson, The Red Truck
Jack Gilbert
Edmond Jabes
Russell Edson, The Tunnel
Charles Simic, The World Doesn't End
Juan Ramon Jimenez, Platero and I
William Faulkner, the Vardaman chapters of As I Lay Dying
Tom Kromer, Waiting for Nothing
Rick Bass, "Mississippi"
Rick Bass, "Cats and Students, Bubbles and Abysses"
Rick Bass, Platte River
Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son
Mark Richard, The Ice at the Bottom of the World
Jim Heynen, The One-Room Schoolhouse
Samuel Beckett, Company
Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drunkard
John Rybicki, Traveling at High Speeds
John Rybicki, We Bed Down in Water
Gordon Lish, My Romance
Gordon Lish, Self-Imitation of Myself
Sean Thomas Dougherty, The Body's Precarious Balance
Sean Thomas Dougherty, Nightshift Belonging to Lorca
Robert Lopez, Part of the World
Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie
William Tester, Darling
Jennifer Allen, Better Get Your Angel On
Norman Lock, The King of Sweden
Brian Evenson, Altmann's Tongue
Frank Stanford, The Light the Dead See
Knut Hamsun, Hunger
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Jack Kerouac, Visions of Gerard
David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress
Gary Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Gertrude Stein, Ida
Gertrude Stein, The World is Round
William Goyen, The House of Breath
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Cormac McCarthy, Child of God
James Salter, Light Years
Michael Kimball, The Way the Family Got Away
Cesare Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfires
Ted Pejovich, The State of California
Leon Rooke, A Good Baby
William Saroyan, My Name is Aram



Kristina Born

gertrude stein, doctor faustus lights the lights
alfred jarry, caesar antichrist
samuel beckett, not i
jean genet, the balcony
eugene ionesco, the chairs
sarah kane, blasted
adrienne kennedy, funnyhouse of a negro
bertolt brecht, short description of a new technique of acting which produces an alienation effect



Eugene Lim

william carlos williams' IMAGINATIONS. this is a collection of five early prose works, where williams was experimenting wildly. one of the first anti-novels in american literature, his GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL, is in there.

two more poets' novels: louis zukofsky's LITTLE and robert creeley's THE ISLAND. the former is a gem portrait of that rare, rebel family: the one that stays (somewhat) sane but smart and functional. the latter is the opposite, a breaking down marriage from the POV of a young, self-torturing writer--but beautiful and strange sentences. creeley's style is a great transcription slash symbolic rendering of the mind in the act of thinking.

my favorite novel maybe of all is coleman dowell's THE ISLAND PEOPLE. a magnificent prose stylist and an odd structure of related stories evolving from one another. a writer's book about the haunting act of writing.

gilbert sorrentino's RED THE FIEND, SPLENDIDE HOTEL, IMAGINATIVE QUALITIES OF ACTUAL THINGS.

edward dahlberg's BECAUSE I WAS FLESH.

emmanuel bove's MY FRIENDS--perhaps the best title ever.

the george perec's i most love are his pre-oulipian ones: THINGS and MAN WHO SLEEPS.

the favorite oulipian novels are those where the constraint is almost entirely hidden and, on the surface, are not immediately recognizable as constraint-based, but just: strange. in this category i love: harry mathews CIGARETTES and THE JOURNALIST. and also, not officially "oulipian" but a both sad and delightful world created i believe by constraints: lynn crawford's SIMPLY SEPARATE PEOPLE.

i haven't read much gordon lish, but one i thought was hilarious, and think about its voice from time to time, is his EXTRAVAGANZA. which was one.

richard brautigan's TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA and THE ABORTION.

i think OLD MASTERS is my favorite thomas bernhard. robert walser's JAKOB VON GUNTEN destroyed me. w.g. sebald's AUSTERLITZ.

don delillo i read and re-read so much i might not be able to anymore. but my favorite i think is THE NAMES... i've read almost all of haruki murakami's work so that means something... and a writer who is similarly accessible as these, even more so, but who has gotten cheated i think of a potentially huge audience is: donald harington. his WITH is a knockout.

david antin's talkings, expecially TUNING and I NEVER KNEW WHAT TIME IT WAS.

two overlooked mcpherson press titles by great and very different stylists: jaimy gordon's SHAMP OF THE CITY SOLO and frederick ted castle's ANTICIPATION.

my favorite david markson is actually SPRINGER'S PROGRESS, the style precursor to W's Mistress and the latest series. SP is bawdy and, if i remember right, somewhat sleazy, but where shines best his singular ear and rhythm.

mary gaitskill's VERONICA was a surprise for me. on the surface a traditional story, but its transitions are ethereal and perfectly done. a book that seems to barely hold together, like a fine web. very beautiful. another surprise: kazuo ishiguro's THE UNCONSOLED. a sprawling dream as complete a work of art as moby dick. before and after this, he's written world-stage pleasers, but this one is a world creator-destroyer. bolano's SAVAGE DETECTIVES was for me, as it seems for many, a revelation. kenzaburo oe's A QUIET LIFE is a strangely lop-sided book i think about a lot.

ben marcus' NOTABLE AMERICAN WOMEN cleared a (perhaps already cleared) ground. william vollman is an act of nature who i think i like best in small doses--but i admired much in his THIRTEEN STORIES AND THIRTEEN EPITAPHS. eileen myles' COOL FOR YOU is. s'got a raconteur's easy but perfect style, crackerjack timing. dennis cooper's GUIDE is scary. gary lutz's PARTIAL LIST OF PEOPLE TO BLEACH continues his unyielding saga-in-stories of the abject everyperson.



Justin Taylor

Donald Barthelme, entire (esp. Sixty Stories)
Amy Hempel, Collected Stories
Gary Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way
Chris Bachelder, entire (esp. Bear Vs Shark)
William T. Vollmann, The Rainbow Stories & You Bright & Risen Angels
Virginia Woolf, The Waves & To The Lighthouse & Mrs. Dalloway
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
Dennis Cooper, entire (esp. My Loose Thread)
George Bataille, Story of the Eye
Gordon Lish, entire (esp. My Romance & Epigraph)
Barry Hannah, Ray & Hey Jack! & Airships
William S. Burroughs, any (after two or three, it all runs together)
Stephen King, It & From a Buick 8 & The Dark Tower Books 1-4
H.P. Lovecraft, entire, (esp. "The Call of Cthulhu" & At The Mountains of Madness)
Diane Williams, Excitability



Kevin Sampsell

Sam Lipsyte, Home Land
Jonathan Goldstein, Lenny Bruce is Dead
Elizabeth Shepard, H
Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness
Joe Wenderoth, Letters to Wendy's
James Tate, Hints to Pilgrims
Gary Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way
Steven Jesse Bernstein, I am Secretly an Important Man
Larry Brown, Facing the Music
Diane Williams, Stupefaction
Matthew Rohrer and Joshua Beckman, Nice Hat. Thanks
Matthew Derby, Super Flat Times
Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You
David Gilbert, Remote Feed
Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
Willy Vlautin, The Motel Life
Donald Ray Pollock, Knockemstiff
Gordon Lish, Dear Mr. Capote
Judy Budnitz, Nice Big American Baby
Mark Jude Poirier, Unsung Heroes of American Industry
Kevin Keck, Oedipus Wrecked
Jonathan Messinger, Hiding Out
Ben Marcus, Age of Wire & String
Barry Hannah, Ray
Benjamin Weissman, Dear Dead Person
A.M. Homes, The End of Alice
Lynda Barry, Cruddy
Derek McCormack, Grab Bag
Lewis Nordan, Music of the Swamp
Richard Brautigan, Willard and His Bowling Trophies


Matt Kirkpatrick

Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Patrik Ourednik, Europeana
William Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
David Markson, The Last Novel
Nicholas Mosley, Impossible Object
WG Sebald, The Emigrants
Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler
Jorge Borges, Ficciones
Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes
Thomas Pynchon, Mason and Dixon



William Walsh

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
James Joyce, Dubliners
Samuel Becket, More Pricks Than Kicks
Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song
Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime
James P. White, Birdsong
Don DeLillo, Libra
Martin Amis, Money
Paul Auster, Leviathan
David Markson, Vanishing Point



Chris Higgs

Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus
Alain Robbe-Grillet, For A New Novel
John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse
Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar
Gilbert Sorrentino, Mulligan Stew
Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler
John Hawkes, The Lime Twig
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch
Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper
David Markson, The Novelist Quartet (Vanishing Point, This is Not a Novel, Reader's Block, The Last Novel)



Matt Bell

Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son
Ander Monson, Neck Deep
Sam Lipsyte, Venus Drive
George Saunders, Civilwarland in Bad Decline
Dennis Cooper, Guide
Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Chris Bachelder, U.S.!
Etgar Keret, The Nimrod Flipout
Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String
Brian Evenson, The Open Curtain



Lee Klein

Kafka, everything
William Faulkner, Light in August
Kenzaburo Oe, A Personal Matter
Jose Saramago, Blindness
Peter Handke, The Weight of the World
Thomas Bernhard, The Loser
Danilo Kis, Garden, Ashes
WG Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
George Saunders, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son
Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai
Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum
David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again



Brian Oliu

James Joyce, Ulysses
Lyn Hejinian, My Life
Homer, The Odyssey
Joy Williams, The Changeling
Michael Mejia, Forgetfulness
Olena Kalytiak Davis, And Her Soul Out Of Nothing
Lia Purpura, On Looking
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Michael Joyce, Was
Albert Goldbarth, Many Circles



Michael Hemmingson

Paul Auster, Mr. Vertigo & Moon Palace
Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication
Charles Bukowski, Factotum & Women
Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming
Raymond Caver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love & Cathedral
Samuel R. Delany, Hogg
Don DeLillo, Mao II
Norman K. Denzin, Interpretative Biography
Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero
Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream & The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World
Katherine Frank, G-Strings and Sympathy
Joe Haldeman, The Forever War
Barry Hannah, Airships & Ray
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich
Laud Humphreys, Tearoom Trade
Steve Katz, SAW
Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans & Maggie Cassidy
Gordon Lish, Dear Mr. Capote & Zimzum
Larry McCaffery, ed., Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation
Jay MacInerney, Bright Lights, Big City
Norman Mailer, The American Dream
Barry N. Malzberg, Beyond Apollo & In the Enclosure
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Frank Norris, McTeague
Joyce Carol Oates, Them
Avital Ronell, Crack Wars & The Telephone Book
Whitley Strieber, Communion
William T. Vollmann, The Rifles & Butterfly Stories & Whores for Gloria & The Rainbow Stories



Tao Lin

Ann Beattie, Chilly Scenes of Winter
Joy Williams, Honored Guest
Lorrie Moore, Like Life
Lydia Davis, The End of the Story
Matthew Rohrer, A Green Light