Welcome to Litsy!

For Colm Toibin and Carmen Callil there is no difference between literary and commercial writing - there is only the good novel: engrossing, inspirational, compelling. In their selection of the best 200 novels written since 1950, the editors make a case for the best and the best-loved works and argue why each should be considered a modern classic. Enlightening, often unexpected, and always engaging this tour through the world of fiction is full of surprises, forgotten masterpieces and a valuable guide to what to read next. Authors include: Agatha Christie, Henry Green, Frank Hardy, Georgette Heyer, J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Hemingway, Bernard Malamud, R. K. Narayan, Flannery O'Connor, John Steinbeck, Evelyn Waugh, Mulk Raj Anand, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, L. P. Hartley, Rosamund Lehmann, Amos Tutuola, Kingsley Amis, William Golding, Elizabeth Jenkins, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Samuel Beckett, Patricia Highsmith, Vladimir Nabokov, Janet Frame, Jack Kerouac, Elizabeth Taylor, Rebecca West, Chinua Achebe, Olivia Manning, John Updike, P. G. Wodehouse, Joseph Heller, V. S. Naipaul, Muriel Spark, Patrick White, Maureen Duffy, William Faulkner, Doris Lessing, Edna O'Brien, Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Bowen, John Le CarrÈ, Mary McCarthy, Sylvia Plath, Wilson Harris, Hubert Selby Jr., Frank Sargeson, Wole Soyinka, Margaret Laurence, Jean Rhys, Paul Scott, John Fowles, Christina Stead, William Styron, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, William H. Gass,Iris Murdoch, B. S. Johnson, Mary Lavin, Mario Puzo, Robertson Davies, Patrick O'Brian, Eudora Welty, J. G. Farrell, Thomas Pynchon, E. L. Doctorow, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, David Lodge, Alistair MacLeod, Graham Greene, Roy A. K. Heath, Ian McEwan, Thomas Flanagan, Martin Amis, J. G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Anita Desai, Balraj Khanna, Cormac McCarthy, Raymond Carver, Frank Moorhouse, Bapsi Sidhwa, Anne Tyler, Tom Wolfe, John Banville, Oscar Hijuelos, Amy Tan, A. S. Byatt, J. M. Coetzee, Micheal Cunningham, Roddy Doyle, David Malouf, Alice Munro, Pat Barker, Angela Carter, Amit Chaudhuri, Bret Easton Ellis, Timothy Mo, Norman Rush, Iain Sinclair, Patrick McCabe, Donna Tartt, Jeffrey Eugenides, Gita Mehta, E. Annie Proulx, Will Self, Irvine Welsh, Sebastian Faulks, Vikram Seth, Jonathan Coe, Louis de BerniËres, Alan Hollinghurst, P. D. James, James Kelman, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Penelope Fitzgerald, Rohinton Mistry, Margaret Atwood, Patrick McGrath, Graham Swift, Tobias Wolff, Jim Crace, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth.