| 1 |
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The Metamorphosis
by
3.90 avg rating — 1,419,698 ratings
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| 2 |
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Magic for Beginners
by
3.80 avg rating — 10,221 ratings
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| 3 |
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Invisible Cities
by
4.10 avg rating — 97,067 ratings
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| 4 |
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Naked Lunch: The Restored Text
by
3.46 avg rating — 98,511 ratings
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| 5 |
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Steppenwolf
by
4.13 avg rating — 214,857 ratings
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| 6 |
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Collected Fictions
by
4.56 avg rating — 25,654 ratings
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| 7 |
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
by
4.12 avg rating — 1,102,262 ratings
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| 8 |
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Beloved (Beloved Trilogy, #1)
by
3.98 avg rating — 489,588 ratings
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| 9 |
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The Haunting of Hill House
by
3.81 avg rating — 393,231 ratings
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| 10 |
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Cloud Atlas
by
4.01 avg rating — 267,364 ratings
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| 11 |
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Orlando
by
3.87 avg rating — 114,761 ratings
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| 12 |
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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
by
4.14 avg rating — 314,336 ratings
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| 13 |
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Ice
by
3.64 avg rating — 12,086 ratings
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| 14 |
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Little, Big
by
3.81 avg rating — 12,321 ratings
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| 15 |
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Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology
by
3.78 avg rating — 586 ratings
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| 16 |
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The Trial
by
3.94 avg rating — 393,908 ratings
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| 17 |
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Foucault’s Pendulum
by
3.91 avg rating — 74,799 ratings
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| 18 |
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The Crying of Lot 49
by
3.69 avg rating — 97,165 ratings
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| 19 |
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The House of the Spirits
by
4.30 avg rating — 318,602 ratings
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| 20 |
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Perdido Street Station (New Crobuzon, #1)
by
3.98 avg rating — 75,291 ratings
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| 21 |
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The Gormenghast Novels (Gormenghast, #1-3)
by
4.03 avg rating — 9,902 ratings
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| 22 |
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Dhalgren
by
3.77 avg rating — 12,259 ratings
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| 23 |
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Stranger Things Happen
by
3.83 avg rating — 6,410 ratings
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| 24 |
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City of Saints and Madmen (Ambergris, #1)
by
3.87 avg rating — 8,101 ratings
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| 25 |
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The Castle
by
3.91 avg rating — 75,304 ratings
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| 26 |
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Pattern Recognition (Blue Ant, #1)
by
3.88 avg rating — 52,582 ratings
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| 27 |
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The Satanic Verses
by
3.71 avg rating — 71,694 ratings
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| 28 |
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Love in the Time of Cholera
by
3.94 avg rating — 546,131 ratings
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| 29 |
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Six Characters in Search of an Author
by
3.83 avg rating — 22,548 ratings
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| 30 |
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Map of Dreams
by
3.89 avg rating — 135 ratings
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| 31 |
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The Lottery and Other Stories
by
4.02 avg rating — 84,457 ratings
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| 31 |
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Gravity’s Rainbow
by
4.01 avg rating — 48,127 ratings
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| 33 |
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Big Fish
by
3.68 avg rating — 25,443 ratings
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| 33 |
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House of Leaves
by
4.09 avg rating — 199,760 ratings
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| 35 |
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being
by
4.11 avg rating — 542,695 ratings
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| 36 |
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The Library
by
3.69 avg rating — 3,012 ratings
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| 37 |
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Nights at the Circus
by
3.88 avg rating — 14,671 ratings
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| 38 |
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Lost in the Funhouse
by
3.68 avg rating — 6,735 ratings
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| 39 |
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The Lovely Bones
by
3.86 avg rating — 2,460,540 ratings
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| 40 |
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In the Forest of Forgetting
by
3.94 avg rating — 1,052 ratings
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| 41 |
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Finnegans Wake
by
3.68 avg rating — 13,618 ratings
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| 42 |
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The Complete Stories
by
4.33 avg rating — 28,442 ratings
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| 43 |
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Engine Summer
by
really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 2,269 ratings
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| 44 |
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Was
by
3.89 avg rating — 1,863 ratings
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| 44 |
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Fundamental Disch
by
3.86 avg rating — 44 ratings
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| 44 |
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Sixty Stories
by
4.18 avg rating — 6,137 ratings
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| 47 |
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The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye: Five Fairy Stories
by
3.85 avg rating — 4,509 ratings
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| 48 |
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A Season in Hell
by
4.06 avg rating — 6,965 ratings
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| 49 |
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The Complete Dramatic Works
by
4.34 avg rating — 2,383 ratings
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| 49 |
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Moonwise
by
4.09 avg rating — 169 ratings
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| 51 |
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The Waves
by
4.14 avg rating — 53,457 ratings
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| 52 |
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Blood and Guts in High School
by
3.46 avg rating — 7,096 ratings
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| 52 |
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The Bridge
by
3.87 avg rating — 12,720 ratings
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| 54 |
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Lolly Willowes
by
3.69 avg rating — 13,393 ratings
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| 55 |
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Ulysses
by
3.76 avg rating — 137,679 ratings
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| 56 |
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Black Juice
by
3.71 avg rating — 1,356 ratings
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| 57 |
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Set This House in Order
by
4.30 avg rating — 6,180 ratings
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| 58 |
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The Glass Bead Game
by
4.10 avg rating — 42,365 ratings
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| 59 |
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Grendel
by
3.69 avg rating — 42,459 ratings
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| 60 |
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Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories
by
4.28 avg rating — 2,814 ratings
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| 61 |
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Ægypt (The Ægypt Cycle, #1)
by
3.84 avg rating — 2,218 ratings
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| 62 |
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The Complete Short Stories
by
4.41 avg rating — 1,808 ratings
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| 63 |
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Conjunctions #39: The New Wave Fabulists
by
3.99 avg rating — 135 ratings
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| 64 |
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X, Y
by
3.11 avg rating — 65 ratings
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| 65 |
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Tainaron: Mail from Another City
by
3.82 avg rating — 1,658 ratings
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| 66 |
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Medea the Sorceress
by
4.02 avg rating — 57 ratings
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| 67 |
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The Wall Of The Sky, The Wall Of The Eye: A Strange and Unforgettable Sci-Fi Short Story Collection
by
3.67 avg rating — 1,544 ratings
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| 68 |
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Godmother Night
by
3.87 avg rating — 315 ratings
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| 69 |
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V.
by
3.97 avg rating — 25,310 ratings
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| 70 |
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The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet
by
4.02 avg rating — 314 ratings
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| 71 |
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The Heat Death of the Universe and Other Stories
by
3.90 avg rating — 146 ratings
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| 71 |
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The Impossible Bird
by
3.60 avg rating — 94 ratings
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| 73 |
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Sarah Canary
by
3.42 avg rating — 1,672 ratings
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| 74 |
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Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic
by
3.38 avg rating — 32 ratings
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| 75 |
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Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing
by
3.77 avg rating — 237 ratings
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| 75 |
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The Girl in the Glass
by
3.73 avg rating — 1,307 ratings
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| 77 |
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His Monkey Wife
by
3.50 avg rating — 213 ratings
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| 78 |
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Waiting for Godot
by
3.84 avg rating — 221,963 ratings
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| 79 |
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Carmen Dog
by
3.54 avg rating — 290 ratings
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| 80 |
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Mason & Dixon
by
4.14 avg rating — 12,547 ratings
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| 81 |
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The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories
by
4.08 avg rating — 272 ratings
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| 82 |
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Changing Planes
by
3.86 avg rating — 7,240 ratings
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| 83 |
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Bibliomancy: Four Novellas
by
4.24 avg rating — 29 ratings
|
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| 84 |
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Novelties and Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction
by
3.88 avg rating — 385 ratings
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| 85 |
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Giles Goat-Boy
by
3.75 avg rating — 2,253 ratings
|
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| 86 |
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Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
by
4.12 avg rating — 12,973 ratings
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| 87 |
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Verging on the Pertinent
by
really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 12 ratings
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| 88 |
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The Start of the End of It All and Other Stories
by
3.86 avg rating — 58 ratings
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| 89 |
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Black Glass
by
3.57 avg rating — 393 ratings
|
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| 90 |
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Ciphers: A Post-Shannon Rock 'N' Roll Mystery
by
3.90 avg rating — 21 ratings
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| 91 |
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Brown Girl in the Ring
by
3.85 avg rating — 7,507 ratings
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| 92 |
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The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology of Writing on the Subject of Memory Loss
by
3.73 avg rating — 271 ratings
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| 93 |
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Chimera
by
3.71 avg rating — 2,287 ratings
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| 94 |
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The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
by
3.73 avg rating — 33,802 ratings
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| 95 |
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Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!
by
3.85 avg rating — 44,743 ratings
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| 96 |
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Brittle Innings
by
3.92 avg rating — 442 ratings
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| 97 |
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Pussy, King of the Pirates
by
3.59 avg rating — 919 ratings
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| 98 |
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Humpty Dumpty: An Oval
by
3.12 avg rating — 88 ratings
|
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| 99 |
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Lanark
by
4.10 avg rating — 7,868 ratings
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| 100 |
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The Hidden Side of the Moon
by
3.64 avg rating — 73 ratings
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Comparing the list to the original list in the PDF you linked, 13 titles (*listed below) from the original 115 of the "working canon" have been omitted from this Listopia list, so I've added them. (They were all books that fell on page 2 of the PDF - in the main "working canon" area, not the much larger full list - but several others from the same area of the list, such as Cloud Atlas, made it onto this Listopia list, so...who knows?)
Of course, as there were already 110 titles listed here, when I added the missing 13 the total comes to 123, which is 8 more than the original list. Perhaps some off-list books were added by others? (Or possibly books from the extended list outside the "working canon" in the PDF. I haven't combed through to find them.)
Thanks again for putting this up! It's great to have it as a way of tracking progress through the "canon".
* The books I added to make this list match the original:
X, Y by Michael Blumlein
Tainaron: Mail from Another City by Leena Krohn
Medea the Sorceress by Diane Wakoski
The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye by Jonathan Lethem
Godmother Night by Rachel Pollack
Big Fish by Daniel Wallace
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
The Library by Zoran Živković
The Impossible Bird by Patrick O'Leary
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic by F. Brett Cox, Andy Duncan
The Girl in the Glass by Jeffrey Ford