1. The Bible

An amazing collection of poetry and prose in a broad array of genre. It is incredible that the Song of Solomon is housed within the same collection as the Psalms or the Sermon on the Mount. I would likely go with the unsurpassed (in English) King James translation… but I would also love the recent Robert Alter version of the Hebrew (Old Testament) texts.

2.Dante- The Divine Comedy

Many literary folk would name Dante’s masterwork as the single greatest work of literature. I would probably agree with them. This work which on the surface records the journey of Dante through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven is an allegory of journey of the human soul. But it is so much more. Like any number of the so-called “frame stories” (Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, The Arabian Nights, etc…) it is a collection of narratives within narratives within narratives. I grew up with John Ciardi’s marvelous translation… but I’d probably go with the more recent poetic prose translation (with brilliant notes and commentary) by Robert and Jean Hollander.

3. William Shakespeare- Collected Plays

Arguably the greatest writer of all history… certainly the greatest writer in English… Shakespeare would have to show up in my favorite works of literature. Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and so many more have made an indelible mark on me and so many others… including so many artists of every genre.

4. Edmund Spenser- Poetical Works

John Milton and his Paradise Lost may be second only to Shakespeare within the realm of English-language literature… but I’ve long been more enamored of Edmund Spenser. His Amoretti may be the greatest cycle of sonnets… even finer than those by Dante, Shakespeare, Petrarch, and Ronsard. Where the sonnets of others remain static, Spenser’s evolve from his initial infatuation and rejection and grow into friendship and eventually love culminating in his wedding poem: Epithalamion

5. Cervantes- Don Quixote

While I would hate losing Chaucer, Milton, Robert Herrick, John Donne, and others, limited to a set number of books, I would seek a degree of variety. The Spaniard Cervantes’ Don Quixote was arguably the first Western novel and one of the greatest. At its heart, the novel (actually two novels: part 1 & 2) tells the tale of one of the finest literary friendships: that of Sancho and the Don.

6. Lawrence Sterne- The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” is one of the first novels written in English… and one of the finest. Like Cervantes, Sterne disects the elements of the novel and story-telling right from the start in a manner that is almost Post-Modern. Like Don Quixote, this is a comic masterpiece and one of the finest portrayals of friendship in writing.

7. anon.-The Arabian Night’s Entertainments tr. Richard Francis Burton

The Arabian Nights is perhaps the masterpiece of the “frame story” or that literary form in which stories within stories within stories (often told by various are organized within an overarching narrative in which various characters often relate tales. Burton’s tanslation avoide the usual censorship of the erotic elements of the Arabian Nights. The Obscene Publications Act of 1857 had resulted in censorship and many jail sentences for publishers of questionable works with prosecutions being brought by the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Burton referred to the society and those who shared its views as Mrs Grundy. A way around this was the private circulation of books amongst the members of a society. For this reason Burton, together with Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, created the Kama Shastra Society to print and circulate books, including the Arabian Nights that would be illegal to publish in public. The Arabian Nights is one of the finest collections of narrative tales and Burton’s translation is one of the finest and most complete in English.

8. William Blake Collected Prose and Poetry

Blake famously wrote: “I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” There have been few writers who have matched Blake’s creation of his own visionary world (Milton and Dante come to mind). Both his short “lyrical” poems and his longer “visionary” epic poems reward repeated and deep readings… and these take on even more layers of interpretation when accompanied by his paintings and prints… or illuminations.

9. Charles Baudelaire- Les Fleurs du Mal– tr. by Richard Howard

The two towering and game-changing collections of poetry of the mid-1800s both employed the allegory of plants in the titles of the collections: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil. I remember a discussion on a literary group as to which I preferred. Then, as now, I go with the Frenchman and his poetry rooted in the Modern urban experience rendered in the most exquisite of language and literary form. The Flowers of Evil was a text I kept at my side all throughout my years as an art student.

10. Flaubert- Madame Bovary

The novel has been the dominant literary form for the last 150 years or longer… but I have only included 4 novels in my list as a lean far more toward other literary forms. Having said this, I could not be without Flaubert’s masterpiece… the nearest to the perfect novel that I can imagine.

11. Marcel Proust- À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time… previously translated as Remembrance of Things Past)

In choosing a work of Modernism I passed on James Joyce, whose Finnegans Wake literally demands a vast volume of commentary to fully grasp. T.S. Eliot’s poems were considered but ultimately I wanted something meatier in terms of scale… trapped on this island as it were. I ended up going with that “meatiest” of novels, as it were: Proust’s In Search of Lost Time which the great literary critic, Harold Bloom acknowledged was “widely recognized as the major novel of the twentieth century.” In spite of its epic scale (some 7 volumes), the book does not fit the usual concept of the epic such as War & Peace with grand actions and drama. In Search of Lost Time follows the narrator’s recollections of childhood and experiences into adulthood during late 19th century to early 20th century aristocratic France, while reflecting on the loss of time and lack of meaning to the world. The rich, poetic language is clearly rooted in the aestheticism of late 19th century writers such as Baudelaire, Flaubert, Walter Pater, etc…

12. J.L. Borges- Collected Fictions

Borges is my sole selection from the Americas… Argentina to be precise. Borges rejected the larger form of the novel and focused upon short lyric poems, short stories, and essays. His work was inspired by a profound grasp of literary history, especially Shakespeare, Don Quixote, Kafka, and the Arabian Nights. His Collected Fictions is essential, but the slim volume, Dreamtigers, is one of the most read books in my library.

13. Vladimir Nabokov- Lolita

Once again I’ll “cheat” a bit and go for the “baker’s dozen” with what may just be the greatest American novel… written by a Russian on a theme that would seem impossible to tackle… and yet he does so without the least bit of vulgarity… with incredible insight into American culture… with great humor and the most exquisite prose… and in the process, creates one of the greatest characters in literary history: Humbert Humbert… at once comically absurd and a horrible villain.