99 Novels by Anthony Burgess, 1984

This anthology by the English writer is considered “neglected” by some which makes it a suitable entry for Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.

© www.anthonyburgess.org

As a rule, I don’t publish lists of novels or short stories I read or come across in an anthology or collection. However, I'm making an exception in the case of 99 Novels: The Best in English since 1939 by Anthony Burgess.

Neither do I have the book and nor have I read it, but I'm excited enough to share it with those who didn’t know about it until now. I read about it online and I'm ashamed to admit that I've read less than half of the ninety-nine novels which, according to the late English writer and composer, were the best since 1939. Worse still, I have not read anything by Burgess himself, not even A Clockwork Orange.

The anthology covers a forty-four year period between 1939 and 1983. Fiction of the fifties and sixties finds pride of place in the author’s personal choice of books.

Burgess, who was a prolific writer, reader, and reviewer of books, was comfortable with all types of authors including “practitioners of well-wrought sensational fiction” like Irving Wallace, Arthur Hailey, Frederick Forsyth, and Ken Follett.

© Simon & Schuster

He once revealed in an interview that the book was originally commissioned by a Nigerian publishing company and that he wrote it in two weeks. You can listen to the interview at Wired for Books.

I'm tempted to reproduce passages from his introduction to 99 Novels but that would be neither here nor there. Instead, you can read it at The New York Times where Anthony Burgess gives his reasons for choosing the books he did. It makes interesting reading. The book is available at Amazon.

The 99 novels, sorted by year, are given below, courtesy Wikipedia. The author has kept himself out of his own list.

1930s

1939 – Henry Green – Party Going (1939)
1939 – Aldous Huxley – After Many a Summer (1939)
1939 – James Joyce – Finnegans Wake (1939)
1939 – Flann O'Brien – At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)

1940s

1940 – Graham Greene – The Power and the Glory (1940)
1940 – Ernest Hemingway – For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
1940 – C.P. Snow – Strangers and Brothers (1940)
1941 – Rex Warner – The Aerodrome (1941)
1944 – Joyce Cary – The Horse's Mouth (1944)
1944 – W. Somerset Maugham – The Razor's Edge (1944)
1945 – Evelyn Waugh – Brideshead Revisited (1945)
1946 – Mervyn Peake – Titus Groan (1946)
1947 – Saul Bellow – The Victim (1947)
1947 – Malcolm Lowry – Under the Volcano (1947)
1949 – Elizabeth Bowen – The Heat of the Day (1949)
1948 – Graham Greene – The Heart of the Matter (1948)
1948 – Aldous Huxley – Ape and Essence (1948)
1948 – Nevil Shute – No Highway (1948)
1948 – Norman Mailer – The Naked and the Dead (1948)
1949 – George Orwell – Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
1949 – William Sansom – The Body (1949)

1950s

1950 – William Cooper – Scenes from Provincial Life (1950)
1950 – Budd Schulberg – The Disenchanted (1950)
1951 – Anthony Powell – A Dance to the Music of Time (1951)
1951 – J.D. Salinger – The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
1951 – Henry Williamson – A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (1951)
1951 – Herman Wouk – The Caine Mutiny (1951)
1952 – Ralph Ellison – Invisible Man (1952)
1952 – Ernest Hemingway – The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
1952 – Mary McCarthy – The Groves of Academe (1952)
1952 – Flannery O'Connor – Wise Blood (1952)
1952 – Evelyn Waugh – Sword of Honour (1952)
1953 – Raymond Chandler – The Long Goodbye (1953)
1954 – Kingsley Amis – Lucky Jim (1954)
1957 – John Braine – Room at the Top (1957)
1957 – Lawrence Durrell – The Alexandria Quartet (1957)
1957 – Colin MacInnes – The London Novels (1957)
1957 – Bernard Malamud – The Assistant (1957)
1958 – Iris Murdoch – The Bell (1958)
1958 – Alan Sillitoe – Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958)
1958 – T.H. White – The Once and Future King (1958)
1959 – William Faulkner – The Mansion (1959)
1959 – Ian Fleming – Goldfinger (1959)

1960s

1960 – L.P. Hartley – Facial Justice (1960)
1960 – Olivia Manning – The Balkan Trilogy (1960)
1961 – Ivy Compton-Burnett – The Mighty and Their Fall (1961)
1961 – Joseph Heller – Catch-22 (1961)
1961 – Richard Hughes – The Fox in the Attic (1961)
1961 – Patrick White – Riders in the Chariot (1961)
1961 – Angus Wilson – The Old Men at the Zoo (1961)
1962 – James Baldwin – Another Country (1962)
1962 – Aldous Huxley – Island (1962)
1962 – Pamela Hansford Johnson – An Error of Judgement (1962)
1962 – Doris Lessing – The Golden Notebook (1962)
1962 – Vladimir Nabokov – Pale Fire (1962)
1963 – Muriel Spark – The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
1964 – William Golding – The Spire (1964)
1964 – Wilson Harris – Heartland (1964)
1964 – Christopher Isherwood – A Single Man (1964)
1964 – Vladimir Nabokov – The Defense (1964)
1964 – Angus Wilson – Late Call (1964)
1965 – John O'Hara – The Lockwood Concern (1965)
1965 – Muriel Spark – The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)
1966 – Chinua Achebe – A Man of the People (1966)
1966 – Kingsley Amis – The Anti-Death League (1966)
1966 – John Barth – Giles Goat-Boy (1966)
1966 – Nadine Gordimer – The Late Bourgeois World (1966)
1966 – Walker Percy – The Last Gentleman (1966)
1967 – R.K. Narayan – The Vendor of Sweets (1967)
1968 – J.B. Priestley – The Image Men (1968)
1968 – Mordecai Richler – Cocksure (1968)
1968 – Keith Roberts – Pavane (1968)
1969 – John Fowles – The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969)
1969 – Philip Roth – Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

1970s

1970 – Len Deighton – Bomber (1970)
1973 – Michael Frayn – Sweet Dreams (1973)
1973 – Thomas Pynchon – Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
1975 – Saul Bellow – Humboldt's Gift (1975)
1975 – Malcolm Bradbury – The History Man (1975)
1976 – Robert Nye – Falstaff (1976)
1977 – Erica Jong – How to Save Your Own Life (1977)
1977 – James Plunkett – Farewell Companions (1977)
1977 – Paul Mark Scott – Staying On (1977)
1978 – John Updike – The Coup (1978)
1979 – J.G. Ballard – The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
1979 – Bernard Malamud – Dubin's Lives (1979)
1979 – Brian Moore – The Doctor's Wife (1976)
1979 – V.S. Naipaul – A Bend in the River (1979)
1979 – William Styron – Sophie's Choice (1979)

1980s

1980 – Brian Aldiss – Life in the West (1980)
1980 – Russell Hoban – Riddley Walker (1980)
1980 – David Lodge – How Far Can You Go? (1980)
1980 – John Kennedy Toole – A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)
1981 – Alasdair Gray – Lanark (1981)
1981 – Alexander Theroux – Darconville's Cat (1981)
1981 – Paul Theroux – The Mosquito Coast (1981)
1981 – Gore Vidal – Creation (1981)
1982 – Robertson Davies – The Rebel Angels (1982)
1983 – Norman Mailer – Ancient Evenings (1983)

This list goes on my tackboard.