I currently have Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster, Train Dreams, Lolita, Naked Lunch, Suttree, Omensetter's Luck (DFW-recommended), Reader's Block (DFW raved about Wittgenstein's Mistress, but it was checked out), Ulysses, The Corrections, Middlesex, and Joseph Andrews (mainly because I always see Tom Jones being used for lit exams). I still need to finish Infinite Jest, but had to return it to the library with 200 pages to go. I'm 17, a senior in high school, and I really love lyrical and difficult prose. I attempted the first few pages of Suttree, but it was so incredibly difficult to read. Maybe that was because I read the italicized opening. I'm the type to look up every single word I come accross with which I am not familiar. There must've been 20 words per page of that opening of Suttree that I didn't know.
Words like (at random) "pinchbeck," "dogwhelk," "bolos," "murenger." I love this type of writing though. I was absolutely wowed by Nabokov's prose in Lolita (reading it again).
what about all this contemporary stuff
i don't know how well known it is
but
one example (random)
joshua cohen's Witz (dubbed the Jewish Ulysses (even though Ulysses is about a jew i think)
the intstructions- adam levin
zadie smith
pynchon
gaddis
martin amis
ben lerner
delillo
robinson
krasznahorkai
cortazar
eggers
safran foer
murakami
houellebecq
banville
chabon
vila-matas
egan
danielewski
harbach
saunders
mitchell
bolano
roth
updike
lydia davis
walser
shteyngart
lipsyte
st aubyn
tobias wolff (wolfe?)\
colson whitehead
barnes (djuna and julian)
denis johnson
coover
perec
vollmann
celine (louis something)
sebald
waugh
wodehouse
hitchens (not a novelist, but still good)
atwood
rushdie
eco
and what about the books/novelists on this list, many of which/whom are quite obscure and unfamiliar to me
^am i missing many contemporary novelists of great literary merit? i'm sure i am, i haven't read very much, but i've read stuff about all of those authors above
and there are many others who i'm forgetting
also
am homes
calvino
erickson
daitch
pessoa
lethem
dyer
d'agata
diaz (not sure about this one)
nicholson baker
colm toibin
auster
edmund white
leyner
moore
kundera
carson
shirley jackson
oh ya, barth
alice munro
coover
carver
cheever
will self
ellroy
hunter s thompson
didion
borges
saramago
dos passos
beckett
coetzee
winterson
mcinerney