This is an intensely subjective, non-comprehensive list of books you might want to investigate: The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien, stories Birds of America - Lorrie Moore, stories The Size of Thoughts - Nicholson Baker, essays The Essays of E.B. White "Goodbye to All That" - an essay by Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem Lolita - Nabokov The Collected Stories of John Cheever The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers The Ballad of the Sad Café - Carson McCullers The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway In Our Time - Hemingway Any stories by Ray Carver The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison The Corrections - Jonathon Franzen The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster Jernigan - David Gates Preston Falls - David Gates Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen Emma - Jane Austen The Plague - Camus A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon Mrs. Bridge - Evan Connell Cowboys Are My Weakness - Pam Houston, stories Dubliners - James Joyce, stories A Personal Matter - Kenzaburo Oe My Name Is Asher Lev - Chaim Potok American Pastoral - Philip Roth Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates Madame Bovary - Flaubert The Seagull - a play by Chekhov Everything That Rises Must Converge - Flannery O'Connor, stories Shakespeare plays and sonnets Poetry by Sylvia Plath The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton White Noise - Don Delillo "The Lottery" - a story by Shirley Jackson