1996 · David Foster Wallace · 1079 pages · Literary Fiction
Infinite Jest is a monumental, maddening, frequently brilliant novel about addiction and entertainment that rewards patient readers with some of the most perceptive writing about the human condition in contemporary fiction.
1973 · Thomas Pynchon · 760 pages · Literary Fiction
Gravity's Rainbow is one of the most challenging and rewarding novels in the English language, a sprawling meditation on technology, war, and paranoia that resists easy understanding while offering passages of writing that are simply unmatched.
2002 · Jonathan Safran Foer · 276 pages · Literary Fiction
Jonathan Safran Foer's debut novel is a wildly ambitious, formally inventive, and deeply uneven book about a young American's search for the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. The comic voice of Alex, the Ukrainian translator who narrates half the book in gloriously mangled English, is one of the great literary creations of the early 2000s. The magical realist chapters set in a fictional shtetl are beautiful but don't always mesh with the contemporary road-trip sections. And the ending, when the comedy falls away to reveal the grief underneath, hits with a force that retroactively justifies every excess that came before. It's the kind of debut that announces a major talent even as it reveals one still learning the craft.