26 fictions and 3 memoirs that stayed with me (and then more than 9 others)

(For my favorite novels and short story collections, I limited myself to fiction but cheated so I could add Richard Wright's Black Boy and Iain Levison's A Working Stiff's Manifesto. I listed no more than one work per author.)

1) A Fan's Notes by Fred Exley
2) The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
3) Brothers Karamazov by F.D.
4) Chump Change by Dan Fante
5) Like Life by Lorrie Moore
6) Benito Cereno by H. Melville
7) Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
8) Hunger by Knut Hamsun 
9) Candide by Voltaire
10) Lolita by Nabokov
11) Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
12) The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon
13) The Bridegroom and Other Stories by Ha Jin
14) The Middleman and Other Stories by Bharati Mukherjee
15) A Working Stiff's Manifesto by Iain Levison 
16) The Joke by Milan Kundera
17) Petersburg by Andrei Biely
18) Envy by Yuri Olesha
19) Black Boy by Richard Wright
20) Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

and then I thought of some more (and cheated more with memoirs, Offutt and Pham):

21) The Music of Chance by Paul Auster
22) White Noise by Don DeLillo
23) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
24) The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
25) Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow
26) The Same River Twice by Chris Offutt
27) Catfish and Mandala by Alexander X. Pham
28) Caucasia by Danzy Senna
29) Native Speaker by Chang Rae Lee

And because this is such a highly professional blog, I'll come back later and add some links.

30) Hard Times by Charles Dickens
31) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
32) The Cliff Walk by Don J. Snyder
33) The Human Stain by Philip Roth
34) Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner
35) Water Music by T. C. Boyle
36) Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
37) Television by Jean-Phillippe Toussaint

and saving the best for last

38) The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano although Last Evenings on Earth is an extremely close second for me

Until I remembered to also include these:

39) Selected Stories by Andre Dubus
40) The Overcoat and Other Tales by Nikolai Gogol
41) Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver
42) The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth

So with that final four, until I remember others, I still kind of have a saving-the-best-for-last thing going on.

Feel free to find me at Goodreads for star ratings and a few reviews.

A fine final correction would be

43) The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Okay, then, until I add more. . .

44) Revulsion by Horacio Castellanos Moya
45) Zone by Mathias Enard
46) Journey to the End of Night by Celine
47) Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski
48) Dreams from Bunker Hill by John Fante
49) Outline by Rachel Cusk
50) Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
51) Extinction by Thomas Bernhard
52) The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories by Franz Kafka
53) Confessions of a Lady Killer by George Stade
54) Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
55) Independence Day by Richard Ford
56) The Chaneysville Incident by David Bradley
57) Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

58) Memory of Departure by Abdulzarak Gurnah

There were others I should have added, and then new ones appeared.

59) Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon

60) Heaven by Mieko Kawakami

61) Wake Up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames

Note: I do not see W. G. Sebald above, and I believe that I doubted it fit into categories such as "the novel," "fiction," or "memoir," so below I am adding it with other favorite titles that might not easily fit although I'm not ready to add Thucydides, Foucault, Nietzsche, and so on.

62) The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

63) The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing