| Key: | Owned | Read | Available |
| Year | Fiction | Biography | Criticism | General Non-Fiction | Memoir | Translation | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1975 | Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow
|
The Great War and Modern Memory
Paul Fussell
Oxford University Press |
|
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| 1976 | October Light
John Gardner
Knopf |
The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
Bruno Bettelheim
Knopf |
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
Maxine Hong Kingston
Knopf |
|||||
| 1977 | Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison
Knopf |
On Photography
Susan Sontag
Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Samuel Johnson
W. Jackson Bate
Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich |
|||||
| 1978 | The Stories of John Cheever
John Cheever
Knopf |
Modern Art: 19th & 20th Centuries, Selected Papers
Meyer Schapior
Braziller |
|
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| 1979 | The Year of the French
Thomas Flanagan
Holt, Rinehart & Winston |
The Gnostic Gospels
Elaine Pagels
Random |
Munich: The Price of Peace
Telford Taylor
Doubleday |
|||||
| Year | Fiction | Biography | Criticism | General Non-Fiction | Memoir | Translation | ||
| 1980 | The Transit of Venus
Shirley Hazzard
Viking |
Part of Nature: Modern American Poets
Helen Vendler
Harvard University Press |
Walter Lippmann and the American Century
Ronald Steel
Atlantic-Little, Brown |
|||||
| 1981 | Rabbit Is Rich
John Updike
Knopf |
A Virgil Thomson Reader
Virgil Thomson
Houghton Mifflin |
The Mismeasure of Man
Stephen Jay Gould
Norton |
|||||
| 1982 | George Mills
Stanley Elkin
E.P. Dutton |
The Second American Revolution and Other Essays
Gore Vidal
Random House |
The Path of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
Robert A. Caro
Knopf |
|||||
| 1983 | Ironweed
William Kennedy
Viking |
Minor Characters
Joyce Johnson
Houghton Mifflin |
Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism
John Updike
Knopf |
The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House
Seymour M. Hersch
Summit Books |
||||
| 1984 | Love Medicine
Louise Erdrich
Holt, Reinhart & Winston |
Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859
Joseph Frank
Princeton University Press |
Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry
Robert Hass
Ecco Press |
Weapons and Hope
Freeman Dyson
Harper & Row |
||||
| 1985 | The Accidental Tourist
Anne Tyler
Alfred A. Knopf |
Henry James: A Life
Leon Edel
Harper & Row |
Habitations of the Word: Essays
William H. Gass
Simon & Schuster |
Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families
J. Anthony Lukas
Alfred A. Knopf |
||||
| 1986 | A Summons to Memphis
Peter Taylor
Alfred A. Knopf |
The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. I: 1902-1941
Arnold Rampersad
Oxford |
Less Than One: Selected Essays
Joseph Brodsky
Farrar, Straus & Giroux |
Arctic Dreams
Barry Lopez
Scribner's |
||||
| 1987 | The Counterlife
Philip Roth
Farrar, Straus & Giroux |
Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World
Donald R. Howard
Abrahams/Dutton |
Dance Writings
Edwin, edited by Robert Cornfield and William MacKay Denby
Knopf |
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Richard Rhodes
Simon and Schuster |
||||
| 1988 | The Middleman and Other Stories
Bharati Mukherjee
Crest Press |
Oscar Wilde
Richard Ellmann
Alfred A. Knopf |
Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author
Clifford Geertz
Stanford University Press |
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963
Taylor Branch
Simon and Schuster |
||||
| 1989 | Billy Bathgate
E.L. Doctorow
Random House |
A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt
Geoffrey C. Ward
Harper & Row |
Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History
John Clive
Knopf |
The Broken Cord
Michael Dorris
Harper & Row |
||||
| Year | Fiction | Biography | Criticism | General Non-Fiction | Memoir | Translation | ||
| 1990 | Rabbit At Rest
John Updike
Alfred A. Knopf |
Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. II
Robert A. Caro
Knopf |
Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present
Arthur C. Danto
Farrar, Straus & Giroux |
The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America
Shelby Steele
HarperCollins |
||||
| 1991 | A Thousand Acres
Jane Smiley
Alfred A. Knopf |
Patrimony: A True Story
Philip Roth
Simon & Schuster |
Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory
Lawrence L. Langer
Yale University Press |
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against America Women
Susan Faludi
Crown |
||||
| 1992 | All the Pretty Horses
Cormac McCarthy
Alfred A. Knopf |
Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World
Carol Brightman
Clarkson N. Potter |
Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America
Garry Wills
Simon & Schuster |
Young Men and Fire
Norman Maclean
University of Chicago Press |
||||
| 1993 | A Lesson Before Dying
Ernest J. Gaines
Knopf |
Genet: A Biography
Edmund White
Alfred A. Knopf |
Opera in America: A Cultural History
John Dizikes
Yale University |
The Land Where the Blues Began
Alan Lomax
Pantheon |
||||
| 1994 | The Stone Diaries
Carol Shields
Viking |
Shot in the Heart
Mikal Gilmore
Doubleday |
The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature and Modern American Culture
Gerald Early
Ecco Press |
The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War
Lynn H. Nicholas
Knopf |
||||
| 1995 | Mrs. Ted Bliss
Stanley Elkin
Hyperion |
Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson
Robert Polito
Knopf |
The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France
Robert Darnton
W.W. Norton |
A Civil Action
Jonathan Harr
Random House |
||||
| 1996 | Women in Their Beds
Gina Berriault
Counterpoint |
Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
Frank McCourt
Scribner |
Finding a Form
William Gass
Knopf |
Bad Land
Jonathan Raban
Pantheon |
||||
| 1997 | The Blue Flower
Penelope Fitzgerald
Mariner/Houghton |
Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II
James Tobin
Free Press |
Making Waves
Mario Vargas Llosa
Farrar, Straus & Giroux |
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
Anne Fadiman
Farrar, Straus & Giroux |
||||
| 1998 | The Love of a Good Woman
Alice Munro
Knopf |
A Beautiful Mind
Sylvia Nasar
Simon & Schuster |
Visions of Jazz
Gary Giddins
Oxford |
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families
Philip Gourevitch
Farrar, Straus & Giroux |
||||
| 1999 | Motherless Brooklyn
Jonathan Lethem
Doubleday |
The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White
Henry Wiencek
St. Martin's |
Selected Non-Fictions
Jorge Luis Borges
Viking |
Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior
Jonathan Weiner
Knopf |
||||
| Year | Fiction | Biography | Criticism | General Non-Fiction | Memoir | Translation | ||
| 2000 | Being Dead
Jim Crace
Farrar, Straus & Giroux |
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
Herbert P. Bix
HarperCollins |
Quarrel & Quandary
Cynthia Ozick
Knopf |
Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing
Ted Conover
Random House |
||||
| 2001 | Austerlitz
W. G. Sebald
Random House |
Boswell’s Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr.Johnson
Adam Sisman
Farrar, Straus & Giroux |
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000
Martin Amis
Talk Miramax |
Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper
Nicholson Baker
Random House |
||||
| 2002 | Atonement
Ian McEwan
Doubleday/Nan A. Talese (US)/Jonathan Cape (UK) |
Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, Vol. II
Janet Browne
Knopf |
Tests of Time
William H. Gass
Knopf |
A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
Samantha Power
Basic Books |
||||
| 2003 | The Known World
Edward P. Jones
Amistad/HarperCollins |
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
William Taubman
W.W. Norton |
River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
Rebecca Solnit
Viking |
Sons of Mississippi
Paul Hendrickson
Knopf |
||||
| 2004 | Gilead
Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
De Kooning: An American Master
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan
Alfred A. Knopf |
Where You’re At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet
Patrick Neate
Riverhead |
The Reformation: A History
Diarmaid MacCulloch
Viking |
||||
| 2005 | The March
E.L. Doctorow
Random House |
American Prometheus
Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin
Alfred A. Knopf |
The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin
William Logan
Columbia University Press |
Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
Svetlana Alexievich
Dalkey Archive Press |
Them (2005)
Francine du Plessix Gray
Penguin Press |
|||
| 2006 | The Inheritance of Loss
Kiran Desai
Hamish Hamilton |
James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
Julie Phillips
St. Martin's Press |
Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences
Lawrence Wechsler
McSweeney's |
Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution
Simon Schama
Ecco |
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
Daniel Mendelsohn
HarperCollins |
|||
| 2007 | The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao
Junot Diaz
Riverhead |
Stanley: The Impossible Life Of Africa’s Greatest Explorer
Tim Jeal
Yale University Press |
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
Alex Ross
Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
Harriet Washington
Doubleday |
Brother, I'm Dying
Edwidge Danticat
Alfred A. Knopf |
|||
| 2008 | 2666
Roberto Bolaño
Farrar, Straus |
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul
Patrick. French
Knopf |
Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History: Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter
Seth Lerer
University of Chicago Press |
The Forever War
Dexter Filkins
Knopf |
My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq
Ariel Sabar
Algonquin |
|||
| 2009 | Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel
Fourth Estate |
Cheever: A Life
Blake Bailey
Knopf |
Notes From No Man's Land: American Essays
Eula Biss
Graywolf Press |
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
Richard Holmes
Pantheon |
Somewhere Towards the End
Diana Athill
Norton |
|||
| Year | Fiction | Biography | Criticism | General Non-Fiction | Memoir | Translation | ||
| 2010 | A Visit From The Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan
Knopf |
How To Live, Or A Life Of Montaigne
Sarah Bakewell
Other Press |
Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West
Clare Cavanagh
Yale University Press |
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
Isabel Wilkerson
Random |
Half a Life
Darin Strauss
McSweeney’s |
|||
| 2011 | Binocular Vision
Edith Pearlman
Lookout Books |
George F. Kennan: An American Life
John Lewis Gaddis
Penguin Press |
Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews
Geoff Dyer
Graywolf |
Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War
Maya Jasanoff
Knopf |
The Memory Palace
Mira Bartók
Free Press |
|||
| 2012 | Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
Ben Fountain
Ecco |
The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4
Robert A. Caro
Knopf |
Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights
Marina Warner
Belknap Press: Harvard University Press |
Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
Andrew Solomon
Scribner |
Swimming Studies
Leanne Shapton
Blue Rider Press |
|||
| 2013 | Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Knopf |
Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World
Leo Damrosch
Yale University Press |
Distant Reading
Franco Moretti
Verso |
Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital
Sherri Fink
Crown |
Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti
Amy Wilentz
Simon & Schuster |
|||
| 2014 | Lila
Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
John Lahr
W.W. Norton & Company |
The Essential Ellen Willis
Ellen Willis, edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz
University of Minnesota Press |
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation
David Brion Davis
Alfred A. Knopf |
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
Roz Chast
Bloomsbury |
|||
| 2015 | The Sellout
Paul Beatty
Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley
Charlotte Gordon
Random House |
The Argonauts
Maggie Nelson
Graywolf |
Dreamland: The True Story of America’s Opiate Epidemic
Sam Quinones
Bloomsbury |
Negroland
Margo Jefferson
Pantheon |
|||
| 2016 | LaRose
Louise Erdrich
Harper |
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
Carol Anderson
Bloomsbury |
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Matthew Desmond
Crown |
Lab Girl
Hope Jahren
Alfred A. Knopf |
||||
| 2017 | Improvement
Joan Silber
Counterpoint |
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder
Caroline Fraser
Metropolitan Books |
You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages
Carina Chocano
Mariner |
The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America
Frances FitzGerald
Simon & Schuster |
Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China
Xiaolu Guo
Grove |
|||
| 2019 | Everything Inside
Edwidge Danticat
Knopf |
The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth
Josh Levin
Little, Brown |
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
Saidiya Hartman
W.W. Norton |
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
Patrick Radden Keefe
Doubleday / Penguin Random House |
Know My Name: A Memoir
Chanel Miller
Viking |
|||
| Year | Fiction | Biography | Criticism | General Non-Fiction | Memoir | Translation | ||
| 2020 | Hamnet
Maggie O’Farrell
Knopf |
Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World
Amy Stanley
Scribner |
Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
Nicole R. Fleetwood
Harvard Univ. Press |
Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire
Tom Zoellner
Harvard Univ. Press |
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
Cathy Park Hong
One World |
|||
| 2021 | The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Harper / HarperCollins Publishers |
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler
Rebecca Donner
Little, Brown |
Girlhood
Melissa Febos
Bloomsbury |
How the Word Is Passed
Clint Smith
Little, Brown |
Gay Bar: Why We Went Out
Jeremy Atherton Lin
Little, Brown |
|||
| 2022 | Bliss Montage: Stories
Ling Ma
Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
Beverly Gage
Viking |
Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age
Timothy Bewes
Columbia |
The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act
Isaac Butler
Bloomsbury |
Stay True: A Memoir
Hua Hsu
Doubleday |
Grey Bees
Andrey Kurkov trans. by Boris Dralyuk
Deep Vellum |
||
| 2023 | I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home
Lorrie Moore
Knopf |
Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage
Jonny Steinberg
Knopf |
Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression
Tina Post
NYU Press |
We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America
Roxanna Asgarian
Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
How to Say Babylon: A Memoir
Safiya Sinclair
Simon & Schuster |
Cold Nights of Childhood
Tezer Özlü and translated by Maureen Freely
Transit Books |
||
| 2024 | My Friends
Hisham Matar
Random House / Penguin Random House |
Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar
Cynthia Carr
Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
Hanif Abdurraqib
Random House / Penguin Random House |
Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space
Adam Higginbotham
Avid Reader |
Patriot: A Memoir
Alexei Navalny, translation by Arch Tait with Stephen Dalziel
Knopf |
A Last Supper of Queer Apostles
Pedro Lemebel, translation by Gwendolyn Harper
Penguin Classics |
||
| 2025 | We Do Not Part
Han Kang (Translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris)
Hogarth / Penguin Random House |
A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America's Disabled
Alex Green
Bellevue Literary Press |
Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right
Quinn Slobodian
Zone Books |
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
Karen Hao
Penguin Press |
Mother Mary Comes to Me
Arundhati Roy
Scribner |
Sad Tiger
Neige Sinno (Translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer)
Seven Stories Press |