"This remarkable novel, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize, takes place in a cemetery the evening after the burial of Lincoln’s son, Willie. The chorus of the dead, an astonishing cast of over 60 characters, are trapped in the Bardo, the state of existence between life and death. Another kind of bardo is taking place at the White House on the night before Willie dies. Historical diaries and letters written by those who attended the grand ball illustrate the struggle in Lincoln’s soul. His role is to be President, but he longs to be with his beloved son."

"I was a student when I read Orlando for the first time, and I remember how for many days afterwards I walked around in a happy daze. Daring to transcend boundaries of gender, class, history, culture, geography…. this is a story—Woolf called it a biography—like no other. Our hero wakes up and finds himself turned into a woman, and delightfully, this transition takes place in Istanbul—Constantinople. Orlando is a novel about transformations and journeys—from man into woman, from the West to the East, from one existence to the next and vice versa."

"This dark, fast-paced novel is a visionary masterpiece. It’s populated by hackers and cyberpunks, Gibson’s creations that have since become fixtures in the electronic matrix. I first read the book in the mid-1990s, when the Internet was beginning to wrap itself around all of us, and I read it with increasing excitement—but not without some difficulty. Gibson doesn’t bother to explain his terms or lead the reader by the hand through the puzzling dislocations of his futuristic landscape. Neuromancer is pulp fiction, but it’s guided by a hip wisdom about a baffling phenomenon that was only beginning to take shape."

"The language sizzles and hisses in this 2011 Irish novel set in a steampunk future. We slip from the Trace, all tangled alleyways, to the Fancy, which is as it sounds, and even out to the wastes of the Big Nothin’, from which the Bohane river crashes down through the city. There’s a gang war, indelible characters, a martial music. Sweet Baba Jay, did anyone ever really speak this way? It’s wordplay at the level of Nabokov, but with a very different, Gaelic purpose. “Fucker Burke and Wolfie Stanners set their face against the hardwind as they climbed the bluffs.”"

"I include this quirky novel in my list, because it is a satiric gem and one of the guiltiest of guilty pleasures. Terry Southern was a comic genius (Dr. Strangelove, Candy) who has never quite been given his due. The argument of The Magic Christian is a simple one, namely: There is no limit to what you can make people do, if you give them enough money. Everyone has his price. In this slim volume, Southern illustrates this point in a story that becomes increasingly outrageous and culminates in one of the most absurdly comic scenes in the American literary canon."