Peter Culley's list of 75 of maybe 150 "Essential Texts" in No Particular Order, and not including reference books

1. Life of Johnson--James Boswell

2. Last Lunar Badeker--Mina Loy

3. So Going Around Cities--Ted Berrigan

4. Curiosities of Literature--Isaac D'Israeli

5. Pandemonium--Humphrey Jennings

6. Collected Novels--Jean Rhys

7. Tristram Shandy--Laurence Sterne

8. Collected Poems--Hugh MacDiarmid

9. Ambit--Gerald Creede

10. Planetary Gear--Ted Pearson

11. You--George Stanley

12. The Relative Minor--Deanna Ferguson

13. Europe of Trusts--Susan Howe

14. Words--Robert Creeley

15. Journals--Gilbert White

16. Swedish Letters--Mary Wollstencraft

17. Midsummer Cushion--John Clare

18. Art Criticism--Denis Diderot

19. Lost Illusions--Honore de Balzac

20. The Cloister and the Hearth--Charles Reade

21. Polyverse--Lee Ann Brown

22. The Power Broker--Robert Caro

23. The Glenn Gould Reader

24. Charlotte Bronte--Villette

25. The Fire Next Time--James Baldwin

26. Notebooks and Marginalia--Samuel Taylor Coleridge

27. Tight Corners (and what's around them)--David Bromige

28. From Next Spring--Gerry Gilbert

29. Don Juan--Lord Byron

30. Collected Nonsense--Edward Lear

31. Moominland Midwinter--Tove Jansson

32. Fovea Centralis--Christopher Dewdney

33. The Dumbfounding--Margaret Avison

34. Travels in Arabia Derserta--Charles Doughty

35. Memoirs--Thomas Bewick

36. The Seasons--James Thompson

37. The Task--William Cowper

38. A Dance to the Music of Time--Anthony Powell

39. Autobiographies--Janet Frame

40. Reveries of a Solitary Walker--Jean-Jacques Rousseau

41. Stages on Life's Way--Soren Kierkegaard

42. Book of Magazine Verse--Jack Spicer

43. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire--Edward Gibbon

44. Street of Crocodiles--Bruno Schulz

45. Collected Poems--Basil Bunting

46. The Mediterranean--Fernand Braudel

47. The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity--Aby Warburg

48. The Journal of a Disappointed Man--WNP Barbellion

49. Martyrology Book 2--bp Nichol

50. Midwinter Day--Bernadette Mayer

51. Collected Short Novels--Collette

52. Own Face--Clark Coolidge

53. Testimony--Charles Reznikoff

54. Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror--John Ashbery

56. Anatomy of Melancholy--Robert Burton

57. Journals--Dorothy Wordsworth

58. Voyage of the 'Beagle'--Charles Darwin

59. The Fur Trade in Canada--Harold Adams Innis

60. Archaeologist of Morning--Charles Olson

61. The Kalevela--comp. Elias Lonrot

62. Collected Poems--Lorine Niedecker

63. Memoirs--Hector Berlioz

64. Marcel Duchamp--Octavio Paz

65. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym--Edgar Allen Poe

66. Diaries--Cosima Wagner

67. Essays--Arthur Schopenhauer

68. Harvest of the Cold Months--Elizabeth David

69. A Place of Greater Safety--Hilary Mantel

70. The Wind in the Willows--Kenneth Grahame

71. Imaginations--William Carlos Williams

72. Harmonium--Wallace Stevens

73. Hymns and Fragments--Friedrich Holderlin (Sieburth trans.)

74. The Wanderer--Alain-Fournier

75. Up in the Old Hotel--Joseph Mitchell
- posted by cjb @ 11:32 PM