Women and Men read online by Joseph McElroy.

When looking for an interesting book, people often turn to various ratings and expert recommendations. Our today's top ten literary works will not be mastered by every reader. The fact is that The Millions portal published ranking of the most difficult books in history.

Each of the works that hit the top ten is distinguished by a decent volume, complex intricate syllable, strange structure and intricate syntax. After reading one or two books from our today's list, you have every right to boast of your intellectual superiority, as well as remarkable willpower.

The lesbian novel by the American modernist writer was edited by the poet and playwright Thomas Stearns Eliot. This did not make the work easier, although some literary portals regularly include it in mandatory reading.

9. Jonathan Swift, Tale of the Barrel

The anti-church pamphlet was banned by the Pope himself. The plot of the work is impossible to retell due to its complete absence. The author talks extensively about all aspects human life, its laws and principles. The individual parts of the pamphlet are logically unrelated to each other.

8. Georg Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit

One of the main works of the philosopher has three parts, devoted respectively to consciousness, self-consciousness and the absolute subject. Sophisticated philosophical book lovers will like Hegel's innovative ideas for their time, based on the concept of "appearing spirit." The book is considered a fundamental work in the history of philosophical thought.

7. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

The novel immerses the reader in reflections on time and on the course of human life. The author builds a real kaleidoscope of scraps of thoughts of different characters. The plot is almost non-existent. Even fans of Woolf's work call the novel controversial.

6. Samuel Richardson, "Clarissa"

The unhurried plot of the novel, a lengthy analysis of the thoughts and actions of the characters, constant references to earlier events cause ambiguous feelings in most readers. Clarissa is considered Richardson's best novel.

5. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

The Irish modernist wrote this comic novel for 16 years. The text of the work is an unpredictable mixture of puns in different languages. The novel, which is inaccessible for understanding, causes a contradictory reaction of literary critics.

4. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

The work had a significant impact on the philosophy of the XX century. Like every fundamental work on philosophy, "Being and Time" will not seem to anyone an easy and easy reading.

3. Gertrude Stein, Making Americans

The novel has never been popular among a wide range of readers. In style, structure and syllable, the work can be dubbed "experimental prose".

2. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene

Fairies and elves became the heroes of this allegorical poem. But the images are far from the fairy-tale characters we are used to. On the contrary, all the characters personify the real English and French during the reign of Uther Pendragon.

1. Joseph McElroy, Women and Men

McElroy's novel is a real literary Everest, which not everyone can conquer. By the way, Los-Angeles Times included this book among the classic works of American postmodernism.

Not all writers agree with the statement "Brevity is the sister of talent." In addition, many of us prefer that our favorite book or story never ends. Below is a list of the ten longest novels in the world, based on estimated word count.

Sironia, Texas is a novel by American author Madison Cooper that describes life in the fictional city of Sironia, Texas, at the beginning of the 20th century. The book contains about 840,000 words and over 1700 pages, making it one of the longest novels in the world. English language. It was written over 11 years and published in 1952. Received the Houghton Mifflin Literary Prize.

Women and Men is a 1987 novel by Joseph McElroy. Has 1,192 pages and 850,000 words. It is considered the most difficult novel in the world.

Poor Fellow My Country is a novel by Australian writer Xavier Herbert that won the Miles Franklin Award for it. Was published in 1975. Consists of 1,463 pages and 852,000 words. Is the longest Australian fiction ever written. The theme of the novel includes questions about Aboriginal rights, and also describes the life and problems of Northern Australia.

Son of Ponni (Ponniyin Selvan) is a Tamil historical novel written by Kalki Krishnamurthy. It is one of the greatest works of Tamil literature. Tells the story of Prince Arulmozhivarman (later crowned as Rajaraja Chola I), one of the prominent kings of the Chola dynasty who ruled in the 10th-11th centuries. The novel was published in the 1950s. Has 2,400 pages and 900,000 words.

Kelidar is a monumental novel by Mahmud Doulatabadi. One of the most famous Persian novels and definitely one of the best. It has 2,836 pages in five volumes, consists of ten books and 950,000 words. Describes the life of a Kurdish family from an Iranian village in the province of Khorasan between 1946-1949, which faces the hostility of their neighbors, despite the similarity of their cultures.

Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady is a 1748 epistolary novel by the English writer Samuel Richardson. Consists of 1,534 pages and 984,870 words. Included in the list of 100 best novels of all time. It tells the tragic story of a heroine whose pursuit of virtue is constantly thwarted by her family.

Zettel's Dream (Zettels Traum) is a work by the West German writer Arno Schmidt, published in 1970. Has 1,536 pages and 1,100,000 words. The story is told here in the form of notes, collages and typewritten pages.

Venmurasu is a Tamil novel written by Jayamohan. This is the author's most ambitious work, which he started in January 2014 and later announced that he would write every day for ten years. The total volume of the novel is expected to be 25,000 pages. As of December 2017, 15 books have been published online and in print. So far they have 11,159 pages and 1,556,028 words.

In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) is a French epic novel, the main work of the writer Marcel Proust, created by him during the years 1908 / 1909-1922 and published in seven parts from 1913 to 1927. Describes the author's childhood memories and teenage experiences in aristocratic France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, examines the waste of time and the lack of meaning in the world. The novel consists of 3,031 pages and 1,267,069 words.

Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus (Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus) is a French river novel originally published in ten volumes in the 17th century by Madeleine de Scuderi and her brother Georges de Scuderi. In total, the original edition has 13,095 pages and 1,954,300 words. It is considered the longest novel in the history of world literature. It is of the type of secular novels (with a key), where modern people and events are thinly disguised as classical characters from Roman, Greek or Persian mythology.

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Joseph McElroy

I always think of the child as a girl. What if it's a boy?

Oh, it couldn't be. .

Martha Martin

Nothing new here, except my marriage, which to me, is matter of profound wonder.

A. Lincoln, Letter to a fellow lawyer, November 9, 1842

My thanks to Alice Quinn, my editor at Knopf, for hours, weeks, and months she spent on this book. Thanks also to Margaret Cheney, the copy editor, who has followed every parenthesis and sentence with the most exacting attention. And thanks to my friend Robert Walsh, a young writer and editor of great gifts, who has read the book several times and encouraged me at every turn to believe in the American heart of its common sense and heartfelt and humorous extremities. And thanks to Chris Carroll for help when I needed it.

My thanks also to the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts for grants, and to Queens College of The City University of New York for paid time-off from teaching, and to the University of New Mexico for the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship in San Cristobal, New Mexico.

division of labor unknown

After all she was not so sure what had happened, or when it had started. Which was probably not a correct state to be in, because what had happened made the biggest difference in her life so far. Hours of life that worked her back full to breaking of pain and drained it of its work when the back of her child’s head with a slick of dark hair and its rounded shoulders gave her that last extra push to free its arms still held inside her. She would tell her husband later - she knew she would - and she did tell him. She told her husband and he told others for weeks afterward. Also he had his own side to tell. She loved his excitement.

Pain all in her back worked free of her at the end, dropping away into a void below, and it could almost not be recalled. This pain had been new and undreamt of. As new as the height of the young obstetrician whom she had never seen until she arrived at the hospital, he stood in surgical green against the ceiling above her head, then at her feet, at a distance down there between the stirrups tilting his head this way and that way between her thighs, and the green cap on his head was as far away as the bright, fairly unmetallic room she was giving birth to her child in, and the young obstetrician's words were the talk that went almost and sharply along with the pain her husband Shay - she was thinking of him as Shay - also in surgical green, could not draw off into the ten-buck pocket watch he'd timed her with (where was it? in a pocket? mislaid? she didn't t care where it was). Her husband Shay's chin hung close to her; I will always be here, his chin might have said, and his hand out of sight somewhere gripped hers, his hand might have been invisible for all she knew; but then he had to see for himself what was going on at the other end and he moved down to the foot of the delivery table and he peered over the doctor's shoulder as if they were both in it together, and then Shay half looked up from that end against his better judgment she was sure and frowned at her but with love smiled the old smile. He needed a shave, his tan had grown seedy. The doctor stood up between her thighs and said they were getting there.

She was just with it enough to be embarrassed and so she didn't say she didn't want Shay down there looking. He was already there. Her baby had changed. It had felt older last week, older than their marriage. One night he had told her with his tongue just what he would do to her when the head began to show, and she didn't think he meant it but she didn't tell him. Now he heard her pain. He couldn't see it. She could see it on the blank ceiling, oh God oh blank, and it was coming to birth, that pain, and would always be there like a steady supply of marrow-to-burn mashed out of her from her skull downward.

The men there between her thighs said, "Hey" and "Oh" at the same time (doctor, husband, respectively). They spoke at once, like song.

What's she look like down there? Oh God oh God. What's she sucking spitting look like down sucking splitting there? look like? Well, she never really had known, so why should she know now? A saddle of well-worked mutton? A new dimension of Her. Later she was encouraged to recall it all. As if she did.

Afterward she did recall a thought about being an invalid that had escaped her during the pain, the labor, and came back at a later moment of the pain when she was not really trying very hard to recall another, different thing that she couldn't at that moment even refer to (so how did she know there was anything to recall?), it suddenly quite naturally during the pain took the place of the invalid insight and it had to do with Shay moving the way he moved when they were at last in the delivery room and he'd been at her side holding her hand. He moved then slowly away from her head to the foot of the delivery table to look at the very top of the baby's head (girl head or boy head). But also at the part of her he said opened like an animal looking to be a flower. But now with the baby coming down, she was pushing against what Shay would be seeing, whatever that was, and the thing that had come to her had to do with his moving from one end of her to the other, from the upper part where her eyes were, downward - the way he did it, walked to the foot of the table, and the way this turned her into something but she lost it - had it, lost it, a wrinkle in her mind somewhere stirred like the start of a laugh- and later she found herself recalling this thing about being an invalid: that, here she was perfectly healthy, never more, and healthier than Shay with his sinus; and in order to have this baby she had to become an invalid, and she got the picture again of her recurrent dream she'd never told Shay, of gazing out the endless window of her lab and seeing a man led to execution who she learned had been in the hospital getting better for several weeks until he was able to have the punishment executed on him which then she saw was a thousand and one strokes; then he was to crawl back to the infirmary he had just walked out of: but she saw that her thinking was incorrect and she was not an invalid at all, she was using herself, that was what she was doing, being fruitful. Her husband had hated his first name when he was eleven and had been Dave for a while and then, of all things, Shay, he hadn't gotten over it, she called him Shay sometimes, hadn't gotten over what? it sounded like a movie actor. What is the fruit of a cross between an animal and a flower?

The men looking over her, head to toe, were glad to be there and so was she to have them, and so was the nurse and so was she to have the nurse and so were they to have the nurse, and so were they glad to have her and her pain and the baby that she could remember looking ahead to: the truth was not head to toe, it was the men looking when they couldn't see in, until they saw what was coming out to meet them, which was nice, wasn't it.

How did you feel?

It was (she sips the last of her daiquiri which now is not so chilled) the most beautiful experience of my life. No, it was rough, it was painful, but I couldn't remember all the pain. It was an experience I wouldn't have missed.

She was glad it was ending, glad Shay wanted to be there with her, she was alone with her pain whittling at her, but no, we are not alone.

Shay and the chin he was hitched to moved away but down and near the foot of the delivery table in the bright delivery room, and he moved politely as if he didn’t want to notice himself moving. She found on his face a pursed-lip fixity sharing her pain, she knew he shared it. It was love. She was glad, so glad. She couldn't have done it without him, later that was what she was telling everyone again. Having apparently already told them. For how else could there be an again? She heard herself.

And recalled the word for what Shay had made her into when he respectfully moved with a Sunday museum-goer's slowness, from her higher to her lower, from her eyes and dry mouth that he'd kissed and that hadn't changed, to the action down there - she thought of him as Shay during the labor - and he mustn't look back at her, this was what she felt, or felt he felt, as if he could share her labor only by not looking back at her. Well, it wasn't as if she couldn't have had a mirror to follow the action. But he, who had been impatient for the baby to come and who had said the time had never gone faster, had looked along her length so that by his slowness she had become a model.

Of what? A model of a woman on a scale not to be sniffed at.

Still, a model. A model woman? In the mouths of others. Scientist, lover, mother of a fetus nearing term, nutritionist at the bar of the breakfast nook, creator soft and trim who'd give you a hand and a thigh, demonstrate relative acceleration, share a birth with you, be tracked by your pocket clock through space to the next contraction (breathing quick and regular, hhh - hhh - hhh - hhh, as she and Shay had been shown at the natural childbirth sessions), while she’d often said (knowing she will often later say) that she must have (later had had ...

12:00 / 26.01.2018

There is such a paradox: in order to become part of the canon, you first need to kick it well, loosen it or scratch something indecent on it. The writers who today look at us from portraits in literature classrooms did not end up in these portraits because they “preserved traditions”, quite the contrary – they violated them.

"Hero of Our Time" and " Captain's daughter are considered classics today, but at the time of publication they were the most innovative lyrics of their time.

Therefore, it seems to me that the best way to look into the future of literature is to find and study the most unusual novels of recent years.

For example, these:

Percival Everett. Glyph (1999, translated by Maria Semenkovich)

Ralph is a brilliant baby. He is 10 months old, he cannot walk yet, he will be able to read and he is already criticizing the works of Jacques Derrida and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He does not speak, but only because he does not like the limitations of the language, silence is his conscious choice: "I was a child full of words, but I did not make a sound."

The novel by Percival Everett is the world through the eyes of a person who has skipped the stage of accumulation of experience and knows everything about the world, but only theoretically - from books. "I didn't know the taste of flan, but I knew the recipe." The principles of the functioning of the language are of interest to Ralph much more than the world around him - the problem is that the world around him has his own plans, so Ralph is continually kidnapped; some to experiment on him, others to cast the devil out of him.

At the same time, little Ralph also manages to be ironic about how we, the readers, perceive the text, and explains why we tend to draw wrong conclusions from defaults:

“Have you still assumed that I am white? При чтении я обнаружил: если персонаж черный, он обязан поправлять свою африканскую прическу, употреблять на улице характерные этнически идентифицируемые идиомы, жить в определенной части города или слышать в свой адрес «ниггер». White characters—I assumed they were white (often because of how they spoke of others)—didn't seem to need that kind of introduction, or perhaps legitimation, to exist on the page. But you, dear reader, whether you share my pigmentation and cultural roots or not, undoubtedly considered me white.

Matthew Macintosh. theMystery.doc (2017, not translated)

“House of Leaves” by Mark Z. Danilevsky was published in 2000, and since then flirting with layout, color and fonts can hardly be considered an innovation. But Matthew Mackintosh's 2017's theMystery.doc is perhaps the first novel since 2000 where text installations don't seem like an attempt to follow the success of House of Leaves.

There are a whole bunch of plots in “theMystery.doc”, but there is also the main one: the main character wakes up in bed with an unknown woman and tries to remember his life.

In retelling, it does not sound very impressive - again a story about amnesia! - but there are nuances: the book has 1660 pages, during which the author uses all possible media tools available on paper: photo collages, correspondence with a chat bot, emails, search terms in the browser, movie screenshots, and random text files from your laptop. "theMystery.doc" - a novel about context; or, more accurately, trying to restore context in the world of the Internet, where there is so much information that you can overdose. Not to mention a few crazy twists and turns within the story, reminiscent of Christopher Nolan's Memento.

David Markson. Etoneroman (ThisIsNotaNovel, 2001, not translated)

Most recently, David Markson's most famous novel, Wittgenstein's Mistress, was published in Russian, which means that there is hope that the rest of his books will also be translated. In general, he is a great master of inventing names - take at least his last three texts: “This is not a novel” (ThisIsNotaNovel, 2001), “Vanishing Point” (VanishingPoint, 2004) and “The Last Novel” (TheLastNovel, 2007).

All three are collage novels, not so much written as compiled, composed by Marxon from hundreds of cards on which he liked to fix his thoughts - variations on the theme of the relationship between the author and the text. The plot is this: the author is trying to write a novel about how he is trying to write a novel, while being distracted all the time, looking at his typewriter, flipping through a directory with addresses, trying to remember where the nearest typewriter repair shop is, looking out the window, thinking about other writers and remembers how and why they died, then he himself dies (or does he not die?) Of a heart attack a few pages before the end of the book, then the replicas of his children penetrate into the text, something like: “Dad, please stop staring at the wall, you're scaring me, talk to me." In fact, Marxon writes one big triptych novel about creative torments, or rather about procrastination, which is already ridiculous in itself, because anyone who has ever tried to write will immediately recognize himself in this chaos from quotes and random thoughts. But Marxon goes further - the text, which begins as a meta-joke about the author's distracted attention, at some point turns into a real meditation on the theme of death and fear of a blank sheet. And “This is not a novel” begins with the words “The writer is almost ready to quit writing. The writer is tired of telling stories."

Joseph McElroy. Plus (1977, will be released this fall, translated by Maxim Nesteleev and Andrey Miroshnichenko)

Plus is a novel about a scientific experiment. The protagonist is the brain, separated from the body and launched into orbit inside the capsule. McElroy reproduces the process of the birth of consciousness from scratch; at first, the brain simply sends data to the MCC, then it begins to think about the meaning of words and gradually remembers the past life - when it was still a person, before it agreed to become part of the experiment.

And although the text in places resembles a poem in prose and is entirely built on associations, on the consonances of words, and on words within words, McElroy himself does not like it when Plus is called a "novel about language." "A novel about language," he says, is just a convenient label to put on any unusual idea. And in some ways he is right: Plus is more a novel about words than about language; this is an attempt to describe the work of consciousness, which, having no sense organs at all, cognizes the world through words and through fragmentary memories of its past body. Such is the linguistic wandering in the darkness of the imagination.

The translator of "Plus" Maxim Nesteleev writes about the language of the novel as follows: “McElroy realizes the metaphors he finds in the words themselves. For example, in the word remembering there is already this idea of ​​​​re-membering as a process that the process of dis-memberment of the engineer’s body was to be.<…>Growth as a metaphor, in addition to the title of the novel, is stated primarily in the words green (141 mentions) and more (335). Physical and spiritual growth + growth associated with the movement from simplicity to complexity is manifested primarily in the language, from primitive, incomplete and stylistically imperfect phrases at the beginning of the text to confusing syntactic constructions in the end".

Alexander Sekatsky. Two caskets, turquoise and jade (2008)

Alexander Kupriyanovich Sekatsky in Russia is known rather as a philosopher, although his artistic text “Two caskets, turquoise and jade” was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize in 2008.

This is one of the strangest and most intricate books I have ever read, if only because Sekatsky himself begins to confuse the traces already in the preface, arguing that he is not the author, but only a translator of "Two Caskets ..." from Chinese into Russian .

In the form of "Cabinets" - a collection of cribs for Chinese officials. 44 stories stylized as tasks, each task is in some way a parable, where the main character faces a moral dilemma. Ethics clash with bureaucracy. The task has conditions, a clearly posed question, and answer options, which, however, sometimes look like separate stories, and often do not answer the question, but dodge it or try to comment on it or criticize it from the position of one or another philosophical school.

Jonathan Safran Foer. Code tree (2010, not translated)

In 2010, Jonathan Safran Foer published The Tree of Codes, but this is not a novel in the classic sense of the word. Foer himself wrote about the idea this way: “To create the “Tree of Codes”, I printed out several copies of Bruno Schulz’s “Street of the Crocodiles” and tried to find a story within his story. The idea was simple: cut words out of the book, many words, whole blocks of words, in order to create a different, new story from the remaining words.

Creating a book with holes in the pages is such a technical challenge that Foer was never able to find a publisher in the United States. The Tree of Codes agreed to print only one Belgian publisher, DieKeure.

I don't know that" - this is how the Russian poet Innokenty Annensky began his article "What is poetry?". One could also start a conversation about postmodernism, given the complete blurring of the meaning of this word among philosophers, sociologists, culturologists and critics, but one should immediately agree on the terms. Obviously, it is necessary to distinguish between the concepts of "postmodern time", "postmodern" and "postmodernism", which often denote the exact opposite, and indicate that in this article postmodernism will be called artistic creativity, which arose after 1945 and was aimed at searching for new formal and meaningful methods or at a radical rethinking of the old ones.

In the American context, postmodernists are often identified or separated from the writers of the so-called "school of black humor", who, perhaps, should not be singled out separately. Interestingly, in general, postmodernism in the United States was formed under the significant influence of European history (in particular, World War II) and European literature(avant-gardism, "theater of the absurd", existentialism, etc.), and most critics attribute the existence of this phenomenon to the second half of the twentieth century, within 1949-1996, where the first and last dates are the years when iconic postmodernist texts appeared . Postmodernism of the 21st century, the first work of which is considered the experimental "House of Leaves" (2000) by Mark Danilevsky, is no longer so easy to classify, because it is still ongoing.

John Hawkes / John Hawkes (1925-1998)

The author of one of the first postmodern novels in America and several dozen other works of various genres, which defined the style of US literature for thirty years until Pynchon's famous novel about people and rockets, which he directly influenced. Hawkes' novel "Cannibal" (1949) is a hallucinatory vision of Europe, although, probably, a vision of the inner life of Europeans, their "spiritual cesspool". In three parts of the novel, the horrors of war are meaningful, because the writer admitted that it was from here that everything he created comes from, while evil is the only pure word that I would like to keep. Hawkes describes the events during the First World War and immediately after the Second, reducing them to a common denominator: German ideology and character, striving to restore the former national greatness. The somewhat distant, sometimes even sophisticated depiction of violence and the artful "stream of consciousness" in his novels influenced many authors, and Hawkes himself went from surrealism to realism, thus emphasizing the stylistic diversity of postmodernism.

William Gaddis / William Gaddis (1922-1998)

The author of only five large epic texts, for two of which he received the country's highest literary award - the National Book Prize. His first work, "Confession" (1955), about forgeries in painting and the money that can be made from it, is written in a fairly traditional style, and at the same time it is a rethinking of all the classic varieties of the novel, which updated the novel form and prompted American postmodernists look differently at this hardened genre. Later, he became interested in the possibilities of the dialogical form, presenting phrases in his texts without addressees and addressees. The themes of Gaddis's novels are: art - business ("J R") - religion ("Carpenter's Gothic") - law ("A Frolic of His Own"). Own last work- "Agapē Agape" - he finishes two months before his death. This is a 96-page monologue by an artist who is trying to complete a work on a mechanical piano. The work concentrates in itself all of the above topics.

Joseph McElroy (1930)

The most difficult author on this list, and also uncompromisingly difficult, because he believes that the reader must constantly balance on the verge of incomprehension, realizing that in the twentieth century, knowledge is ignorance. McElroy achieves this effect by overloading his nine novels with scientific terms, jargon, author's syntax, non-linear text. His most indicative work - "Women and Men" (1987) - often falls into the lists of the largest works of art (1192 pages).

Thomas Pynchon / Thomas Pynchon (1937)

The central author of the American postmodern canon, a singer of paranoia and entropy, a prominent representative of the so-called "historiographic metafiction", because the most important thing in his texts is the "zeitgeist", therefore Pynchon's novels and stories are always tied to a specific time and space. So, in particular, the plots of his works unfold in all decades of the 20th century, but there is also "Mason and Dixon" about the 18th century and the very "Edge Through" (2013) about the events of 9/11. His novel Gravity's Rainbow (1976) about the events of World War II and Tyrone Slowthrop, who, with his sensitive part, could foresee those places in London where German V-2s should fall, is called a kind of "Bible of postmodernism". However, there is an opinion that all that happens there is a few seconds of Pirate Prentice's dream before a rocket hits him.

William H. Gass (1924)

The oldest writer on this list and one of the most interesting literary critics USA. Author of only three novels, who coined the cornerstone concept of "metaliterature" (adopted it in a 1970 essay) to refer to works whose content is the process of writing artistic text, and the main character is the writer himself. It is on this that his second novel The Tunnel (1995) is built, which Hess wrote for 26 years and received an American Book Award for it. It talks about the history professor William Frederick Kohler, who writes "Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany" and gradually becomes paranoid, hides the manuscript from his wife and decides to dig a secret passage in his basement.

John Barth / John Barth (1930)

Theorist and practitioner of postmodernism, who explained why and how one ended artistic method("Literature of exhaustion", 1967) and another began ("Literature of replenishment", 1979), to which he himself belonged. According to critics, Bart went from a cult author to a classic (whereas Pynchon did the opposite), experimenting with all epic genres (from essays and letters to the Great American Novel), starting as a representative of a rather conventional "school of black humor" (two the first novels), bypassing "metaprose" ("Lost in the laughing room", "Chimera"), the historical novel ("Datura dealer") and reaching a completely realistic style, the end of which he himself once announced.

Robert Coover (1932)

A tireless rethinker of fairytale and wandering plots, in whose work the concept of "metaliterature" is revealed in the fullest way. In the first two novels, he addresses the topic of cult formation. Around the man who was the only survivor of the accident in the mine - "The Origin of the Brunists" (1966), which in 2014 received a 1000-page sequel to "The Day of the Wrath of the Brunists"; and around baseball so beloved by Americans in the "World Baseball Association" (1968). His most significant work is called "Public Burning" (1977) - a political satire and partly magical realism about President Nixon and the execution of the Rosenbergs in 1953. He actively supports electronic literature, and back in 1992 he predicted the end of books (their absorption by hypertext), however, contrary to his statement, in January 2017 his novel was released, continuing the events of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Donald Barthelme (1931-1989)

The author of several novels, known mainly for his short fragmentary works, where he tries to avoid the usual plot structure: the collections Sixty Stories (1981), Forty Stories (1987), Flight to America: 45 Stories (2007). He is considered one of the main representatives of the "school of black humor", although his short stories are very different in subject matter, and in mood they are rather elegiac-ironic than crudely ridiculing death and illness. So, in particular, his lyrical short story "Balloon" inspired D. F. Wallace to leave philosophy and become a writer.

Don DeLillo / Don DeLillo (1936)

Author of 17 novels and winner of all possible awards (with the exception of the Nobel), latest novel whose character goes to the Ukrainian volunteer battalion and dies near Konstantinovka. Just like Barthelm, he calls Samuel Beckett an important writer for himself, although they borrow completely different ideas from him. From the novel Americana (1971) to the novel Zero K (2016), DeLillo, in different, yet always detached, vulnerable and warning voices, predicts the dangers of the future from terrorism to transhumanism. Having started writing already at a fairly mature age, he builds "novels-systems", where even real newspaper coincidences on the same strip of the victory of the baseball team and the successes of the Soviet atomic program (as in his big romance"The other side of the world", 1997) are a sign of the imminent apocalypse approaching.

/ David Foster Wallace (1962-2008)

Author of two completed novels and one unfinished, two probably the best collections of essays in the twentieth century, as well as numerous essays and short stories. The first novel, "The Broom of the System", according to him, is a fictional thesis, from which for some reason everyone usually remembers only the first phrase: "Most pretty attractive girls have pretty unsightly feet." His most famous work - (1996) - almost immediately after the publication received the status of a cult and summed up the American 90s. Although for the author himself it was an attempt to answer the question of how life is in the USA at the end of the second millennium. If the author's answer to the question posed is shortened somewhat (there are 1079 pages in the novel), then it will be as follows: life is bad. Wallace imagines a near future where years are named after sponsors (garbage bags or soap bags), the US joined with Mexico and Canada in the O.N.A.N. (Organization of the North American Nations) with a funny coat of arms, which depicts an eagle in a sombrero with a broom and a spray can of disinfectants in one paw and maple leaves in the other. The novel features many members of the Incadenza family, Canadian separatists, drugs and author's footnotes, and a video clip that only death can take away from viewing.

Keywords: 10 American Postmodernists to Read John Hawkes