Yes, taking a picture would have been easier, but a list is much more servicey. Have I read all of these books? No. Have I read most of them? Yes, I think I you could say that. These books are on my desk because I’ve planned to use, tried to use, or just won’t give up on using them in one of our issues. I’ve organized them by genre here, but don’t you dare think this is how they are on my desk. 

Fiction / Plays

Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers

Voltaire, Candide

Henry James, In the Cage

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time

Bernard Malamud, The Natural

Muriel Spark, The Public Image

Javier Marais, Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico

Cesar Aria, The Literary Conference

Roberto Bolano, The Insufferable Gaucho

Tom Stoppard, Travesties

Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

Doug Wright, Quills

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

J.M. Coetzee, Youth

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Yiyun Li, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

Nonfiction

Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists

Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethelehem

Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

Normal Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon

John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies

Mike Davis, City of Quartz

Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic

John D’Agata, About a Mountain

Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch

Haruki Murakami, Underground

Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

H.J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books

Chandler Burr, The Perfect Scent

Mary Roach, Packing for Mars

Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows

Rebecca Solnit, Infinite City

Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown

Leslie T. Chang, Factory Girls

Graham Robb, Parisians

Brian Dillion, The Hypochondriacs

Stefanie Syman, The Subtle Body

Lauren Redniss, Century Girl

Lauren Redniss, Radioactive

Research / Anthologies

ed. Robert Gottlieb, On Reading Dance

ed. Phillip Lopate, Writing New York

ed. David L. Ulin, Writing Los Angeles

Art in Theory 1648-1815

Art in Theory 1815-1900

Art in Theory 1900-2000

Roger Stalley, Early Medieval Architecture

Barry Bergdoll, European Architecture 1750-1890

Magazines

Electric Literature, issue #3

Tin House #43: Games People Play

Tin House #44: Summer Reading

Tin House #45: Class in America

Tin House #46: Winter Reading

Good, The Work Issue

Cabinet, Issue 35, Dust

Longshot Magazine (Issue 1)

48 HR Magazine (Issue 0)

The last five New Yorkers

The last three New York Review of Books

The last two Harpers