The Best Novels You’ve Never Read

And the Winner Is....

David Markson,
for The Last Novel and Vanishing Point

David Markson, who has long been a writer other writers go gaga over, got more votes than any other novelist (that would be two—and not even for the same novel). As Sarah Weinman of Galley Cat notes, in singling out his just-released novel, The Last Novel, “Markson writes both in a postmodern fashion, all but the barest of phrases stripped away, and in a widely expansive method to reveal a greater sum of the world around him and all of us.” Wayne Koestenbaum highlighted an earlier book by Markson, Vanishing Point: “It’s a novel, yes, but it barely qualifies—it’s simply a list of outrageously pathetic facts about artists and writers. It’s funny, sad, bravura, minimalist. I adore his work.”