The King James Bible, which is indeed the only great book ever written by a committee. Thank you, authors in the mists of recorded history and seventeenth-century translators, for demonstrating, in the most glorious English possible, the full range of human possibilities and the ridiculousness of supernatural explanations for human behavior.

Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam. Translated from the Russian by Max Hayward. 1970. Madame Mandestam was the widow of the greatest 20th-century Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, who died in the Gulag after writing a satirical poem about Joseph Stalin. Her memoir is a cultural history of Russia from the pre-revolutionary era to the mid-1960s. It is a history of words that could not be suppressed and that will never die.

Goodbye, Columbus And Five Short Stories. By Philip Roth. 1959. I was fourteen when I first read one of the short stories, titled "Defender of the Faith," in The New Yorker magazine. Like everything Roth writes, it is terrifically funny but is also a poignant tale of the claims of individual conscience versus group loyalty. This was the first piece of contemporary adult fiction I had ever read, and--how obvious this sounds!--made a huge impression because it showed me that great literature can be written about the here and now, not only about the past.