We invited eight female literary powerhouses, from Michiko Kakutani to Anna Holmes to Roxane Gay,
to help us create an updated list of books everyone should read. Each participant made 10 picks.
It's a new year, a new Esquire.com. We're looking forward to reading and we hope you are, too.
Michiko Kakutani
Chief book critic for The New York Times, Pulitzer Prize winner, and perhaps the only person on earth
with the guts to call the work of Philip Roth "flimsy" and that of John Updike "cringe-making."
- The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Beloved, by Toni Morrison
- One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
- Underworld, by Don DeLillo
- Selected Stories Of Alice Munro
- Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon
- The Stories Of Vladimir Nabokov
- The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz
- A Wrinkle In Time, by Madeleine L'Engle
Lauren Groff
Author of three novels, including President Obama's favorite book of 2015, Fates and Furies.
- Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko
- The Collected Stories of Grace Paley
- Middlemarch, by George Eliot
- Giovanni's Room, by James Baldwin
- Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson
- Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
- The Complete Poems, by Emily Dickinson
- Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
- So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Maxwell
- Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne
Sloane Crosley
Novelist, essayist, and one of 2015's biggest success stories.
- In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
- Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion
- Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
- Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
- The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
- The Group, by Mary McCarthy
- Birds of America, by Lorrie Moore
- The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy
- Things Fall Apart, by Chiunia Achebe
- Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
Roxane Gray
Essayist, novelist, self-professed bad feminist.
- Citizen, by Claudia Rankine
- Balm, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
- NW, by Zadie Smith
- Forgotten County, by Catherine Chung
- Play It As It Lays, by Joan Didion
- Stone Butch Blues, by Leslie Feinberg
- Possessing the Secret of Joy, by Alice Walker
- The Round House, by Louise Erdrich
- The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton
- The Lover, by Marguerite Duras
Lizzie Widdicombe
Staff writer and editor at The New Yorker.
- The Neapolitan Novels, by Elena Ferrante
- The Leopard, by Tomasi di Lampedusa
- Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
- Heartburn, by Nora Ephron
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark
- Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
- Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson
- To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
- To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf
- Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar
Anna Holmes
New York Times columnist and founder of Jezebel.
- The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
- The Liars' Club, by Mary Karr
- Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
- Parting the Waters, by Taylor Branch
- Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow
- The White Album, by Joan Didion
- The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen
- The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson
- Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh
Camille Perri
Cosmopolitan's at-large books editor and writer of the forthcoming The Assistants.
- Just Kids, by Patti Smith
- Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte
- Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
- A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers, by Yiyun Li
- Bad Behavior, by Mary Gaitskill
- Bastard Out Of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison
- The Ballad Of The Sad Café, by Carson McCullers
- Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott
- The Best Of Everything, by Rona Jaffe
Ashley Ford
Contributor to BuzzFeed, ELLE, and others.The Boys of My Youth, by Jo Ann Beard
- The Chronology of Water, by Lidia Yuknavitch
- Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel
- Sula, by Toni Morrison
- The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
- An Untamed State, by Roxane Gay
- Redefining Realness, by Janet Mock
- Silver Sparrow, by Tayari Jones
- Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
- Shadowshaper, by Daniel José Older
- Walk Two Moons, by Sharon Creech