Although asking people to narrow down a list of personal favorites for spec fic to ten might have been hard, I feel like pushing the envelope a bit: Name ten works that may or may not be "speculative fiction" that were originally written in a language other than English that you would say are among your favorites. Something tells me that the first two will be commonly suggested:
Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciónes
Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad
Roberto Bolaño, 2666
Carlos Ruiz Zafón, La sombra del viento
Milorad Pavić, The Dictionary of the Khazars
Zoran Živković, Impossible Stories
Danilo Kiš, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich
Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili
Dino Buzzati, Il deserto dei Tartari
José Saramago, Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira
In all but the last case (read in Spanish), I read each of the books mentioned above in the language that I used for the titles. But what about you? What books, translated or in their original texts, would you say rank among your favorites?
The Empirical Approach to Learning
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Bulgakov Master and Margarita
Solzhenitsyn Gulag Archipelago (not fiction but more mind boggling than most sff)
Arabian Nights
Oddyssey
Druon Rois Maudits - Cursed Kings - (not sff but as close to an epic fantasy as it gets in historical fiction; would strongly recommend it to any epic fantasy lover since except for magic the rest is there)
Zweig Chess Story (again as close to sff as it gets)
Mishima The Sea of Fertility (4 novels - this counts as sff)
Eliade Forbidden Forrest/ (alt title) St John's Night
Dumas - Joseph Balsamo and the whole revolution cycle again counts as sff to some extent
Waltari - Roma duology (counts as speculative fiction too btw)
Again I included books read by me at least 5 years ago - the latest read is Mishima in the early 00'- since only the test of time decides what stays as favorite and what flows away, so 2666, Kindly Ones, Pavic or Zivkovic do not qualify yet for me
Off the top of my head (and I'll stick to English titles):
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Jacek Dukaj, The Other Songs
Victor Hugo, The Miserable Ones
Leena Krohn, Tainaron
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Erich Maria Remarque, The Black Obelisk
Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic
And then there's Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Christo), Maurice Druon (The Accured Kings), Arturo Pérez-Reverte (The Club Dumas), Jules Verne (The Mysterious Island or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea), Jaroslav Hašek (The Good Soldier Švejk)... I could go on and on I guess.
Borges. Bolano, and Zafon certainly. Though with Bolano I'd argue that Nazi Literature in the Americas is more "sf" than 2666. I like Garcia Marquez as a writer, yet I find it hard to forgive his Castro apologizing...
I've only read one Calvino, but would like to read more.
Currently reading some Javier Marias. His stories often feature ghosts and killers; he has a three-part novel about an MI6 spy.
What about some of the Oulipo writers? Perec? They seem like they might have some sff elements.
On my shelf I have a book called The Noonday Cemetery, by the Polish writer Gustaw Herling. His stories look like they contain some sf or at least Gothic elements - There are stories about exorcists, murderous musicians, etc.
Liviu is right to suggest The Master and Margarita. Fine fine novel. I also like Spike's suggestion of Murakami.
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge
The Sailor from Gibraltar by Marguerite Duras
Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
Laundry by Suzane Adam
Foreign Words by Vassilis Alexakis
The Same Sea as Every Summer by Esther Tusquets
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
Ghost in the Shell by Masamune Shirow (Yes, it's manga. And yes, it is literature.)
Couldn't read any of them in the original language, unfortunately.
The Poetic Edda
Sándor Márai - Embers
Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum
Kafka - The Trial
Italo Calvino - If on a winter's night a Traveller
Homer - Illias
Camus - The Stranger
Borges - el Aleph
Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Walter Moers - The City of Dreaming Books
Jorge Luis Borges - Short Stories
Michail Bulgakow - Master and Margarita
Nikolai Gogol - Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka
Henrik Ibsen - Peer Gynt
Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis
Stanislaw Lem - Solaris
Naguib Mahfouz - The Seventh Heaven
Gustav Meyrink - The Golem
Leo Perutz - By Night under the Stone Bridge
Francois Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel
There would have been a lot more writers who wrote in german but i tried for a wide variety of languages.
- Haruki Murakami: Wind-up Bird Chronicle
- Viktor Pelewin: Empire V
- Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions
- Franz Kafka: Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis)
- Michael Ende: Die Unendliche Geschichte (The Neverending Story)
- Italo Calvin: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
- Stanislaw Lem: Solaris
- Juan Rulfo: Pedro Páramo
- Nikolai Gogol: Dead Souls
- Robert van Gulik: The Judge Dee Detektive Stories
I was lazy and just replaceed those on my previous list that are originally written in English.
A few not yet mentioned:
Johanna Sinisalo - Not Before Sundown (Troll)
Andreas Eschbach - The Carpet Makers
Isabelle Allende - City of Beasts
Babylon Babies - Maurice Dantec
Kalpa Imperial - Angelica Gorodischer
Black Blossom - Boban Knezevic
The Twentieth Century - Albert Robida
Also yes to Borges, Eco, Calvino, Verne, Dumas, Murakami, Krohn, Zivkovic, Marquez, Kafka, Homer, Moers
Here's a quick ten, in no particular order of importance.
The Woman in the Dunes -- Kobo Abe
The Four Wise Men -- Michel Tournier
Arabian Nights and Days -- Naguib Mahfouz
The Baron in the Trees -- Italo Calvino
The Street of Crocodiles -- Bruno Shulz
Love and Other Demons -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Diary of a Mad Old Man -- Junichiro Tanizaki
Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio -- Pu Songling
The Prince -- Ib Michael
The Tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann
jeff ford
Some Brazilian classics bordering on the Fantastic:
Guimarães Rosa, Grande Sertão: Veredas;
Osman Lins, Avalovara;
Jorge Amado, Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos;
Ignacio de Loyola Brandão, Não Verás País Nenhum (this one is a tribute of sorts to 1984, one of our few mainstream authors who wrote an explicit SF novel)
More coming up later!
Here are a few favorites I haven't seen named yet:
Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red
Venedikt Erofeev, Moscow to the End of the Line
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
Johann von Goethe, Faust
Umberto Eco, Baudolino
Texaco - Patrick Chamoiseau
One Hundred Years of Solitude - GGM
Gargangtua and Pantagruel - Francois Rabelais
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Beowulf
The Search For Lost Time - Marcel Proust (yes, really, the whole thing)
Suite Francais - Irene Nemirovsky
Notes from Underground - Dostoevsky
Journey to the End of the Night - Celine
Akira - Otomo
I like how there's a mixture of the familiar (and very good) and the undiscovered yet for me after reading these fine lists. Anyone else thinking about buying/reading some of these books now?
Solzhenitsyn, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch
Jose Carlos Somoza, The Art of Murder
Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Angel's Game
Calvino, If On A Winter's Night A Traveler
Borges, Collected Stories
Eco, The Name of the Rose
Eschback, The Carpet Makers
Zivkovic, 12 Collections and The Teashop
Luis Fernando Verissimo, Borges and the Eternal Orangutan
Much more to read and, in answer to your last question, yes, the list lengthened by virtue of reading the comments to this thread.
Great english school and college, you can make your english perfect, tells your friends about sprachkurs vancouver
José Saramago - Ensaio sobre a Cegueira
José Saramago - Intermitências da Morte
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