“Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air, blue above the wires.”
Herzog by Saul Bellow
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
The Human Stain by Philip Roth
“The Swede. During the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical name in our Newark neighborhood, even to adults just a generation removed from the city's old Prince Street ghetto and not yet so flawlessly Americanized as to be bowled over by the prowess of a high school athlete.”
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Ask the Dust by John Fante
Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos
Rabbit Redux by John Updike
“To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.”
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Independence Day by Richard Ford
Ada or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
“Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in a single file. Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cotton-house can see Jewel's frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own.”
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children.”
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man by Joseph Heller
The Gravedigger's Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates
“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.”
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron
“On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.”
Sabbath's Theatre by Philip Roth
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
“He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful. It's a school day, sure, but he's nowhere near the classroom.”
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Naked Lunch by William S Burroughs
Underworld by Don DeLillo
“On Memorial Day in 1867 Daniel Lewin thumbed his way from New York to Worcester, Mass., in just under five hours. With him was his young wife, Phyllis, and their eight-month-old son, Paul, whom Daniel carried in a sling chair strapped to his shoulders like a pack.”
The Beautiful and Damned by F Scott Fitzgerald
JR by William Gaddis
The Book of Daniel by EL Doctorow
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before but there is nothing to compare it to now.”
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. 'Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.'”
A Lost Lady by Willa Cather
White Noise by Don DeLillo
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
Ragtime by EL Doctorow
Solutions
1:B, 2:A, 3:A, 4:D, 5:A, 6:C, 7:B, 8:D, 9:C, 10:A, 11:C
Scores
3 and above.
Oh dear. Try again in four years' time.
6 and above.
Indecisive. Time to get the lawyers involved.
9 and above.
Well done. You've carried the electoral college.
11 and above.
All correct. Four more years!
