American novelist EL Doctorow dies at 84

EL Doctorow, critically acclaimed author of the novels Ragtime and Billy Bathgate, has died aged 84 in a New York hospital, of complications from lung cancer.

He was known for works which re-imagine the American experience, placing fictional characters in recognizable historical contexts.

In his tweeter Barack Obama wrote: "his books taught me much, and he will be missed.'' For the US President EL Doctorow was "one of America's greatest novelists".

In a 50-year career, Doctorow published 10 novels, a stage drama, two books of short fiction and numerous essays.

His talent will be missed.

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Source: bbc.com/news

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The greatest books of all time, as voted by 125 famous authors

See if you have read some of the best books of all time, according to 125 famous British and American authors.

The book Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books asks 125 of modernity’s greatest British and American writers — including Norman Mailer, Ann Patchett,Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, andJoyce Carol Oates — “to provide a list, ranked, in order, of what [they] consider the ten greatest works of fiction of all time– novels, story collections, plays, or poems.”

Here are some of this project main conclusions:

TOP TEN WORKS OF THE 20TH CENTURY

1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
4. Ulysses* by James Joyce
5. Dubliners* by James Joyce
6. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
7. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
8. To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
9. The complete stories of Flannery O’Connor
10. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

TOP TEN WORKS OF THE 19th CENTURY

1. Anna Karenina* by Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary* by Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
5. The stories of Anton Chekhov
6. Middlemarch* by George Eliot
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Great Expectations* by Charles Dickens
9. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
10. Emma* by Jane Austen

TOP TEN AUTHORS BY NUMBER OF BOOKS SELECTED

1. William Shakespeare — 11
2. William Faulkner — 6
3. Henry James — 6
4. Jane Austen — 5
5. Charles Dickens — 5
6. Fyodor Dostoevsky — 5
7. Ernest Hemingway — 5
8. Franz Kafka — 5
9. (tie) James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf — 4

TOP TEN AUTHORS BY POINTS EARNED

1. Leo Tolstoy — 327
2. William Shakespeare — 293
3. James Joyce — 194
4. Vladimir Nabokov — 190
5. Fyodor Dostoevsky — 177
6. William Faulkner — 173
7. Charles Dickens — 168
8. Anton Chekhov — 165
9. Gustave Flaubert — 163
10. Jane Austen — 161

You may find the whole article in here.

Source: brainpickings.org