P
P is for Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon before Old Ez, Ezra Pound, and before Edgar Allan Poe. Gravity’s Rainbow: my favorite novel of all times.
O
O is for Charles Olson. He might have been a scatterbrain, poetically his vision coheres.
N
N. I have to pass on N. No, I do not like Nabokov.
M
M is for Herman Melville. Definite. Ben Marcus and David Markson have to take a seat in the second row.
L
L is for Mark Leyner. Language as dynamite. It seems he does not write literature anymore.
K
K is for Jack Kerouac. Who else? For me American literature started with On the Road.
J
J is for Henry James. Even though I am unable to finish his big novels; the social worlds he depicts are utterly alien to me.
I
I is for Washington Irving and his American transformations of German stories.
H
H is for Nathaniel Hawthorne. Rather than for Hemingway.
F
F is for Raymond Federman, I translated The Voice in the Closet. Hence no Faulkner whose work I find difficult.