Esquire's 80 Best Books Every Man Should Read (2015)
List published in 2015. An unranked, incomplete, utterly biased list of the greatest works of literature ever published. Esquire would follow-up this list with two new versions, 80 Books Every Person Should Read in 2016, and a revised "80 Books Every Man Should Read" in 2022.
- 1
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Raymond Carver · 1981 · 4 lists
- 2
Deliverance
James Dickey · 1970 · 4 lists
- 3
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck · 1939 · 32 lists
- 4
Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy · 1985 · 14 lists
- 5
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1880 · 22 lists
- 6
The Known World
Edward P. Jones · 2003 · 11 lists
- 7
The Good War
Studs Terkel · 1984 · 2 lists
- 8
American Pastoral
Philip Roth · 1997 · 10 lists
- 9
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Flannery O'Connor · 1955 · 3 lists
- 10
The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien · 1990 · 10 lists
- 11
A Sport and a Pastime
James Salter · 1967 · 2 lists
- 12
The Call of the Wild
Jack London · 1903 · 13 lists
- 13
Time's Arrow
Martin Amis · 1991 · 1 list
- 14
A Sense of Where You Are
John McPhee · 1965 · 1 list
- 15
Hell's Angels
Hunter S. Thompson · 1966 · 1 list
- 16
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison · 1952 · 29 lists
- 17
Dubliners
James Joyce · 1914 · 8 lists
- 18
Rabbit, Run
John Updike · 1960 · 12 lists
- 19
The Postman Always Rings Twice
James M. Cain · 1934 · 6 lists
- 20
Dog Soldiers
Robert Stone · 1973 · 4 lists
- 21
Winter's Bone
Daniel Woodrell · 2006 · 1 list
- 22
Legends of the Fall
Jim Harrison · 1978 · 1 list
- 23
Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowry · 1947 · 15 lists
- 24
The Naked and the Dead
Norman Mailer · 1948 · 8 lists
- 25
The Professional
W.C. Heinz · 1 list
- 26
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway · 1940 · 13 lists
- 27
Dispatches
Michael Herr · 1977 · 3 lists
- 28
Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller · 1934 · 12 lists
- 29
Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates · 1961 · 3 lists
- 30
As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner · 1915 · 18 lists
- 31
The Killer Angels
Michael Shaara · 1974 · 5 lists
- 32
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut · 1969 · 19 lists
- 34
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Ken Kesey · 1962 · 13 lists
- 36
A Fan's Notes
Frederick Exley · 1968 · 1 list
- 37
Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis · 1953 · 6 lists
- 38
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami · 1997 · 8 lists
- 39
Master and Commander
Patrick O'Brian · 1969 · 3 lists
- 40
Plainsong
Kent Haruf · 1999 · 1 list
- 41
A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole · 1980 · 13 lists
- 42
Affliction
Russell Banks · 1989 · 2 lists
- 43
This Boy's Life
Tobias Wolff · 1989 · 1 list
- 44
Winter's Tale
Mark Helprin · 1983 · 4 lists
- 45
The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow · 1953 · 11 lists
- 46
Women
Charles Bukowski · 1978 · 1 list
- 47
Going Native
Stephen Wright · 1994 · 2 lists
- 48
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad · 1899 · 29 lists
- 49
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
John Le Carré · 1963 · 13 lists
- 50
The Crack-Up
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1945 · 1 list
- 51
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
George Saunders · 1996 · 1 list
- 52
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy · 1869 · 29 lists
- 53
The Shining
Stephen King · 1977 · 8 lists
- 57
Labyrinths
Jorge Luis Borges · 2005 · 5 lists
- 58
The Right Stuff
Tom Wolfe · 1979 · 5 lists
- 59
The Sportswriter
Richard Ford · 1985 · 2 lists
- 60
American Tabloid
James Ellroy · 1995 · 1 list
- 61
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Alex Haley · 1968 · 9 lists
- 62
What It Takes
Richard Ben Cramer · 1992 · 1 list
- 63
The Continental Op
Dashiell Hammett · 1974 · 1 list
- 64
The Power and the Glory
Graham Greene · 1940 · 6 lists
- 65
So Long, See You Tomorrow
William Maxwell · 1980 · 3 lists
- 66
Native Son
Richard Wright · 1940 · 18 lists
- 67
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
James Agee · 1941 · 5 lists
- 68
Angle of Repose
Wallace Stegner · 1971 · 5 lists
- 69
The Great Bridge
David McCullough · 1972 · 1 list
- 70
The Dharma Bums
Jack Kerouac · 1958 · 2 lists
- 71
Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry · 1985 · 7 lists
- 72
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov · 1955 · 38 lists
- 73
Underworld
Don DeLillo · 1997 · 9 lists
- 74
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain · 1885 · 25 lists
- 75
The Road
Cormac McCarthy · 2006 · 14 lists
- 76
Let the Great World Spin
Colum McCann · 2009 · 5 lists
- 78
The Orphan Master's Son
Adam Johnson · 2012 · 3 lists
- 79
Savages
Don Winslow · 2010 · 1 list
- 80
The Stories of John Cheever
John Cheever · 1978 · 9 lists