Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West (1985) is Cormac McCarthy’s fifth novel.

Jonathan Franzen is the author of The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), Phillip Roth is the author of The Ghostwriter (1979), Raymond Chandler is the author of The High Window (1942), and Raymond Carver is the author of Cathedral (1983).

Blood Meridian (1985) is set in the Mexican-American borderlands in the late 1840s and early 1850s and concerns the adventures of a gang of scalp hunters. It is characterized as a Modern or Revisionist Western.

The Pale King was posthumously published in 2011 by David Foster Wallace’s wife, Karen Green, and editor, Michael Pietsch, and was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Billy Budd (1924) is by Herman Melville, The 120 Days of Sodom (1904) is by the Marquis de Sade, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) is by Charles Dickens, Dubrovsky (1841) is by Alexander Pushkin. All of these novels were also published posthumously.

Infinite Jest (1996) is David Foster Wallace’s second of three novels. It concerns various characters at a junior tennis academy and drug addicts in a nearby substance-abuse recovery center and is written in a fragmentary, experimental form. The novel contains at least 200 pages of end notes.

Jonathan Franzen is the author of Strong Motion (1992), Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of Everything is Illuminated (2002), Phillip Roth is the author of Goodbye Columbus (1959), and John Updike is the author of Toward the End of Time (1997).

Notably, in his 1997 review of Toward the End of Time Foster Wallace classified Updike and Roth as two of America's "great male narcissists."

Infinite Jest (1996) was begun in the late 1980s and published in 1996.

The Corrections was published in 2001 and received the National Book Award the same year.

Philip Roth published American Pastoral in 1997, The Human Stain in 2000, Everyman in 2006, and Sabbath’s Theater in 1995. Bullet Park is a 1969 work by the American writer John Cheever.

Portnoy’s Complaint was published in 1969, making it Roth’s fourth published novel.

Jonathan Franzen published Freedom in 2010. The Broom of the System (1987) is by David Foster Wallace, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) is by Jonathan Safran Foer, The Bluest Eye (1970) is by Toni Morrison, and Invisible Man (1952) is by Ralph Ellison.

The Corrections (2001) is concerned with the travails of the elderly Lambert couple (Midwesterners), their three adult children, and their grandchildren. It is a realist work that in part examines contemporary American family dynamic and in part investigates the nation’s paranoia, economic woes, and social structures.