E. L. Doctorow‘s work is published in thrity languages. His novels include Welcome to Hard Times, Ragtime, Loon Lake, Lives of the Poets, Billy Bathgate, and The Waterworks. Among his honors are the National Book Award, The National Book Critics Circle Award (twice), the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howell medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. He lives and works in New York.

His latest book “City of God” begins in mystery: in the autumn of 1999 the large brass cross behind the altar of St. Timothy’s Episcopal church in lower Manhattan disappears…. and even more mysteriously reappears on the roof of the Synagogue for Evolutionary Judaism. Filled with the sights and sounds of New York, and with a cast of vividly drawn characters that includes scientists, war veterans, prelates, holocaust survirors, cabinet members, theologians, New York Times reporters, film actors, and crooners, this dazzlingly inventive, mordantly funny masterwork emerges as the American novel readers have been thirsting for, a defining document of our times, a narrative of the 20th Century written for the 21st.

“E.L. Doctorow is an astonishing novelist–astonishing not only in the virtuosity with which he deploys his mimetic skills, but also in the fact that it is impossible to predict even roughly the shape, scope and tone of one of his novels from its predecessors.”–Robert Tower, The New York Times Book Review

Listen to an MP3 excerpt from “City of God,” (Random House) read by John Rubenstein.

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
A novel whose action is oblique, slantwise, Southern existential. What has remained with me is its almost French quietness.

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
As an aspiring young writer I felt liberated by this rousing, freewheeling Jewish picaresque assault on narrative correctness. I imagine it set many of my generation free.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
A monumental, hammered-out novel of perfected technical mistakes. I cannot conceive of post-war American literature without it.