If word music is something you listen for, then try—or read again—any book on this short list of mostly American novels. These are masterworks that come off the page like poetry, that by compression and musical intensity act in the ear and in the mind as long poems:
- My Ántonia (1918), Willa Cather
- Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Virginia Woolf
- The Great Gatsby (1925), F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Trout Fishing in America (1967), Richard Brautigan
- The Bluest Eye (1970), Toni Morrison
- The Hours (1998), Michael Cunningham
