Famous for the wrong book

There is a difference between the best known of the work of an author, and his best

Why is it that the book is the author of the best known is rarely the best? If history is the ultimate judge of literary excellence, why a title like Corelli's Mandolin Louis de Bernieres Captain "reached the top, eclipsing his previous novels and better living Lord and the Lord of coke? There are, hopefully, snobbery easy to insist that the most popular can not be better. (After all, who doubt that the peak of Middlemarch by George Eliot? ... Would you? Well, there is a space for you in the comments below.)

If someone reads the most famous book of Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, and do not like, I want to shout at them, "but anything! Cat's Cradle is better! This is the only want to read! "It's not just me, I'm sure. Geoff Dyer believes that it is not John Cheever magazines, stories, representing his" greatest achievement, his main claim to the survival of literature " . Gabriel said he is Josipovic Process Kafka "Metamorphosis" - not one of his novels or stories - that "the way [his] most sustained meditation on the life and death, good and evil, and role of art, "but his aphorisms.

So here I will list some examples of a writer is famous for the wrong book, and my suggestions to make your greatest achievement really is. Then you can make your own suggestions (someone please tell me that I read Peter Carey evil or Emily Bronte), or let me know how I'm wrong.

Joseph Heller

Catch-22 is too long, complicated and requires 100 pages to go. Heller's second novel, something happened, it took longer to write and justify the time. Its first line ("I have the willies when I see closed doors"), is a work of art highly controlled and thorough, based on the horror of everyday life. The first time I read it I was overwhelmed. The second time I found very funny. The third time - closer to the age of the narrator Bob Slocum horribly honest - it was terrible. Is the book that keeps on giving.

Kazuo Ishiguro

difficult to say exactly this book is most famous today. Do inexplicably never let Me Go emerging, probably his worst novel? Or trust which is the day, a beautiful book to be sure, but really just a refinement of his first two novels? The great, no doubt, is inconsolable, his bold and brilliant epic of anxiety of a man, through the expectations of the family, the logic of dreams, and to grow and age. It has always been a controversial novel, undoubtedly, a writer recently described as "unreadable," while another said it was "one of the few English novels read the decade of 1990." However, when the inconsolable appeared on the final examination (as it then was) on the publication in 1995, Tony Parsons requested copies of the same to be burned. What more recommendation do you need?

Evelyn Waugh

• In the preface to Brideshead Revisited, written 15 years after its first publication, the book Waugh comments written in the "deprivation" of the war, and that "consequently, the book is imbued with a kind of gluttony, food and wine, the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language currently with a full stomach, I think in bad taste. "The strength Waugh Tan is a comedian, the darker the better, and then a handful of dust should be your best work. This is the novel that, in a scene no one will forget key (" Oh, God thank you "), I learned that Isaac Babel meant when he said that no iron can pierce the heart with the force of a point from the right place.

Jeanette Winterson

Sky
know Jeanette Winterson has had its ups and downs of books - gut symmetries or PowerBook, someone? No, I think - but it's always an interesting writer at a time that the willingness to experiment is rarely upheld. It is sad after his most famous work of the house from its beginnings as unambitious, oranges are not the only fruit. Despite the fairy tale inserts and applying revisionist Winterson, a "spiral narrative" for him, is an autobiographical novel simple and warm. For me his best work - before the "difficult" but rewarding, even mid-period novels - The determination of sex is the icing. Written sickening young age of 29 years, it's funny, lyrical, intelligent and an amazing woman with a huge dog and memorable, not coincidentally, is very short.

John Wyndham

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