The only brick-and-mortar bookstore I go to anymore is the Strand in Manhattan. The shop’s website is unreliable as hell when it comes to letting you know what volumes are in stock in the store, but it has an amazing amount of really good books, and you can save some bucks if you’re a smart shopper. The Strand asks different writers to a curate a shelf (a table, actually) of their favorite works. The following is a list of George Saunders’ 56 selections. What’s the most surprising choice? Bright Lights, Big City, maybe?

• The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose by Alice Munro

• Selected Poems by Anna Akhmatova

• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

• Sakhalin Island (Alma Classics) by Anton Chekhov

• Airships by Barry Hannah

• Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus

• I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal

• Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

• Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writing of Daniil Kharms by Daniil Kharms

• Twilight of the Superheroes: Stories by Deborah Eisenberg

• The Dead Father by Donald Barthelme

• Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow

• In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway

• Johnny Tremain by Esther Hoskins Forbes

• Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor

• Stories in the Worst Way by Gary Lutz

• A Collection of Essays by George Orwell

• Edie: American Girl by Jean Stein

• The Groucho Letters: Letters from and to Groucho Marx by Groucho Marx

• The Bridegroom by Ha Jin

• Loving/Living/Party Going by Henry Green

• Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya

• 1920 Diary by Isaac Babel

• The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel by Isaac Babel

• A Sportsman’s Notebook by Ivan Turgenev

• Visions of Gerard by Jack Kerouac

• Dubliners by James Joyce 

• Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney

• Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects by Kerry Brougher

• Dos Passos: U.S.A., 42nd Parallel, 1919, Big Money by John Dos Passos

• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

• Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

• Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey

• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

• Hadji Murat (Vintage Classics) by Leo Tolstoy

• Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy

• Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

• One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko by Mike Royko

• A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov

• Dead Souls (Wordsworth Classics) by Nikolai Gogol

• Collected Tales by Nikolai Gogol

• Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century by Patrik Ourednik 

• Cathedral by Raymond Carver

• Collected Stories of Richard Yates by Richard Yates 

• All the King’s Men (Restored Edition) by Robert Penn Warren

• Children of Light by Robert Stone

• Living End by Stanley Elkin

• The Coast of Chicago by Stuart Dybek

• The Bushwhacked Piano by Thomas McGuane

• The Barracks Thief by Tobias Wolff

• The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

• I Will Bear Witness, 1942-1945: A Diary of the Nazi Years by Victor Klemperer 

• Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin

• Ironweed by William Kennedy

• The Designated Mourner by Wallace Shawn