n.1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov: "Lolita, light of my life...From his first writings in Russian, published as V. Sirin, and then from Berlin and Paris, Nabokov eclipsed his peers as the most important Russian writer in the world. In America and later in Switzerland he then became simply the most important writer in the world until his death in 1977. According to Borges there are two kinds of classics: the ones everybody knows about but no one reads, and "that book which a nation (or group of nations, or time itself) has taken the decision to read as if in its pages everything were predetermined, predestined, deep as the cosmos, and capable of endless interpretation." And so Lolita can continue to be misunderstood, so lively is its satire that it restarts its soliloquy upon the first turning of the page.

n.14. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Pale Fire, a poem in heroic couplets, of nine hundred ninety-nine lines... When it comes to books that truly scare, Pale Fire has no equal. The only
kind of metafiction that really matters; the sort that creates another level in the drama in which you yourself become involved and resolve the action in your own mind.

Carnevale writes in a short preface: "We can date back all of modern literature to Chekhov's novella My Life, which appeared in Russian in 1896. At about the same time the first translations of new novels by Dostoevsky were hitting American shores, and they too find a place on any compendium of the modern. Many of the novels that contributed in an critical historical capacity to its development are no longer very readable to our modern audience, through no fault of their own. Others, like Tristram Shandy or Moby Dick are far better now than they were at the time of publication, while sharing some of the deficiences of their 19th century brethren. In the end, we are concerned with modern novels [...]Without the  enduring brilliance of New Directions, the sustained efforts of Dalkey Archive, the phenomenal and immortal NYRB Classics series, and the efforts of so many others editors and writers, some of these novels would never have remained available in America...The novel exploded as a form in the twentieth century; in recent years it has retained only some small percentage of that power. Some novels changed the world simply by existing [...]

 

Well! What an interesting sample of novels which "have remained available in America" and a report about how one critic reacts to them. Mr. Carneval seems to enjoy superlative evaluations, of the kind "the most important (writer,book, novel) in the world" and his globalistic ambition is almost endearing.