Plot: Troubled Jewish man tries to make sense of his life.

Why it's on the list: The first novel about masturbation, or rather, about unrestrained sexual energy. Portnoy comes in the wrapper of a Mounds bar, an old sock, a cored apple, the liver about to be served as family dinner, beneath a nylon windbreaker while riding a bus. Later he uses sex to satisfy both rage and curiosity ("What I'm saying, Doctor, is that I don't seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their backgrounds -- as though through fucking I will discover America."). One of his girlfriends lubricates upon hearing a poem by William Butler Yeats, resulting in the memorable line, "Eat my educated cunt."

Excerpt: Then came adolescence -- half my waking life spent locked behind the bathroom door, firing my wad down the toilet bowl, or into the soiled clothes in the laundry hamper, or splat, up against the medicine-chest mirror, before which I stood in my dropped drawers so I could see how it looked coming out. Or else I was doubled over my flying fist, eyes pressed closed but mouth wide open, to take the sticky sauce of buttermilk and Clorox on my own tongue and teeth -- though not infrequently, in my blindness and ecstasy, I got it all in the pompadour, like a blast of Wildroot Cream Oil.