I don’t think I could pick just one! 

My favourite authors in no order (top two favourite books from each) are:

• Maritta Wolff (Whistle Stop and About Lyddy Thomas)
  
• Norman Collins (London Belongs to Me and Love in Our Time)
  
• Patrick Hamilton (Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky and Hangover Square)
  
• Willa Cather (My Antonia and O Pioneers!)
  
• F Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned and Tender is the Night)
  
• Kurt Vonnegut (God Bless You Mr Rosewater and Breakfast of Champions)
  
• Trollope (The Way We Live Now and the Palliser series)  
  
• Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent and East of Eden)
  
• Zola (L'Assommoir and Nana)
  
• Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment and The Idiot)
  

I also really like Peyton Place by Grace Metalious, An American Tragedy and Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, London Fields by Martin Amis, The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks, Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis, The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, The Millstone by Margaret Drabble, The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe, The Tenants of Moonbloom by Edward Lewis Wallant, The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, A Time to be Born by Dawn Powell, Apartment in Athens by Glenway Wescott, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, The Mysteries of Paris by Eugene Sue, Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann, Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr, and everything by Nancy Mitford and Dominick Dunne. 

If I had to pick a short story, maybe A Perfect Day for Bananafish by  J. D. Salinger?

I have a tattoo of Behemoth from The Master and Margarita!