The Bigger Read List by English PEN
The English PEN staff compiled a list of the best works not written in the English language. This list combines their list with the suggestions made by Fred Armentrout, President of Hong Kong (English-Speaking) PEN.
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Aesop's Fables by Aesop
A collection of nearly sixty fables from Aesop includes such familiar ones as "The Grasshopper and the Ants," "The North Wind and the Sun," "Androcles and the Lion," "The Troublesome Dog," and "The...
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The Wanderer by Henri Alain-Fournier
Le Grand Meaulnes is the only novel by French author Alain-Fournier. Fifteen-year-old François Seurel narrates the story of his relationship with seventeen-year-old Augustin Meaulnes as Meaulnes se...
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The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
The House of the Spirits (La casa de los espíritus, 1982) is the debut novel by Isabel Allende. Initially, the novel was rejected by several Spanish-language publishers, but became an instant best ...
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Fairy Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Anderson
a Danish author and poet noted for his children's stories. These include "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", "The Snow Queen", "The Little Mermaid", "Thumbelina", "The Little Match Girl", and the "The Ugl...
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Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis
Dom Casmurro, written by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, was first published in Brazil in 1899. Like The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas and Quincas Borba, both by Machado de Assis, it is a master...
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Confessions by Augustine
Confessions is the name of an autobiographical work, consisting of 13 books, by St. Augustine of Hippo, written between AD 397 and AD 398. Modern English translations of it are sometimes published ...
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Cousin Bette by Honoré de Balzac
La Cousine Bette (English: Cousin Betty or Cousin Bette) is an 1846 novel by French author Honoré de Balzac. Set in mid-19th century Paris, it tells the story of an unmarried middle-aged woman who ...
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The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
The Second Sex (French: Le Deuxième Sexe, June 1949) is one of the best-known works of the French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir. It is a work on the treatment of women throughout history and of...
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The Bible by Christian Church
The Authorized King James Version is an English translation of the Christian Bible begun in 1604 and completed in 1611 by the Church of England. Printed by the King's Printer, Robert Barker, the fi...
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Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
Labyrinths (1962) is an English-language collection of short stories and essays by Jorge Luis Borges.
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The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Master and Margarita (Russian: Ма́стер и Маргари́та) is a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, woven around the premise of a visit by the Devil to the fervently atheistic Soviet Union. Many critics consi...
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If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
Calvino's anti-novel is about the efforts of his two characters — a man called only The Reader, and the Other Reader, a woman named Ludmilla — to read ten very different novels. They are never able...
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The Stranger by Albert Camus
Since it was first published in English, in 1946, Albert Camus's extraordinary first novel, The Stranger (L'Etranger), has had a profound impact on millions of American readers. Through this story ...
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The Plague by Albert Camus
A haunting tale of human resilience in the face of unrelieved horror, Camus' novel about a bubonic plague ravaging the people of a North African coastal town is a classic of twentieth-century liter...
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Journey to the End of The Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Journey to the End of Night is the first novel of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. This semi-autobiographical work describes antihero Ferdinand Bardamu. His surname, Bardamu, is derived from the French word...
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Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Alonso Quixano, a retired country gentleman in his fifties, lives in an unnamed section of La Mancha with his niece and a housekeeper. He has become obsessed with books of chivalry, and believes th...
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The Lady with the Dog by Anton Chekhov
"The Lady with the Dog" (Russian: Дама с собачкой, Dama s sobachkoy)[1] is a short story by Anton Chekhov first published in 1899. It tells the story of an adulterous affair between a Russian banke...
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The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian short-story writer, playwright and physician, considered to be one of the greatest short-story writers in the history of world literature. His career as a dram...
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Collected Fiction by Jorge Luis Borges
From his 1935 debut with The Universal History of Iniquity, through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, these enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display Borges'...
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The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
"My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky." Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering...
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The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Belonging in the immortal company of the great works of literature, Dante Alighieri's poetic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, is a moving human drama, an unforgettable visionary journey through the ...
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Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It is a murder story, told from a murder;s point of view, that implicates even the most innocent reader in its enormities. It is a cat-and-mouse game between a tormented young killer and a cheerful...
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The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Idiot is a novel written by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky and first published in 1868. It was first published serially in Russian in Russky Vestnik, St. Petersburg, 1868-1869. The Idiot...
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The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Set against the tumultuous years of the post-Napoleonic era, The Count of Monet Cristo recounts the swashbuckling adventures of Edmond Dantes, a dashing young sailor falsely accused of treason. The...
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The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
The Three Musketeers is a novel by Alexandre Dumas, père. It recounts the adventures of a young man named d'Artagnan after he leaves home to become a guard of the musketeers. D'Artagnan is not one ...
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The Maias: Episodes from Romantic Life by Eça de Queirós
Carlos, heir to a great fortune, becomes a doctor and drifts along spending time at the theater, reading, and having affairs, until he falls deeply in love but has to hide a terrible secret.
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The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
It is the year 1327. Franciscans in an Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, but Brother William of Baskerville’s investigation is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths. Translated by Will...
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Bouvard et Pécuchet by Gustave Flaubert
Bouvard et Pécuchet is an unfinished satirical work by Gustave Flaubert, published in 1881 after his death in 1880. Although conceived in 1863 as Les Deux Cloportes ("The Two Woodlice"), and par...
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Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
For daring to peer into the heart of an adulteress and enumerate its contents with profound dispassion, the author of Madame Bovary was tried for "offenses against morality and religion." What shoc...
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The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
This book introduces Freud's theory of the unconscious with respect to dream interpretation. Dreams, in Freud's view, were all forms of "wish-fulfillment" — attempts by the unconscious to resolve a...
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The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
The Diary of a Young Girl is a book based on the writings from a diary written by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The...
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Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Love in the Time of Cholera is a novel by Nobel Prize winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez that was first published in Spanish in 1985, with an English translation released in 1988 by Al...
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One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world, and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning car...
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The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
Acclaimed as the greatest German novel written since the end of World War II, The Tin Drum is the autobiography of thirty-year-old Oskar Matzerath, who has lived through the long Nazi nightmare and...
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Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust is a tragic play, although more appropriately it should be defined a tragicomedy, despite the very title of the work. It was published in two parts: Faust. Der Tr...
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Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, Russian writer, was first published in 1842, and is one of the most prominent works of 19th-century Russian literature. Gogol himself saw it as an "epic poem in prose",...
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Household Tales by Brothers Grimm
Children's and Household Tales (German: Kinder- und Hausmärchen) is a collection of German origin fairy tales first published in 1812 by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the Brothers Grimm. The collection ...
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Hunger by Knut Hamsun
Hunger is a novel by the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun and was published in its final form in 1890. Parts of it had been published anonymously in the Danish magazine Ny Jord in 1888. The novel is ha...
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Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer
Seven Years in Tibet is an autobiographical travel book written by Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer based on his real life experiences in Tibet between 1944 and 1951 during the Second World War...
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The Odyssey by Homer
The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work traditionally ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the m...
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Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
Les Misérables is a novel by French author Victor Hugo and is widely considered one of the greatest novels of the 19th century. It follows the lives and interactions of several French characters ov...
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The Trial by Franz Kafka
Written in 1914, The Trial is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century: the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and mu...
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Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
Zorba the Greek is a novel written by the Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis, first published in 1946. It is the tale of a young Greek intellectual who ventures to escape his bookish life with the aid ...
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Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward FitzGerald
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (Persian: رباعیات عمر خیام) is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his translation of a selection of poems, originally written in Persian and numbering about a th...
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The Quran by Various Authors
The Qur’an is the central religious text of Islam, also sometimes transliterated as Quran, Qur’ān, Koran, Alcoran or Al-Qur’ān. Muslims believe the Qur’an to be the book of divine guidance and dire...
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), by Milan Kundera, is a philosophic novel about a man and his two women and their lives in the Prague Spring of the Czechoslovak Communist period in 1968. ...
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Dangerous Liaison by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
The complex moral ambiguities of seduction and revenge make Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) one of the most scandalous and controversial novels in European literature. Its prime movers, the Vicomte...
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The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
The Leopard is a novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa that chronicles the changes in Sicilian life and society during the Risorgimento. Published posthumously in 1958, after two rejections by the ...
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Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu
The Tao Te Ching or Dao De Jing, originally known as Laozi, a record-keeper at the Zhou Dynasty court, by whose name the text is known in China. The text's true authorship and date of composition o...
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Independent People by Halldor Laxness
Independent People is an epic novel by Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness, published in 1946. It deals with the struggle of poor Icelandic farmers in the early 20th century, only freed from debt bondag...
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Complete Poems of Giacomo Leopardi by Giacomo Leopardi
Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi (June 29, 1798 – June 14, 1837) was an Italian poet, essayist, philosopher, and philologist.
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Selected Stories of Lu Hsun by Xun Lu
"Some of these stories, I am sure, will be read as long as the Chinese language exists."—Ha Jin
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Mahabharata by Vyasa
The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India, the other being the Rāmāyaṇa. The epic is part of the Hindu itihāsa (literally "history"), and forms an important part of Hi...
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Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
Buddenbrooks was Thomas Mann's first novel, published in 1901 when he was twenty-six years old. It portrays the downfall (already announced in the subtitle, Decline of a family) of a wealthy mer...
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The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain is a novel by Thomas Mann, first published in November 1924. It is widely considered to be one of the most influential works of 20th century German literature.
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Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
The novella Death in Venice was written by the German author Thomas Mann, and was first published in 1912 as Der Tod in Venedig. It was first published in English in 1925 as Death in Venice and Oth...
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Quotations from Chairman Mao by Mao
Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (simplified Chinese: 毛主席语录; pinyin: Máo zhǔxí yǔlù), better known in the West as The Little Red Book, was published by the Government of the People's Republic of...
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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (ねじまき鳥クロニクル, Nejimaki-dori Kuronikuru?) is a novel by Haruki Murakami. The first published translation was by Alfred Birnbaum. The American translation and its British ad...
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Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels
Manifesto of the Communist Party (German: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei), often referred to as The Communist Manifesto, was published on February 21, 1848, and is one of the world's most infl...
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Forbidden Colours by Yukio Mishima
Irresistible to women, the beautiful, young Yuichi embarks on a loveless marriage while he enters a homosexual underworld during postwar Japan.
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The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musil
'between the life we live and the life we feel...there is the invisible border, like a narrow gate' Set in a boarding school in a remote area of the Habsburg Empire at the turn of the last century,...
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My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
My Name Is Red (Benim Adım Kırmızı) is a Turkish novel by Nobel laureate author Orhan Pamuk. The English translation won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2003,. The French version w...
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Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Doctor Zhivago is a 20th century novel by Boris Pasternak, first published in 1957. The novel is named after its protagonist, Yuri Zhivago, a medical doctor and poet. It tells the story of a man to...
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Life, a User's Manual by Georges Perec
Over twenty years ago, Godine published the first English translation of Georges Perec's masterpiece, Life A User's Manual, hailed by the Times Literary Supplement, Boston Globe, and others as "one...
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In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Swann's Way, the first part of A la recherche de temps perdu, Marcel Proust's seven-part cycle, was published in 1913. In it, Proust introduces the themes that run through the entire work. The narr...
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Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau
Impish, foul-mouthed Zazie arrives in Paris from the country to stay with Gabriel, her female-impersonator uncle. All she really wants to do is ride the metro, but finding it shut because of a stri...
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Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan
Endearing, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old Cécile is the very essence of untroubled amorality. Freed from the stifling constraints of boarding school, she joins her father—a handsome, still-young...
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The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Since 1943, the wise little boy from Asteroid B-612 has led children and their adults to deeper understandings of love, friendship, and responsibility. The Little Prince is a cherished story, read ...
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Words by Jean Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre was brought up at his grandfather's home. This book recalls his illusion-ridden childhood, lived within the confines of French provincialism in the years before World War I, and co...
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Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
Austerlitz, the internationally acclaimed masterpiece by "one of the most gripping writers imaginable" (The New York Review of Books), is the story of a man?s search for the answer to his life?s ce...
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The Emigrants by Winfried Georg Sebald
Four narratives weave history and fiction together as refugees from the Holocaust remember their experiences.
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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The only English translation authorized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary ...
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The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal
Balzac considered it the most important French novel of his time. André Gide later deemed it the greatest of all French novels, and Henry James judged it to be a masterpiece. Now, in a major litera...
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The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black), subtitled Chronique du XIXe siécle ("Chronicle of the 19th century"), is an historical psychological novel in two volumes by Stendhal, published in 1830...
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The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki
Tanizaki's masterpiece is the story of four sisters, and the declining fortunes of a traditional Japanese family. It is a loving and nostalgic recreation of the sumptuous, intricate upper-class lif...
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Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endu...
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War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Epic in scale, War and Peace delineates in graphic detail events leading up to Napoleon's invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of fi...
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The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa
The War of the End of the World is one of the great modern historical novels. Inspired by a real episode in Brazilian history, Mario Vargas Llosa tells the story of an apocalyptic movement, led by ...
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The Aeneid by Virgil
The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem written by Virgil in the late 1st century BC (29–19 BC) that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who traveled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the...
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Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Invisible Cities (Italian: Le città invisibili) is a novel by Italian writer Italo Calvino. It was published in Italy in 1972 by Giulio Einaudi Editore.
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Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
In the early summer of the year 1348, as a terrible plague ravages the city, ten charming young Florentines take refuge in country villas to tell each other stories — a hundred stories of love, adv...
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The Lusiad by Luís Vaz Camões
Os Lusíadas (Portuguese pronunciation: [uʒ luˈzi.ɐðɐʃ]), usually translated as The Lusiads, is a Portuguese epic poem by Luís Vaz de Camões (sometimes anglicized as Camoens). Written in Homeric fas...
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The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus is a philosophical essay by Albert Camus. It comprises about 120 pages and was published originally in 1942 in French as Le Mythe de Sisyphe; the English translation by Justin ...
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Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
De la démocratie en Amérique (published in two volumes, the first in 1835 and the second in 1840) is a classic French text by Alexis de Tocqueville on the United States in the 1830s and its strengt...
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Essays by Michel de Montaigne
Essays is the title given to a collection of 107 essays written by Michel de Montaigne that was first published in 1580. Montaigne essentially invented the literary form of essay, a short subjectiv...
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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, two boys are sent to the country for reeducation, where their lives take an unexpected turn when they meet the beautiful daughter of a local tailor and stumb...
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The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hašek
The Good Soldier Švejk is the abbreviated title of an unfinished satirical novel by Jaroslav Hašek. It was illustrated by Josef Lada and George Grosz after Hašek's death. The original Czech title o...
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The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad
Two weeks after September 11th, award-winning journalist Åsne Seierstad went to Afghanistan to report on the conflict there. In the following spring she returned to live with an Afghan family for s...
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The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago is a book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn based on the Soviet forced labor and concentration camp system. The three-volume book is a massive narrative relying on eyewitness testimon...
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Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
Steppenwolf (orig. German Der Steppenwolf) is the tenth novel by German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse. Originally published in Germany in 1927, it was first translated into English in 1929. Combining ...
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Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Classic novel that has inspired generations of seekers. Blending Eastern mysticism and psychoanalysis, Hesse presents a strikingly original view of man and culture and the arduous process of self-d...
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The Art of War by Sun Zi
Offering ancient wisdom on how to use skill, cunning, tactics and discipline to outwit your opponent, this 2000 year old military manual is still worshipped by soldiers on the battlefield and manag...
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The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
The Tale of Genji is a classic work of Japanese literature attributed to the Japanese noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu in the early eleventh century, around the peak of the Heian Period. It is sometimes...
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Some Prefer Nettles by Junichiro Tanizaki
The conflict between traditional and modern Japanese culture is at the heart of this novel. Kaname is a smug, modern man living in a modern marriage. He gamely allows his wife to become the lover o...
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The Half Brother: A Novel by Lars Saabye Christensen
At the end of World War II, twenty-year-old Vera is brutally raped by an unknown assailant. From that rape is born a boy named Fred, a misfit who later becomes a talented boxer. Vera’s young son, B...
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Les Enfants Terribles by Jean Cocteau
A tragedy about the power of the imagination and the strange, claustrophobic world of childhood. At home, Paul shares a private world with his sister Elisabeth, a world from which parents are tacit...
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The Lover by Marguerite Duras
An international best-seller with more than one million copies in print and a winner of France's Prix Goncourt, The Lover has been acclaimed by critics all over the world since its first publicatio...
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The Royal Physician's Visit: A Novel by Per Olov Enquist
An international sensation, The Royal Physician's Visit magnificently recasts the dramatic era of Danish history when Johann Friedrich Struensee -- court physician to mad young King Christian -- st...
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The Years with Laura Diaz by Carlos Fuentes
Like Fuentes's masterpiece THE DEATH OF ARTEMIO CRUZ, the action in this new novel begins in the state of Veracruz and moves to Mexico City. Now the principal figure Fuentes's first female protagon...
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Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy by Jostein Gaarder
One day Sophie comes home from school to find two questions in her mail: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" Before she knows it she is enrolled in a correspondence course with a m...
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Count Julian by Juan Goytisolo
Exiled in Tangiers, cut off from home and country, the narrator of Count Julian rants against the homeland he was forced to leave: Spain. The second novel in Juan Goytisolos trilogy (including Mark...
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Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
A book judged so dangerous in the Soviet Union that not only the manuscript but the ribbons on which it had been typed were confiscated by the state, Life and Fate is an epic tale of World War II a...
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Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
The Growth of the Soil (Norwegian Markens Grøde) is the novel by Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun which won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. - Wikipedia
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The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas by Thor Heyerdahl
This is the story of how Thor Heyderdahl and five other men crossed the Pacific Ocean on a balsa-wood raft in an extraordinary bid to prove Heyderdahl's theory that the Polynesians undertook the sa...
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Smilla's Sense of Snow: A Novel by Peter Høeg
Smilla's Sense of Snow presents one of the toughest heroines in modern fiction. Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen is part Eskimo but she lives in Copenhagen and keeps to herself. When her six-year old nei...
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The Three-Arched Bridge by Ismail Kadare
The Three Arched Bridge (Ura Me Tri Harqe) is a 1978 novel by Ismail Kadare. The story concerns a very old Albanian legend written in verses, namely "Legjenda e Rozafes" The book differs heavily fr...
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Memed, My Hawk by Yashar Kemal
In the Taurus highlands of Anatolia in the 1930s life is harsh and the five small villages on Dikenli, the Plateau of Thistles, are ruled by the owner of the land, Abdi Agha. Ince Memed, the only s...
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Fateless by Imre Kertész
Relates the daily life of prisoners at a Nazi concentration camp through the eyes of a fifteen-year-old boy who is deported to the camp with his father.
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A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by Danilo Kiš
"Kis is one of the handful of incontestably major writers of the secondhalf of the century . . . Danilo Kis preserves the honor of literature."-Partisan Review
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I Will Bear Witness by Victor Klemperer
The author's firsthand account of life in Nazi Germany chronicles the escalation of the war, including the bombing of Dresden and his escape from deportation to a Jewish concentration camp.
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Édes Anna by Dezső Kosztolányi
Anna Edes is a dark and deeply moving naturalistic novel, a classic work of twentieth-century Hungarian literature. A skillful portrayal of the cruelty and emptiness of bourgeois life, it was first...
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Identity: A Novel by Milan Kundera
There are situations in which we fail for a moment to recognize the person we are with, in which the identity of the other is erased while we simultaneously doubt our own. This also happens with co...
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Le Roman de la Rose by Guillaume (de Lorris)
The Roman de la Rose (French: [ʁɔmɑ̃ də la ʁoz]; "Romance of the Rose"), is a medieval French poem styled as an allegorical dream vision. It is a notable instance of courtly literature. The work's ...
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Embers by Sandor Marai
Originally published in 1942 and now rediscovered to international acclaim, this taut and exquisitely structured novel by the Hungarian master Sandor Marai conjures the melancholy glamour of a deca...
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Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
This stunning and elegiac novel by the author of the internationally acclaimed Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has sold over 4 million copies in Japan and is now available to American audiences for the firs...
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The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov
The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native Russian and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the work...
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The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche
Perhaps one of the most controversial and inflammatory philosophers in western civilization, Friedrich Nietzsche summarized his extraordinary ideas in "The Twilight of the Idols." This work is a li...
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Somersault by Kenzaburō Ōe
Ten years after recanting their teachings and abandoning their zealous and violent congregation, two men known only as the Patron and Guide of Humankind seek to overcome a radical faction while lea...
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The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
The Black Book is Orhan Pamuk's tour de force, a stunning tapestry of Middle Eastern and Islamic culture which confirmed his reputation as a writer of international stature. Richly atmospheric and ...
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The Return and Other Stories by Andrey Platonov
"Reading Platonov, one gets a sense of the relentless, implacable absurdity built into the language and with each...utterance, that absurdity deepens" - Joseph Brodsky People are on the move in all...
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Soul and Other Stories by Andrey Platonov
"This volume gathers eight works that show Platonov at his tenderest, warmest, and subtlest. Among them are "The Return," about an officer's difficult homecoming at the end of World War II; "The Ri...
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The Dog Star by Agneta Pleijel
A beautifully crafted story, notable for its sensitive handling of the subject of incest.
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Jealousy: A Novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet
La Jalousie is a 1957 novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet. The title of its English editions is Jealousy, but this fails to capture the ambiguity of the French title: "la jalousie" can be translated as "j...
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The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth
The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth's classic saga of the privileged von Trotta family, encompasses the entire social fabric of the Austro-Hungarian Empire just before World War I. The author's greates...
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The Stone Raft by José Saramago
When the Iberian Peninsula breaks free of Europe and begins to drift across the North Atlantic, five people are drawn together on the newly formed island-first by surreal events and then by love. “...
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Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer
One of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer (1788-1860) believed that human action is determined not by reason but by 'will' - the blind and irrational desire for physi...
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The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald
Shortlisted for the 1998 Los Angeles Times Book Award in Fiction: "Stunning and strange . . . Sebald has done what every writer dreams of doing. . . . The book is like a dream you want to last fore...
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The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape ...
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Another Country by Karel Schoeman
Versluis, a lonely, but well-to-do Dutchman, goes to Bloemfontein in hopes of alleviating his tuberculosis and encounters fellow sufferers trying to come to terms with the disease and their own mor...
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Perfume by Patrick Suskind
Survivor, genius, perfumer, killer: this is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. He is abandoned on the filthy streets as a child, but grows up to discover he has an extraordinary gift: a sense of smell more ...
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Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb
An NYRB Classics Original The trouble begins in Venice, the first stop on Erzsi and Mihály’s honeymoon tour of Italy. Here Erzsi discovers that her new husband prefers wandering back alleys on his ...
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La Saga/ Fuga de J. B./ The Saga/ Escape of J.B. by Gonzalo Torrente Ballester
Recipient of the 1972 Premio de la Crítica and Ciudad de Barcelona, La saga/fuga de J. B. is the first volume of the "Fantastic Trilogy." It tells the story of Castroforte del Baralla, an imaginary...
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First Love by Ivan Turgenev
Turgenev is retelling an incident from his own life, his infatuation with a young neighbor in the country, Catherine Shakovskoy (the Zinaida of the novella), an infatuation that lasted until his di...
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Soul Mountain by Xingjian Gao
A Chinese man goes on a journey of self discovery in the distant regions of contemplating the disparaging effects of the Cultural Revolution.
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The Human Comedy by Honoré de Balzac
La Comédie humaine (French pronunciation: [la kɔmedi ymɛn], The Human Comedy) is the title of Honoré de Balzac's (1799–1850) multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting Fre...
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Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en
Journey to the West is a Chinese novel published in the 16th century during the Ming Dynasty and attributed to Wu Cheng'en. It is one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. In En...
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Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year by Carlo Levi
It was to Lucania, a desolate land in southern Italy, that Carlo Levi—a doctor, painter, philosopher, and man of letters—was confined as a political prisoner because of his opposition to Italy’s Fa...
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If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi
Recounts the adventures of a band of Jews--former Soviet soldiers and concentration camp survivors--who battle the retreating German army in the closing days of World War II
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Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino
Chosen as one of the New York Times’s ten best books in the year of its original publication, this collection immediately won a cherished place among lovers of the tale and vaulted Calvino into the...
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Letters from an American Farmer by J. Crevecoeur
First published in England in 1782, Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer was one of the first works to describe the character of the average American at the close of the Revolutionary War. ...
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August 1914 by Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenit︠s︡yn
Expanded by Solzhenitsyn to almost twice the length of the original edition, this novel reconstructs the assassination of tsarist Prime Minister Pyotr Stolupin and the outbreak of the First World War.
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The Burn: A Novel in Three Books : (late Sixties--early Seventies) by Vassily Aksyonov
Recounts the experiences of Aristarkh Apollinarievich Kunitser, a young scientist living in Moscow during the sixties, who faces the prospect of exile
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Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture by Johan Huizinga
In Homo Ludens, the classic evaluation of play that has become a “must-read” for those in game design, Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga defines play as the central activity in flourishing societies...
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The Kalevala by Elias Lönnrot
The Kalevala is the great Finnish epic, which like the Iliad and the Odyssey, grew out of a rich oral tradition with prehistoric roots. During the first millenium of our era, speakers of Uralic lan...
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The Garlic Ballads: A Novel by Yan Mo
This epic novel of beauty and brutality, set in a landscape at once strange and alluring, paints a portrait of a people whose fierce passions break the rigid confines of their ancient traditions. T...
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The Book of Songs by China
First published in 1937. The Book of Songs is a collection of ancient Chinese songs, dating from 800 to 600 B.C. Until this was published in 1937 it had not been translated into English since the m...
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The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain by Han Shan
This authoritative, bilingual edition represents the first time the entirety of Cold Mountain's poetry has been translated into English. These translations were originally published by Copper Canyo...
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The Sorrow Of War by Bao Ninh
Kien’s job is to search the Jungle of Screaming Souls for corpses. He knows the area well – this was where, in the dry season of 1969, his battalion was obliterated by American napalm and helicopte...
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Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata
Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata’s Thousand Cranes is a luminous story of desire, regret, and the almost sensual nostalgia that binds the living to the dead. While attending a traditional tea c...
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The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories by Yasunari Kawabata
One of the most influential figures in modern Japanese fiction, Yasunari Kawabata is treasured for the intensity of his perception and the compressed elegance of his style. This new collection incl...
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The Skeleton by Amrita Pritam
Pinjar (Punjabi: ਪਿੰਜਰ, Urdu: پنجر, Hindi: पिंजर, English/Translation: The Skeleton) is a 1950 Punjabi novel written by noted poet and novelist Amrita Pritam. It is the story of a Hindu girl, Puro...
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