ZEIT-Bibliothek der 100 Bücher by Die Zeit

  1. 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...

  2. 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...

  3. Apology by Plato

    The Apology is Plato's version of the speech given by Socrates as he defended himself in 399 BC against the charges of "corrupting the young, and by not believing in the gods in whom the city belie...

  4. 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...

  5. Germania by Cornelius Tacitus

    The Germania of Tacitus is the most extensive account of the ancient Germans written during the Roman period, but has been relatively neglected in the scholarship of the English-speaking world: the...

    - Google
  6. Daphnis and Chloe by Longus

    Longus s "Daphnis and Chloe" (second or early third century CE), in which an idealized pastoral environment provides the setting as a boy and girl discover their sexuality, is one of the great work...

    - Google
  7. 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 ...

  8. One Thousand and One Nights by India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt

    One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the Arabian Ni...

  9. Parzival by Wolfram Eschenbach

    Composed in the early thirteenth century, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival is the re-creation and completion of the story left unfinished by its initiator Chrétien de Troyes. It follows Parzival f...

    - Google
  10. Tristan by Gottfried von Strassburg

    Gottfried's work is regarded, alongside Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and the Nibelungenlied, as one of the great narrative masterpieces of the German Middle Ages.

  11. The Nibelungenlied by Anonymous

    Thought to have been first written down in the 12th century by an author who is still unknown, the Nibelungenlied, translated from Middle High German as the Song of the Nibelungs, is an epic German...

    - Google
  12. 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 ...

  13. 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...

  14. Utopia by Thomas More

    Controversial, contradictory, and mysterious, Utopia by Sir Thomas More has engaged scholars and intrigued readers since its initial publication in the 16th century. More's imagining of Utopia pres...

    - Google
  15. Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais

    The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel (in French, La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel) is a connected series of five novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais. It is the story of t...

  16. 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...

  17. Simplicius Simplicissimus by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen

    Simplicius Simplicissimus (German: Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch) is a picaresque novel of the lower Baroque style, written in 1668 by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen and prob...

    - Google
  18. Pensées by Blaise Pascal

  19. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

    A shipwreck’s sole escapee, Robinson Crusoe endures 28 years of solitude on a Caribbean island and manages not only to survive but also to prevail. A warm humanity, evocative details of his struggl...

  20. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

    From the preeminent prose satirist in the English language, a great classic recounting the four remarkable journeys of ship's surgeon Lemuel Gulliver. For children it remains an enchanting fantasy;...

  21. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

    A foundling of mysterious parentage brought up by Mr. Allworthy on his country estate, Tom Jones is deeply in love with the seemingly unattainable Sophia Western, the beautiful daughter of the neig...

  22. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

    As its title suggests, the book is ostensibly Tristram's narration of his life story. But it is one of the central jokes of the novel that he cannot explain anything simply, that he must make expla...

  23. Candide by Voltaire

    Candide, ou l'Optimisme is a French satire written in 1759 by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment. Candide is characterized by its sarcastic tone and its erratic, fantastical, an...

  24. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

    The Sorrows of Young Werther is an epistolary and loosely autobiographical novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, first published in 1774; a revised edition of the novel was published in 1787. Werthe...

  25. Jacques the Fatalist and His Master by Denis Diderot

    The main subject of the book is the relationship between the valet Jacques and his master (who is never named). The two are traveling to a destination the narrator leaves insistently vague, and to ...

  26. Siebenkäs by Jean Paul

    Siebenkäs is a German Romantic novel by Jean Paul, published in Berlin in three volumes between 1796-1797. As is common for Romantic novels of the period, the original title Flower, Fruit, and T...

  27. Hyperion by Friedrich Holderlin

    Hyperion is a novel of stirring lyricism, philosophical sublimity, and enduring influence. It stands among Hölderlin’s most extraordinary achievements. A Greek hermit recounts the pivotal phases of...

    - Google
  28. Sudelbücher by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

    -
  29. Elective Affinities by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

    Elective Affinities (German: Die Wahlverwandtschaften), also translated under the title Kindred by Choice, is the third novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, published in 1809. The title is taken fr...

  30. Stories by Heinrich von Kleist

    New and insightful interpretations of the controversial stories of Heinrich von Kleist.

    - Google
  31. Schatzkästlein des Rheinischen Hausfreundes by Johann Peter Hebel

    The treasure of the Rhine house friend is a collection of stories and calendar stories, Johann Peter Hebel compiled and published in 1811 in Tübingen by Cotta.

    - Google
  32. 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 ...

    - Google
  33. The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr by E. T. A. Hoffmann

    Tomcat Murr is a loveable, self-taught animal who has written his own autobiography. But a printer's error causes his story to be accidentally mixed and spliced with a book about the composer Johan...

    - Google
  34. History of My Life by Giacomo Casanova

    The colorful memoirs of the legendary eighteenth-century lover recall not only his amorous exploits, but also his diverse careers as a gambler, businessman, diplomat, entertainer, politician, con a...

    - Google
  35. Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts by Joseph von Eichendorff

    The life of a ne'er-do is a novella by Joseph von Eichendorff . It was 1 822 / 1,823 completed and first published in 1826. The work is the highlight of musical prose and as an example of the late ...

    - Google
  36. 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...

  37. Lenz by Georg Buchner

    Lenz, Georg Büchner’s visionary exploration of an 18th-century playwright’s descent into madness, has been called the inception of European modernist prose. Elias Canetti considered this short nove...

    - Google
  38. Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac

    Illusions perdues was written by the French writer Honoré de Balzac between 1837 and 1843. It consists of three parts, starting in the provinces, thereafter moving to Paris, and finally returning t...

    - Google
  39. The Adventures of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

    At the heart of Charles Dickens's second novel, first published in 1838, is a story as much about crime and poverty as it is about justice and charity. Orphaned at birth, Oliver Twist grows up unde...

    - Google
  40. 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",...

  41. Either Or by Soren Kierkegaard

    Published in two volumes in 1843, Either/Or (original Danish title: Enten ‒ Eller) is an influential book written by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, exploring the aesthetic and ethical "p...

  42. Germany, a Winter Tale by Heinrich Heine

    This historic bilingual edition presents Heine's German text in a version dating from 1887 and a translation by Edgar Alfred Bowring from the same year. The original work, published in 1844, was ba...

    - Google
  43. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe by Edgar Allan Poe

    Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery...

  44. Moby Dick by Herman Melville

    First published in 1851, Melville's masterpiece is, in Elizabeth Hardwick's words, "the greatest novel in American literature." The saga of Captain Ahab and his monomaniacal pursuit of the white wh...

  45. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx

    Marx's study of the events leading to the coup d'etat of "Napolean the Little" on December 2, 1851, written within a few weeks of the coup, is one of the first works by Marx in which he states his ...

    - Google
  46. 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...

  47. Green Henry by Gottfried Keller

    'Green Henry' is a representation of Gottfried Keller's ideals and philosophy that documents the emergence of an artist and the development of a man. Partly autobiographical, the narrative recounts...

    - Google
  48. 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...

  49. Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov

    Oblomov is the best known novel by Russian writer Ivan Goncharov, first published in 1859. Oblomov is also the central character of the novel, often seen as the ultimate incarnation of the superflu...

  50. 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...

  51. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

    In 1862 Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a shy Oxford mathematician with a stammer, created a story about a little girl tumbling down a rabbit hole. Thus began the immortal adventures of Alice, perhaps th...

  52. Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

    Fathers and Sons is an 1862 novel by Ivan Turgenev, his best known work. The fathers and children of the novel refers to the growing divide between the two generations of Russians, and the chara...

  53. Abu Telfan, Return from the Mountains of the Moon by Wilhelm Karl Raabe

  54. 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...

  55. Stories of Adalbert Stifter by Adalbert Stifter

  56. Human, All Too Human by Friedrich Nietzsche

    Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (German: Menschliches, Allzumenschliches: Ein Buch für freie Geister) is a book by 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, originally published i...

  57. Germinal by Émile Zola

    Germinal is the thirteenth novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Often considered Zola's masterpiece and one of the most significant novels in the French tradition, the no...

  58. The Son of a Servant by August Strindberg

    The Son of a Servant (Swe: Tjänstekvinnans son) is the autobiographical novel of August Strindberg in four parts, published between 1886 and 1909.

    - Google
  59. 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...

  60. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

    Celebrated novel traces the moral degeneration of a handsome young Londoner from an innocent fop into a cruel and reckless pursuer of pleasure and, ultimately, a murderer. As Dorian Gray sinks into...

  61. Ulysses by James Joyce

    Ulysses chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary day, June 16, 1904. The title parallels and alludes to Odysseus (Latinised into Ulysses), the hero of Homer's Odyss...

  62. Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos

    Considered by many to be John Dos Passos's greatest work, Manhattan Transfer is an "expressionistic picture of New York" (New York Times) in the 1920s that reveals the lives of wealthy power broker...

    - Google
  63. The Castle by Franz Kafka

    The Castle is a novel by Franz Kafka. In it a protagonist, known only as K., struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities of a castle who govern the village where he wants to work as a la...

  64. 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 ...

  65. 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...

  66. 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...

  67. The Stechlin by Theodor Fontane

    First English translation of the final work of Theodor Fontane, one of Germany's most significant novelists.

    - Google
  68. 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,...

    - Google
  69. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke

    This is the definitive, widely acclaimed translation of the major prose work of one of our century's greatest poets -- "a masterpiece like no other" (Elizabeth Hardwick) -- Rilke's only novel, extr...

    - Google
  70. The Loyal Subject by Heinrich Mann

    Published in 1918, Der Untertan by Heinrich Mann (1871-1950) - previously issued in the United States only in parts under the title "Man of Straw" - is a satirical novel that connects the tradition...

    - Google
  71. 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...

  72. 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...

  73. Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin

    The story concerns a small-time criminal, Franz Biberkopf, fresh from prison, who is drawn into the underworld. When his criminal mentor murders the prostitute whom Biberkopf has been relying on as...

  74. Track by Ernst Bloch

    -
  75. Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud

    Psychosocial developmentConsciousPreconsciousUnconsciousPsychic apparatusId, ego, and super-egoLibidoDriveTransferenceCountertransferenceEgo defensesResistanceProjection

  76. My Life by Leon Trotsky

    The only Bolshevik leader to write his memoirs, Leon Trotsky published this remarkable book in 1930, the first year of a perilous, decade-long exile that ended with his assassination in Mexico. Exp...

    - Google
  77. Light in August by William Faulkner

    Lght in August is an exploration of racial conflict in the society of the Southern United States.

  78. The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka by Franz Kafka

    The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka is a compilation of all Kafka's short stories. With the exception of Kafka's three novels (The Trial, The Castle and Amerika), this collection includes all of Ka...

  79. Journals: 1889-1913 by André Gide

    Beginning with a single entry for the year 1889, when he was twenty, and continuing throughout his life, the Journals of Andre Gide constitute an enlightening, moving, and endlessly fascinating chr...

    - Google
  80. The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers

    Written in 1939, first published in 1942, a national bestseller and a 1943 BOMC Main Selection, The Seventh Cross presented to a still doubtful, naive America a first-hand account of life in Hitler...

    - Google
  81. 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 ...

  82. The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll by Heinrich Böll

    The definitive short story collection by the Nobel Laureate and master of the form These diverse, psychologically rich, and morally profound stories explore the consequences of war on individuals a...

    - Google
  83. Querelle by Jean Genet

    Jean Genet was one of the world’s greatest contemporary dramatists, and his last play, The Screens, is his crowning achievement. It strikes a powerful, closing chord to the formidable theatrical wo...

    - Google
  84. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

    The Old Man and the Sea is one of Hemingway's most enduring works. Told in language of great simplicity and power, it is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordea...

  85. I'm Not Stiller by Max Frisch

    Max Rudolf Frisch (May 15, 1911 – April 4, 1991) was a Swiss architect, playwright and novelist, regarded as highly representative of German literature after World War II. In his creative works Fri...

  86. Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss

    A milestone in the study of culture from the father of structural anthropology. This watershed work records Claude Lévi-Strauss's search for "a human society reduced to its most basic expression." ...

    - Google
  87. Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett

    Krapp's Last Tape was first performed by Patrick Magee at the Royal Court Theatre in October 1958, and has since been played by a host of distinguished actors including Albert Finney and Max Wall. ...

    - Google
  88. 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...

  89. 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...

    - Google
  90. Stories from the Lord Keuner by Dieter Wöhrle

  91. Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson

    A translation of the first two volumes of Uwe Johnson's Jahrestage.

    - Google
  92. 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...

  93. The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    The Possessed is an 1872 novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Though titled The Possessed in the initial English translation, Dostoevsky scholars and later translations favour the titles The Devils or Demon...

  94. 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...

    - Google