1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die by The Book
A book edited by Peter Boxall, and written by over 100 hundred international critics.
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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...
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The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter by
The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter is a 10th-century Japanese monogatari (fictional prose narrative) containing Japanese folklore. It is considered the oldest extant Japanese prose narrative although th...
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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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Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Guanzhong Luo
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is Lo Kuan-chung's retelling of the events attending the fall of the Han Dynasty in 220 A.D., one of the most tumultuous and fascinating periods in Chinese history...
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The Water Margin: Outlaws of the Marsh by Shi Naian
The Water Margin, known in China as Shuihu Zhuan, is one of the "Four Great Classical Novels" of vernacular Chinese literature, despite being banned by Imperial Edict at the end of the Ming Dynasty...
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The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses): Or Metamorphoses by Apuleius
Apuleius (c. 125-c. 180) was a student of Platonist philosophy and Latin prose writer who produced the novel "Metamorphoses", more popularly known as "The Golden Ass". This work is the only Latin n...
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Tirant Lo Blanc by
Tirant lo Blanch is a chivalric romance written by the Valencian knight Joanot Martorell, finished posthumously by his friend Martí Joan de Galba and published in the city of Valencia in 1490 as an...
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La Celestina by
The Comedy of Calisto and Melibea (Spanish: Comedia de Calisto y Melibea), known in Spain as La Celestina is a work entirely in dialogue published in 1499. It is attributed to Fernando de Rojas, a ...
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Amadis of Gaul by
Amadís de Gaula (Spanish: Amadís de Gaula, IPA: [amaˈðis ðe ˈɣaula]); is a landmark work among the chivalric romances which were in vogue in sixteenth-century Spain, although its first version, muc...
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The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes by
"The bastard son of a prostitute, Lazarillo goes to work for a blind beggar, who beats and starves him, while teaching him some very useful dirty tricks. The boy then drifts in and out of the servi...
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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...
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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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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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The Unfortunate Traveller by Thomas Nashe
The Unfortunate Traveller: or, the Life of Jack Wilton (published The Unfortunate Traueller: or, The Life of Jacke Wilton) is a picaresque novel by Thomas Nashe first published in 1594 but set duri...
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Thomas of Reading, Or, The Sixe Worthie Yeomen of the West by Thomas Deloney
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
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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 Travels of Persiles and Sigismunda by Miguel de Cervantes
The Travails of Persiles and Sigismunda is a romance or Byzantine novel by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, his last work and one that stands in opposition to the more famous novel Don Quixote by its ...
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The True History of the Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz del Castillo
Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (The True History of the Conquest of New Spain) is the first-person narrative written in 1576 by Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1492–1581), the mili...
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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...
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The Princess of Cleves by Madame de La Fayette
La Princesse de Clèves is a French novel, regarded by many as the beginning of the modern tradition of the psychological novel, and as a great classic work. Its author is generally held to be Madam...
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Oroonoko by Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn, the poet, playwright, novelist and political satirist was the first truly professional woman writer in English. This selection, edited and introduced by Professor Janet Todd, demonstrat...
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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...
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Love in Excess; or, The Fatal Enquiry by Eliza Haywood
Love in Excess (1719–1720) is Eliza Haywood's best known novel. It details the amorous escapades of Count D'Elmont, a rake who becomes reformed over the course of the novel. Love in Excess was a hu...
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Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
The Fortunes & Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders Who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of continu'd Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five tim...
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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;...
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A Modest Proposal and Other Satirical Works by Jonathan Swift
Treasury of five shorter works by the author of Gulliver's Travels offers ample evidence of the great satirist's inspired lampoonery. Title piece plus The Battle of the Books, A Meditation Upon a B...
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Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding
Joseph Andrews, or The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, was the first published full-length novel of the English author Henry Fielding, and indeed am...
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Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus by Scriblerus Club
The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus is an incomplete satirical work co-written ostensibly by the members of the Scriblerus Club during the years 1713–14, including Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and...
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Pamela by Samuel Richardson
Richardson's novel is among the first English novels to explore the inner depths of human psychology. Told in a series of letters, his classic tale of a virginal serving maid pursued by her employe...
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Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
It tells the tragic story of a heroine whose quest for virtue is continually thwarted by her family, and is one of the longest novels in the English language.
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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...
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Fanny Hill by John Cleland
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure—popularly known as Fanny Hill (an anglicisation of the Latin mons veneris, mound of Venus)—is an erotic novel by English novelist John Cleland first published in Lond...
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The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle by Tobias Smollett
The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle is a picaresque novel by the Scottish author Tobias Smollett (1721–1771), first published in 1751 and revised and published again in 1758. It tells the story of a...
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The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox
The Female Quixote; or, The Adventures of Arabella is a novel written by Charlotte Lennox imitating and parodying the ideas of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote. Published in 1752, two years after s...
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The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia by Samuel Johnson, Abraham Raimbach, Robert Smirke
The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, originally titled The Prince of Abissinia: A Tale, though often abbreviated to Rasselas, is an apologue about happiness by Samuel Johnson. The book's o...
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Julie, or the New Heloise by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Julie, or the New Heloise (French: Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse), original entitled Lettres de Deux Amans, Habitans d'une petite Ville au pied des Alpes ("Letters from two lovers, living in a smal...
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Emile, or On Education by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Emile, or On Education (French: Émile, ou De l’éducation) is a treatise on the nature of education and on the nature of man written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who considered it to be the "best and m...
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The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story by Horace Walpole
The Castle of Otranto is a 1764 novel by Horace Walpole. It is generally regarded as the first gothic novel, initiating a literary genre which would become extremely popular in the later 18th centu...
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The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith
The Vicar of Wakefield – subtitled A Tale, Supposed to be written by Himself – is a novel by Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774). It was written from 1761 to 1762 and published in 1766. It wa...
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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...
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A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Laurence Sterne
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy is a novel by Laurence Sterne, written and first published in 1768, as Sterne was facing death. In 1765, Sterne travelled through France and Italy as ...
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The Man of Feeling by Henry Mackenzie
The Man of Feeling is a sentimental novel published in 1771, written by Scottish author Henry Mackenzie. The novel presents a series of moral vignettes which the naïve protagonist Harley either obs...
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The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker was the last of the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett, published in London on 17 June 1771 (just three months before Smollett's death), and is considered by man...
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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...
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Evelina by Fanny Burney
Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World is a novel written by English author Fanny Burney and first published in 1778. Although published anonymously, its authorship was ...
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Reveries of a Solitary Walker by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Reveries of a Solitary Walker (French: Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire) is an unfinished book by Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, written between 1776 and 1778. It was the last of a n...
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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 Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Confessions is an autobiographical book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In modern times, it is often published with the title The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in order to distinguish it from St. ...
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The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade
The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage (Les 120 Journées de Sodome ou l'école du libertinage) is a novel by the French writer and nobleman Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade. ...
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Anton Reiser by Karl Philipp Moritz
Anton Reiser is a psychological novel by Karl Philipp Moritz , of which the first three parts appeared in Berlin from 1785 to 1786. The fourth and last part appeared in 1790.
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Vathek by William Beckford
Vathek (alternatively titled Vathek, an Arabian Tale or The History of the Caliph Vathek) is a Gothic novel written by William Beckford. It was composed in French beginning in 1782, and then transl...
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Justine by Marquis de Sade
Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (French: Justine, ou Les Malheurs de la Vertu) is a 1791 novel by Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, better known as the Marquis de Sade. Justine is set just ...
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Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
Dream of the Red Chamber is a masterpiece of Chinese vernacular literature and one of China's Four Great Classical Novels. The novel was composed some time in the middle of the 18th century during ...
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The Adventures of Caleb Williams by William Godwin
Things as They Are; or The Adventures of Caleb Williams (often abbreviated to Caleb Williams) (1794) by William Godwin is a three-volume novel written as a call to end the abuse of power by what Go...
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The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano by Olaudah Equiano
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African, first published in 1789 in London,[1] is the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano. The narrative is argued to b...
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The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe
The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe, was published in four volumes on 8 May 1794 by G. G. and J. Robinson of London. The firm paid her £500 for the manuscript. The contract is housed at the ...
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Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (German: Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre) is the second novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, published in 1795–96. - Wikipedia
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The Monk by Matthew Lewis
The Monk: A Romance is a Gothic novel by Matthew Gregory Lewis, published in 1796. A quickly written book from early in Lewis's career (in one letter he claimed to have written it in ten weeks, but...
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Camilla by Fanny Burney
Camilla, subtitled A Picture of Youth, is a novel by Frances Burney, first published in 1796. Camilla deals with the matrimonial concerns of a group of young people: Camilla Tyrold and her sisters,...
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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 ...
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The Nun by Denis Diderot
La Religieuse (The Nun or Memoirs of a Nun) is an 18th-century French novel by Denis Diderot. Completed in about 1780, the work was not published until 1796, after Diderot's death.
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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...
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Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth
Castle Rackrent is a short novel by Maria Edgeworth published in 1800, one of the few of Edgeworth's novels which her father did not “edit”.Shortly before its publication, an introduction, glossary...
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Heinrich of Ofterdingen by Novalis
Heinrich von Ofterdingen is a fabled, quasi-fictional Middle High German lyric poet and Minnesinger mentioned in the 13th century epic of the Sängerkrieg (minstrel contest) on the Wartburg. The leg...
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Rameau's Nephew by Denis Diderot
Rameau's Nephew, or the Second Satire (French: Le Neveu de Rameau ou La Satire seconde) is an imaginary philosophical conversation written by Denis Diderot, probably between 1761 and 1772.
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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...
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Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist
"You can send me to the scaffold, but I can make you suffer, and I mean to." Based on actual historic events, this thrilling saga of violence and retribution bridged the gap between medieval and mo...
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Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility is a novel by Jane Austen, published in 1811. It was published anonymously; By A Lady appears on the cover page where the author's name might have been. It tells the story of ...
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Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The book is narrated in free indirect speech following the main character Elizabeth Bennet as she deals with matters of upbringing, marriage, moral rightness and education in her aristocratic socie...
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Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
Mansfield Park is the third published novel by Jane Austen, first published in 1814 by Thomas Egerton. A second edition was published in 1816 by John Murray, still within Austen's lifetime. The nov...
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Emma by Jane Austen
Before she began the novel, Austen wrote, "I am going to take a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like."[1] In the very first sentence she introduces the title character as "Emma Woodhouse, ...
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Rob Roy by Walter Scott
Rob Roy (1817) is a historical novel by Walter Scott. It is considered one of the Waverley novels, as the author identified himself on the title page as "by the author of Waverley". Frank Osbaldis...
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Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
At this challenge, Mary Shelley began work on the 'ghost story' that was to evolve into the most celebrated horror novel in literary history. Frankenstein was published the next year and become the...
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Ivanhoe by Walter Scott
Ivanhoe is a historical novel by Sir Walter Scott published in 1820 and set in 12th-century England. Ivanhoe is sometimes credited for increasing interest in romance and medievalism; John Henry New...
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Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin
Melmoth the Wanderer is an 1820 Gothic novel by Irish playwright, novelist and clergyman Charles Maturin. The novel's titular character is a scholar who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for 1...
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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...
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The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg
Considered by turns part-gothic novel, part-psychological mystery, part-metafiction, part-satire, part-case study of totalitarian thought, it can also be thought of as an early example of modern cr...
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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 ...
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The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
The story is set in the British province of New York during the French and Indian War, and concerns—in part—a Huron massacre (with passive French acquiescence) of between 500 to 1,500 Anglo-America...
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The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni
The Betrothed is an Italian historical novel by Alessandro Manzoni, first published in 1827, in three volumes. It has been called the most famous and widely read novel of the Italian language. S...
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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 Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo
Quasimodo, a gentle and kind hunchback who lives a lonely, isolated life in a cathedral in Paris, rescues the beautiful Esmerelda from being hanged for a crime she did not commit.
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Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
Eugene Onegin, a "novel in verse," as announced by its subtitle, and Russia's best-loved classic, was written by Alexander Pushkin, that country's unsurpassed literary idol. Yet the American readin...
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Eugenie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac
1927. Balzac is considered to be the greatest name in the post-Revolutionary literature of France. His writings display a profound knowledge of the human heart, with an extraordinary range of knowl...
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Father Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
Le Père Goriot (English: Father Goriot or Old Goriot) is an 1835 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), included in the Scènes de la vie privée section of his novel s...
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The Nose by Nikolai Gogol
"The Nose" (Russian: Нос Nos) is a satirical short story by Nikolai Gogol written during his time living in St. Petersburg. During this time, Gogol's works were primarily focused on surrealism and ...
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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...
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The Lion of Flanders by Hendrik Conscience
The Lion of Flanders, or the Battle of the Golden Spurs (Dutch: De Leeuw van Vlaenderen, of de Slag der Gulden Sporen) is a major novel first published in 1838 by the Belgian writer Hendrik Conscie...
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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 Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a narrative short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine before being included in the collection Tale...
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Camera Obscura by Nicolaas Beets
Camera Obscura is a collection of stories from 1839 written by Nicolaas Beets under the pseudonym Hildebrand . Beets wrote most of the pieces in 1837 as a student of Theology in Leiden . During the...
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A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov
A Hero of Our Time is a novel by Mikhail Lermontov published in 1840. It tells the story of a young officer, Pechorin, sent to the Caucasus after a duel. This is what the author himself wrote about...
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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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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...
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The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe
"The Pit and the Pendulum" is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and first published in 1842 in the literary annual The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1843. The story is about ...
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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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Facundo by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
"Sarmiento's Facundo remains a foundational work for the traditions of Latin American fiction and historiography, and so an essential book for English language North Americans also, at least for th...
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The Devil's Pool by George Sand
La Mare au Diable (The Devil's Pool) is an 1846 novel by George Sand.
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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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Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre is a first-person narrative of the title character, a small, plain-faced, intelligent and honest English orphan. The novel goes through five distinct stages: Jane's childhood at Gateshead...
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Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her senti...
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Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
The narrative is non-linear, involving several flashbacks, and two primary narrators: Mr. Lockwood and Ellen "Nelly" Dean. The novel opens in 1801, with Mr. Lockwood arriving at Thrushcross Grange,...
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The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is the second and final novel by the English author Anne Brontë. It was first published in 1848 under the pseudonym Acton Bell. Probably the most shocking of the Brontës...
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David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The story of the abandoned waif who learns to survive through challenging encounters with distress and misfortune.
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The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hester Prynne is a beautiful young woman. She is also an outcast. In the eyes of her neighbors she has committed an unforgivable sin. Everyone knows that her little daughter, Pearl, is the product ...
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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...
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The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The House of the Seven Gables is a Gothic novel written beginning in mid-1850 by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne and published in April 1851 by Ticknor and Fields of Boston. The novel follows a...
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Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African America...
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Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
Cranford is one of the better-known novels of the 19th-century English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. It was first published in 1851 as a serial in the magazine Household Words, which was edited by Char...
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Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Bleak House is the ninth novel by Charles Dickens, published in twenty monthly instalments between March 1852 and September 1853. It is held to be one of Dickens's finest novels, containing one of ...
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Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Walden (first published as Walden; or, Life in the Woods) is an American book written by noted transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings.
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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...
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North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
North and South is a social novel published in 1854 by English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. With Wives and Daughters (1865) and Cranford (1853), it is one of her best-known novels and was adapted for ...
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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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Indian Summer by Adalbert Stifter
Der Nachsommer (English: Indian Summer; subtitled A Tale; 1857) is a novel in three volumes by Adalbert Stifter. A 19th century Bildungsroman that describes the journey of an idealistic, sheltered ...
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Adam Bede by George Eliot
Adam Bede, the first novel written by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans), was published in 1859. It was published pseudonymously, even though Evans was a well-published and highly respec...
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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...
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The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
Thus young Walter Hartright first meets the mysterious woman in white in what soon became one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century. Secrets, mistaken identities, surprise revelation...
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The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
The Mill on the Floss is a novel by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), first published in three volumes in 1860 by William Blackwood. The first American edition was published by Thomas Y. Crowell Co., ...
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Max Havelaar by Multatuli
Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (Dutch: Max Havelaar, of de koffi-veilingen der Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappy) is an 1860 novel by Multatuli (the pen name of Ed...
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Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Great Expectations is written in the genre of "bildungsroman" or the style of book that follows the story of a man or woman in their quest for maturity, usually starting from childhood and ending i...
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Silas Marner by George Eliot
Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe is the third novel by George Eliot, published in 1861. An outwardly simple tale of a linen weaver, it is notable for its strong realism and its sophisticated tre...
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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...
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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 Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby by Charles Kingsley
The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby is a children's novel by Charles Kingsley. Written in 1862–63 as a serial for Macmillan's Magazine, it was first published in its entirety in 1863. It...
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Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Notes from Underground is a study of a single character, and a revelation of Dostoyevsky's own deepest beliefs. In this work we follow the unnamed narrator of the story, who, disillusioned by the o...
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Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu
Uncle Silas, subtitled "A Tale of Bartram-Haugh", is a Victorian Gothic mystery-thriller novel by the Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu. Despite Le Fanu resisting its classification as such, the nov...
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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...
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Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
Journey to the Center of the Earth (French: Voyage au centre de la Terre, also translated under the titles A Journey to the Centre of the Earth and A Journey to the Interior of the Earth) is an 186...
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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 Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope
The Last Chronicle of Barset concerns an indigent but learned clergyman, the Reverend Josiah Crawley, the curate of Hogglestock, as he stands accused of stealing a cheque. The novel is notable for...
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Thérèse Raquin by Emile Zola
Thérèse Raquin [teʁɛz ʁakɛ̃] is a novel (first published in 1867) and a play (first performed in 1873) by the French writer Émile Zola. The novel was originally published in serial format in the jo...
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The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century British epistolary novel, generally considered the first detective novel in the English language. The story was originally serialised in Cha...
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Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Written and set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts, it was published in two parts in 1868 and 1869. The novel follows the lives of four sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth and Am...
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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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Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror) by Comte de Lautréamont
This macabre but beautiful work, Les Chants de Maldoror, has achieved a considerable reputation as one of the earliest and most extraordinary examples of Surrealist writing.
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Phineas Finn by Anthony Trollope
Phineas Finn is a novel by Anthony Trollope and the name of its leading character. The novel was first published as a monthly serial from October 1867 to May 1868 in St Paul's Magazine. It is the s...
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A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
The novel describes the life of a young man (Frederic Moreau) living through the revolution of 1848 and the founding of the Second French Empire, and his love for an older woman (based on the wife ...
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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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King Lear of the Steppes by Ivan Turgenev
A loose and decidely Russian adaptation of William Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear, set in the countryside, the story concerns the disrespectful treatment the protagonist, Kharlov, receives from hi...
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Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) is a novel by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Set some six months later...
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Middlemarch by George Eliot
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life is a novel by George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Anne Evans, later Marian Evans. It is her seventh novel, begun in 1869 and then put aside during the final i...
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Torrents of Spring by Ivan Turgenev
Torrents of Spring, also known as Spring Torrents (Russian: Вешние воды Veshniye vody), is a novel by Ivan Turgenev that was first published in 1872. It is highly autobiographical in nature, and ce...
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Erewhon by Samuel Butler
Erewhon: or, Over the Range () is a novel by Samuel Butler which was first published anonymously in 1872. The title is also the name of a country, supposedly discovered by the protagonist. In the n...
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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...
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In a Glass Darkly by Sheridan Le Fanu
In a Glass Darkly is a collection of five short stories by Sheridan Le Fanu, first published in 1872, the year before his death. The second and third are revised versions of previously published st...
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Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
Around the World in Eighty Days (French: Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours) is an adventure novel by the French writer Jules Verne, published in 1873. In the story, Phileas Fogg of London and...
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The Enchanted Wanderer by Nikolai Leskov
The Enchanted Wanderer (Очарованный странник) is a novel by Nikolai Leskov, first published in Russky Mir newspaper in 1873 (issues Nos. 272, 274, 276, 279, 281, 283, 286, 288, 290, 293, 295, 297, ...
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Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) is Thomas Hardy's fourth novel and his first major literary success. It originally appeared anonymously as a monthly serial in Cornhill Magazine, where it gained a...
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Pepita Jimenez by Juan Valera y Alcalá-Galiano
Pepita Jimenez is the first novel of the diplomat , politician and writer Spanish Juan Valera , published in 1874. Following the model of Cervantes , Valera suggests the recovery of a manuscript...
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The Crime of Father Amaro by Eça de Queirós
O Crime do Padre Amaro ("The Crime of Father Amaro"), subtitled 'Scenes of Religious Life', is a novel by the 19th-century Portuguese writer José Maria de Eça de Queiroz. It was first published in ...
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Drunkard by Émile Zola
L'Assommoir [lasɔmwaʁ] (1877) is the seventh novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Usually considered one of Zola's masterpieces, the novel—a study of alcoholism and pover...
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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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Martín Fierro by José Hernández
Martín Fierro, also known as El Gaucho Martín Fierro, is a 2,316-line epic poem by the Argentine writer José Hernández. The poem was originally published in two parts, El Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872...
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The Red Room by August Strindberg
The Red Room (Swedish: Röda rummet) is a Swedish novel by August Strindberg that was first published in 1879.[1] A satire of Stockholm society, it has frequently been described as the first modern ...
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Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ chronicles the journey of Judah Ben-Hur and the life of Jesus, from Ben-Hur's quest for vengeance against the Romans and his search for his imprisoned family to the bi...
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Nana by Émile Zola
Nana is a novel by the French naturalist author Émile Zola. Completed in 1880, Nana is the ninth installment in the 20-volume Les Rougon-Macquart series.
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The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
The story centres on Isabel Archer, an attractive American whom circumstances have brought to Europe. Isabel refuses the offer of marriage to an English peer and to a bulldog-like New Englander, to...
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I Malavoglia by Giovanni Verga
I Malavoglia (Italian pronunciation: [i malaˈvɔʎʎa]) is the best known novel by Giovanni Verga. It was first printed in 1881. An English edition, The House by the Medlar-Tree (1890), translated by ...
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The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Machado de Assis
"In his posthumous memoirs, Braz Cubas, a wealthy nineteenth-century Brazilian, examines (from beyond the grave) his rather undistinguished life in 160 short chapters that both cover the basics of ...
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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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Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Traditionally considered a coming-of-age story, it is an adventure tale known for its superb atmosphere, character and action, and also a wry commentary on the ambiguity of morality—as seen in Long...
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Une vie by Guy de Maupassant
Une vie also known as L'Humble Vérité is the first novel written by Guy de Maupassant. It was serialised in 1883 in the Gil Blas, then published in book form the same year as L'Humble Vérité. It w...
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The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, first published in 1886, is a novella by Leo Tolstoy, one of the masterpieces of his late fiction, written shortly after his conversion to Christianity. The novel tells...
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Against Nature by J. K. Huysmans
Study of obsession and aesthetics in fin-de-siecle France.
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La Regenta by Clarín
La Regenta is a realist novel by Spanish author Leopoldo Alas y Ureña, also known as Clarín, published in 1884 and 1885.
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Bel Ami by Guy de Maupassant
Bel Ami is the second novel by French author Guy de Maupassant, published in 1885; an English translation titled Bel Ami, or, The History of a Scoundrel: A Novel first appeared in 1903. The story ...
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Marius the Epicurean by Walter Pater
Marius the Epicurean: his sensations and ideas is a historical and philosophical novel by Walter Pater (his only completed full-length fiction), written between 1881 and 1884, published in 1885 and...
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Revered by all of the town's children and dreaded by all of its mothers, Huckleberry Finn is indisputably the most appealing child-hero in American literature. Unlike the tall-tale, idyllic worl...
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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...
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King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard
King Solomon's Mines (1885) is a popular novel by the English Victorian adventure writer and fabulist Sir H. Rider Haggard. It tells of a search of an unexplored region of Africa by a group of adv...
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The Quest by Frederik van Eeden
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and rema...
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The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Spawned by a nightmare that Stevenson had, this classic tale of the dark, primordial night of the soul remains a masterpiece of the duality of good and evil within us all.
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The House of Ulloa by Emilia Pardo Bazán
The House of Ulloa (Spanish: Los pazos de Ulloa) is a novel by Emilia Pardo Bazán, published in Spanish in 1886, and in English by Penguin Classics in 1990. It was republished by Pocket Penguins in...
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Hemsöborna by August Strindberg
The People of Hemsö (Swedish: Hemsöborna) is an 1887 novel by August Strindberg about the life of people of the island Hemsö in the Stockholm archipelago. Hemsö is a fictional island, but it is bas...
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Pierre et Jean by Guy de Maupassant
Pierre et Jean is a naturalist or psycho-realist work written by Guy de Maupassant in Étretat in his native Normandy between June and September 1887 . This was Maupassant’s shortest novel. It appea...
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Under the Yoke by Ivan Vazov
Under the Yoke [Bulgarian: 'Под игото'- Pod Igoto] is a novel by Ivan Vazov written in 1888. It is set in a small town in Central Bulgaria during the months leading up to the April Uprising in 1876...
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Il Piacere by Gabriele D'Annunzio
Il Piacere (The Pleasure) is the first novel by Gabriele d'Annunzio, written in 1889 at Francavilla al Mare, and published the following year by Fratelli Treves. Beginning in 1895, the novel was re...
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Eline Vere by Louis Couperus
Eline Vere is an 1889 novel by the Dutch writer Louis Couperus. It was adapted into the 1991 film Eline Vere, directed by Harry Kümel. Couperus wrote Eline Vere in the house at Surinamestraat 20, T...
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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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La Bête humaine by Émile Zola
La Bête humaine (English: The Beast Within or The Beast in Man) is an 1890 novel by Émile Zola. The story has been adapted for the cinema on several occasions. The seventeenth book in Zola's Les R...
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Thaïs by Anatole France
Thaïs is a novel by French writer Anatole France, published in 1890. It is based on events in the life of Saint Thaïs of Egypt, a legendary convert to Christianity who is said to have lived in the ...
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The Kreutzer Sonata: And Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy
Renowned Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy was never one to shy away from complex or unpopular ideas. In the title story of this exquisite collection, named for one of Beethoven's most intricate works, ...
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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...
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Down There by J. K. Huysmans
Là-Bas, translated as Down There or The Damned, is a novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, first published in 1891. It is Huysmans' most famous work after À rebours. Là-Bas deals with the...
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Gösta Berling's Saga by Selma Lagerlöf
Gösta Berling's Saga (Swedish: Gösta Berlings saga) is the debut novel of Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf, published in 1891. It was made into a 1924 silent film directed by Mauritz Stiller starring ...
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New Grub Street: A Novel by George Gissing
New Grub Street is a novel by George Gissing published in 1891, which is set in the literary and journalistic circles of 1880s London. Gissing revised and shortened the novel for a French edition o...
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News from Nowhere by William Morris
News from Nowhere (1890) is a classic work combining utopian socialism and soft science fiction written by the artist, designer and socialist pioneer William Morris. It was first published in seria...
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The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
Since his first appearance in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes has been one of the most beloved fictional characters ever created.
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The Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith, Weedon Grossmith
Weedon Grossmith's 1892 book presents the details of English suburban life through the anxious and accident-prone character of Charles Porter. Porter's diary chronicles his daily routine, which inc...
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The Viceroys by Federico De Roberto
A lost literary classic, written in 1894, The Viceroys is one of the most acclaimed masterworks of Italian realism. The novel follows three generations of the aristocratic Uzeda family as it strugg...
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Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
In 1895 Hardy’s final novel, the great tale of Jude the Obscure, sent shock waves of indignation rolling across Victorian England. Hardy had dared to write frankly about sexuality and to indict the...
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Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane
Unworldly young Effi Briest is married off to Baron von Innstetten, an austere and ambitious civil servant twice her age, who has little time for his new wife. Isolated and bored, Effi finds comfor...
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The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
When the Time Traveler courageously stepped out of his machine for the first time, he found himself in the year 802,700--and everything had changed. H.G. Wells's famous novel of one man's astonishi...
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The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells
The Island of Doctor Moreau is an 1896 science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells. The text of the novel is the narration of Edward Prendick, a shipwrecked man rescued by a passing boat wh...
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Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz
Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero, commonly known as Quo Vadis, is a historical novel written by Henryk Sienkiewicz in Polish. "Quo vadis, Domine?" is Latin for "Where are you going, Lord?...
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Dracula by Bram Stoker
Dracula is an 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker, featuring as its primary antagonist the vampire Count Dracula. Dracula has been attributed to many literary genres including vampire literat...
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What Maisie Knew by Henry James
What Maisie Knew is a novel by Henry James, first published as a serial in The Chap-Book and (revised and abridged) in the New Review in 1897 and then as a book later that year. It tells the story ...
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Pharaoh by Bolesław Prus
Pharaoh (Polish: Faraon) is the fourth and last major novel by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus (1847–1912). Composed over a year's time in 1894–95, serialized in 1895–96, and published in book form...
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The Fruits of the Earth by André Gide
The Fruits of the Earth (French: Les nourritures terrestres) is a prose-poem by André Gide, published in France in 1897. The book was written in 1895 (the year of Gide's marriage) and appeared in ...
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War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
When four Martian space ships land in England, masses of people flee the cities, driven by an overwhelming fear of the alien creatures devastating weapons of death and destruction. Excellently adap...
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Senilità by Italo Svevo
Senilità, translated into English as As a Man Grows Older or Emilio's Carnival, is Italo Svevo's second novel, first published in 1898. The novel's protagonist is Emilio Brentani, a failed writer t...
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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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The Awakening by Kate Chopin
First published in 1899, this novel shocked readers with its open sensuality and uninhibited treatment of marital infidelity. Poignant and lyrical, it tells the story of a New Orleans wife who atte...
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The Stechlin by Theodor Fontane
First English translation of the final work of Theodor Fontane, one of Germany's most significant novelists.
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Eclipse of the Crescent Moon by Géza Gárdonyi
Eclipse of the Crescent Moon (Hungarian: Egri csillagok lit. "Stars of Eger") is a historical novel by the Hungarian writer Géza Gárdonyi. It was first published in 1899 and is one of the most popu...
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Some Experiences of an Irish R. M. by Edith Somerville, Violet Florence Martin
The Irish R.M. refers to a series of books by the Anglo-Irish novelists Somerville and Ross, and the television comedy-drama series based on them. They are set in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century ...
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Sandokan by Emilio Salgari
Sandokan is a fictional late 19th-century pirate created by Italian author Emilio Salgari. His adventures first appeared in publication in 1883. Sandokan is the protagonist of 11 adventure novels....
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Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
When a girl leaves home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse....
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Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Kim is an orphan, living from hand to mouth in the teeming streets of Lahore. One day he meets a man quite unlike anything in his wide experience, a Tibetan lama on a quest. Kim's life suddenly acq...
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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 Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Hound of the Baskervilles is a crime novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle featuring the detective Sherlock Holmes. Originally serialized in the Strand Magazine from August 1901 to April 1902, it ...
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Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The story details an incident when Marlow, an Englishman, took a foreign assignment from a Belgian trading company as a ferry-boat captain in Africa. Although Conrad does not specify the name of th...
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Wings of the Dove by Henry James
One of the masterpieces of James' final period, this novel tells the story of Milly Theale, an American heiress stricken with a serious disease, and her impact on the people around her. Some of the...
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The Immoralist by André Gide
The Immoralist (French: L'Immoraliste) is a novel by André Gide, published in France in 1902.
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The Ambassadors by Henry James
This dark comedy, one of the masterpieces of James' final period, follows the trip of protagonist Lewis Lambert Strether to Europe in pursuit of his widowed fiancée's supposedly wayward son. Streth...
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Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers
A simple invitation to join his friend Davies on a yachting expedition in the Baltic is the beginning of an extraordinary and dangerous adventure for the bored and worldly but clever Carruthers. As...
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The Call of the Wild by Jack London
The plot concerns a previously domesticated and even somewhat pampered dog named Buck, whose primordial instincts return after a series of events finds him serving as a sled dog in the treacherous...
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Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber
In 1884, the distinguished German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber suffered the first of a series of mental collapses that would afflict him for the rest of his life. In his madness, the world was revea...
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Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
'The Way of All Flesh' 'exploded like a bomb' in Edwardian England. Based on Samuel Butler's own life and published posthumously, it indicts Victorian bourgeois values as personified in five genera...
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Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe
One day George Arthur Rose, hack writer and minor priest, discovers that he has been picked to be Pope. He is hardly surprised and not in the least daunted. "The previous English pontiff was Hadria...
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Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
Edited with an introduction and notes by Martin Seymour-Smith. In his evocation of the republic of Costaguana, set amid the exotic and grandiose scenery of South America, Conrad reveals not only th...
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The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
From the esteemed author of The Age of Innocence--a black comedy about vast wealth and a woman who can define herself only through the perceptions of others. Lily Bart's quest to find a husband who...
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Professor Unrat by Heinrich Mann
Professor Unrat (1905, trans. by Ernest Boyd as Small Town Tyrant), which translates as "Professor Garbage," is one of the most important works of Heinrich Mann and has achieved notoriety through f...
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Solitude by Caterina Albert
The story of a woman's emotional awakening amid the inhospitable Catalan mountains.
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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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The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy
The Forsyte Saga, first published under that name in 1922, is a series of three novels and two interludes published between 1906 and 1921 by Nobel Prize-winning English author John Galsworthy. They...
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The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
1906 best-seller shockingly reveals intolerable labor practices and unsanitary working conditions in the Chicago stockyards as it tells the brutally grim story of a Slavic family that emigrates to ...
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The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
In a corrupt London underworld of criminals, terrorists, and fanatics, Mr. Verloc is assigned to plant a bomb. The tragic repercussions for his family show how Conrad's ironic voice is concerned no...
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Mother by Maksim Gorky
Mother (Russian: Мать) is a novel written by Maxim Gorky in 1906 about revolutionary factory workers. It was first published, in English, in Appleton's Magazine in 1906, then in Russian in 1907. T...
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The House on the Borderland by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The House on the Borderland (1908) is a supernatural horror novel by British fantasist William Hope Hodgson. The novel is a hallucinatory account of a recluse's stay at a remote house, and his expe...
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The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett
It deals with the lives of two very different sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, following their stories from their youth, working in their mother's draper's shop, into old age. It is generally ...
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Hell by Henri Barbusse
Hell (French: L'Enfer) is Henri Barbusse's second novel, written in 1908, in which the unnamed narrator spies on his fellow house guests through a peephole in his wall.
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A Room With a View by E. M. Forster
British social comedy examines a young heroine's struggle against strait-laced Victorian attitudes as she rejects the man her family has encouraged her to marry and chooses, instead, a socially uns...
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Strait is the Gate by André Gide
Strait is the Gate (French: La Porte Étroite) is a 1909 French novel written by André Gide. It was translated into English by Dorothy Bussy. It probes the complexities and terrors of adolescence an...
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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...
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Howards End by E. M. Forster
"Only Connect," Forster's key aphorism, informs this novel about an English country house, Howards End, and its influence on the lives of the wealthy and materialistic Wilcoxes; the cultured, ideal...
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Impressions of Africa by Raymond Roussel
The first of Roussel's two major prose works, Impressions of Africa is not, as the title may suggest, a conventional travel account, but an adventure story put together in a highly individual fashi...
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Fantômas by Marcel Allain, Pierre Souvestre
Fantômas (French: [fɑ̃tomas]) is a fictional character created by French writers Marcel Allain (1885–1969) and Pierre Souvestre (1874–1914). One of the most popular characters in the history of Fr...
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Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Tragic story of wasted lives, set against a bleak New England background. A poverty-stricken New England farmer, his ailing wife and a youthful housekeeper are drawn relentlessly into a deep-rooted...
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The Charwoman's Daughter by James Stephens
The Charwoman's Daughter is the strange wistful story of sixteen-year-old Mary, the only child of her fiercely protective, widowed mother.... Mary and her mother live in a one-room tenement flat th...
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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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Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
Sons and Lovers is one of the landmark novels of the twentieth century. When it appeared in 1913, it was immediately recognized as the first great modern restatement of the oedipal drama, and it is...
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The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell, Peter Miles
This novel tells the story of a group of working men who are joined one day by Owen, a journeyman-prophet with a vision of a just society. Owen's spirited attacks on the greed and dishonesty of the...
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Platero by Juan Ramón Jiménez
Platero is the eponymous donkey of the 1914 story Platero y yo (Spanish for Platero and I). The book is one of the most popular works by Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, the recipient of the 1956 N...
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Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Tarzan of the Apes is a novel written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first in a series of books about the title character Tarzan. It was first published in the pulp magazine All-Story Magazine in Oct...
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Kokoro by Sōseki Natsume
Haunted by tragic secrets, Sensei slowly opens up to his young disciple, confessing indiscretions from his own student days that have left him reeling with guilt.
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The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
In The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), the best-known of his thrillers (made into a popular movie by Alfred Hitchcock), John Buchan introduces his most enduring hero, Richard Hannay, who, despite claimin...
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The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence
Set in the rural midlands of England, The Rainbow revolves around three generations of the Brangwen family over a period of more than sixty years, setting them against the emergence of modern Engla...
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Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
The first and most autobiographical of Maugham's masterpieces. It is the story of Philip Carey, an orphan eager for life, love and adventure. After a few months studying in Heidelberg, and a brief ...
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The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford wrote The Good Soldier, the book on which his reputation most surely rests, in deliberate emulation of the nineteenth-century French novels he so admired. In this way he was able to...
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Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Ryünosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) is one of Japan’s foremost stylists - a modernist master whose short stories are marked by highly original imagery, cynicism, beauty and wild humour. ‘Rashömon’ and ...
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Under Fire by Henri Barbusse
Under Fire: The Story of a Squad (French: Le Feu: journal d'une escouade) by Henri Barbusse (December 1916), was one of the first novels about World War I to be published. Although it is fiction, t...
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a semi-autobiographical novel by James Joyce, first serialized in The Egoist from 1914 to 1915 and published in book form in 1916. It depicts the formativ...
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The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela
The Underdogs (Spanish: Los de Abajo) is a novel by Mexican author Mariano Azuela which tells the story of a group of commoners who are dragged into the Mexican Revolution and the changes in their ...
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Pallieter by Felix Timmermans
Pallieter is a regional novel by the Flemish writer and poet Felix Timmermans , published in 1916. The novel is named after his main character Pallieter, a bon vivant who lives under the motto 'sei...
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Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
Set against the backdrop of the Partition of Bengal by the British in 1905, Home and the World (Ghare Baire) is the story of a young liberal-minded zamindar Nikhilesh, his educated and sensitive wi...
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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 Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West
The Return of the Soldier is the debut novel of English novelist Rebecca West, first published in 1918. The novel recounts the return of the shell shocked Captain Chris Baldry from the trenches of ...
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Tarr by Wyndham Lewis
Tarr is a modernist novel by Wyndham Lewis, written in 1909–11, revised and expanded in 1914–15 and first serialized in the magazine The Egoist from April 1916 until November 1917. The American ver...
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Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger
Storm of Steel (in German: In Stahlgewittern) is the memoir of German officer Ernst Jünger's experiences on the Western Front during the First World War. It was originally printed privately in 1920...
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Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
Perhaps no other of the world’s great writers lived and wrote with the passionate intensity of D. H. Lawrence. And perhaps no other of his books so explores the mysteries between men and women–both...
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Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
In this classic satire of small-town America, beautiful young Carol Kennicott comes to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, with dreams of transforming the provincial old town into a place of beauty and cult...
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The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Age of Innocence centers on an upperclass couple's impending marriage, and the introduction of a scandalous woman whose presence threatens their happiness. Though the novel questions the assump...
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Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley
Crome Yellow is the first novel by British author Aldous Huxley, published in 1921. In the book, Huxley satirises the fads and fashions of the time. It is the story of a house party at Crome, a pa...
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Life of Christ by Giovanni Papini
Giovanni Papini's "Life of Christ" was the number two non-fiction best seller in the year 1923. Papini gained international fame with his religious novel "Storio Di Christo" and this, the English t...
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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...
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Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
When Babbitt was first published in 1922, fans gleefully hailed its scathing portrait of a crass, materialistic nation; critics denounced it as an unfair skewering of the American businessman. Spar...
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Life and Death of Harriett Frean by May Sinclair
The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (ISBN 0-86068-106-8) is a 1922 novel by English author May Sinclair.
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Forest of the Hanged by Liviu Rebreanu
Forest of the Hanged (Romanian: Pădurea spânzuraților) is a novel by Romanian writer Liviu Rebreanu. Published in 1922, it is partly inspired by the experience of his brother Emil Rebreanu, an offi...
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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 Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings
The Enormous Room (The Green-Eyed Stores) is a 1922 autobiographical novel by the poet and novelist E. E. Cummings about his temporary imprisonment in France during World War I. Cummings served as...
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Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset
The turbulent historical masterpiece of Norway’s literary master In her great historical epic Kristin Lavransdatter, set in fourteenth-century Norway, Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset tells the life st...
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Amok by Stefan Zweig
The nameless first person narrator travels from India to Europe on the ocean liner Oceania in 1912. One night, during a walk on deck, he meets a man who, disturbed and scared, avoids any social con...
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Le Diable au corps by Raymond Radiguet
Le Diable au corps (The Devil in the Flesh) is an early 1923 novel by Parisian literary prodigy Raymond Radiguet. The story of a young married woman who has an affair with a sixteen-year-old boy wh...
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Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo
Zeno's Conscience is a novel by Italian businessman and author Italo Svevo. The main character is Zeno Cosini and the book is the fictional character's memoirs that he keeps at the insistence of hi...
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A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
A Passage to India is set against the backdrop of the British Raj and the Indian independence movement in the 1920s. The story revolves around four characters: Dr. Aziz, his British friend Cyril Fi...
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We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Translated by Natasha Randall Foreword by Bruce Sterling Written in 1921, We is set in the One State, where all live for the collective good and individual freedom does not exist. The novel takes t...
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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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The Green Hat by Michael Arlen
The Green Hat perfectly reflects the atmosphere of the 1920s—the post-war fashion for verbal smartness, youthful cynicism, and the spirit of rebellion of the "bright young things" of Mayfair. Iris ...
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Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady by Anita Loos
The incomparable adventures of Lorelei Lee, a little girl from Little Rock who takes the world by storm. Anita Loos first published the diaries of the ultimate gold-digging blonde in the flapper da...
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The Professor's House by Willa Cather
The Professor's House is a novel by American novelist Willa Cather. Published in 1925, the novel was written over the course of several years. Cather first wrote the centerpiece, “Tom Outland's Sto...
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The Artamonov Business by Maksim Gorky
The Artamonov Business (Russian: Дело Артамоновых, romanized: Delo Artamonovykh) is a 1941 Soviet drama film directed by Grigori Roshal.
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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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The Counterfeiters by André Gide
The Counterfeiters is a 1925 novel by French author André Gide, first published in Nouvelle Revue Française. With many characters and crisscrossing plotlines, its main theme is that of the original...
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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The novel chronicles an era that Fitzgerald himself dubbed the "Jazz Age". Following the shock and chaos of World War I, American society enjoyed unprecedented levels of prosperity during the "roar...
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Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Created from two short stories, "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister", the novel's story is of Clarissa's preparations for a party of which she is to be hostess. Wit...
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Chaka by Thomas Mofolo
Chaka is the most famous novel by the writer Thomas Mofolo of Lesotho. Written in Sotho, it is a mythic retelling of the story of the rise and fall of the Zulu emperor-king Shaka. It was named one ...
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The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein
"Essential for all literature collections . . . Several of Stein's titles returned to print in 1995, but none more important than The Making of Americans." Library Journal
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The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie's ginius for detective fiction is unparalleled. Her worldwide popularity is phenomenal, her characters engaging, her plots spellbinding. No one knows the human heart—or the dark pas...
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One, No One and One Hundred Thousand by Luigi Pirandello
One, No One and One Hundred Thousand (Italian: Uno, Nessuno e Centomila [ˈuːno nesˈsuːno e ˌtʃɛntoˈmiːla]) is a 1926 novel by the Italian writer Luigi Pirandello. The novel had a rather long and di...
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Under Satan's Sun by Georges Bernanos
This new translation marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Georges Bernanos's first novel, Under Satan's Sun, a powerful account of intense spiritual struggle that reflects the author's deeply-fel...
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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 Alberta Trilogy by Cora Sandel
Imaginative and intelligent, Alberta is a misfit trapped in a stiflingly provincial town in the far north of Norway whose only affinity is for her extrovert brother Jacob.
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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...
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Blindness by Henry Green
"Blindness is a major novel . . . Every character and every scene is shot through with significance after significance." The Times [London]
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The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The novel explores the lives and values of the so-called "Lost Generation," chronicling the experiences of Jake Barnes and several acquaintances on their pilgrimage to Pamplona for the annual San F...
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Amerika by Franz Kafka
Karl Rossman has been banished by his parents to America, following a family scandal. There, with unquenchable optimism, he throws himself into the strange experiences that lie before him as he slo...
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The Case of Sergeant Grischa by Arnold Zweig
The Case of Sergeant Grischa (1927) is a war novel by the German writer Arnold Zweig. Its original German title is Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa. It is part of Zweig's hexalogy Der große Kri...
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Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson
Tarka the Otter: His Joyful Water-Life and Death in the Country of the Two Rivers is a highly influential novel by Henry Williamson, first published in 1927 by G.P. Putnam's Sons with an introducti...
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To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
A landmark novel of high modernism, the text, centering on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920, skillfully manipulates temporality and psycholog...
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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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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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Quicksand by Nella Larsen
Quicksand is a novel by American author Nella Larsen, first published in 1928. This is her first novel and the first draft was completed in a short period of time. The novel was out of print from t...
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Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
Sent down from Oxford in outrageous circumstances, Paul Pennyfeather is oddly surprised to find himself qualifying for the position of schoolmaster at Llanabba Castle. His colleagues are an assortm...
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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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Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford
In creating his acclaimed masterpiece Parade's End, Ford Madox Ford "wanted the Novelist in fact to appear in his really proud position as historian of his own time . . . The 'subject' was the worl...
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The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
The Well of Loneliness is a lesbian novel by British author Radclyffe Hall that was first published in 1928 by Jonathan Cape. It follows the life of Stephen Gordon, an Englishwoman from an upper-cl...
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Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
Lyric and sensual, D.H. Lawrence's last novel is one of the major works of fiction of the twentieth century. Filled with scenes of intimate beauty, explores the emotions of a lonely woman trapped i...
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Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf
In her most exuberant, most fanciful novel, Woolf has created a character liberated from the restraints of time and sex. Born in the Elizabethan Age to wealth and position, Orlando is a young noble...
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Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille
Bataille’s first novel, published under the pseudonym ‘Lord Auch’, is still his most notorious work. In this explicit pornographic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcell...
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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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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...
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All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
All Quiet on the Western Front (German: Im Westen nichts Neues) is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I. The book describes the German soldiers' extreme physical and men...
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The Time of Indifference by Alberto Moravia
Gli Indifferenti (The Time of Indifference, also translated as The Indifferent Ones) is a novel by Alberto Moravia, published in 1929.
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Living by Henry Green
LIVING, as an early novel, marks the beginning of Henry Green's career as a writer who made his name by exploring class distinctions through the medium of love. Set in an iron foundry in Birmingham...
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I Thought of Daisy by Edmund Wilson
Originally published in 1929, I Thought of Daisy is the first of three novels by Edmund Wilson. Written while he was still balancing his ambitions as a novelist against a successful career in liter...
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A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
The novel is told through the point of view of Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American serving as an ambulance driver in the Italian army during World War I.
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Passing by Nella Larsen
Passing is a novel by American author Nella Larsen, first published in 1929. Set primarily in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s, the story centers on the reunion of two childhoo...
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Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
It is Wolfe's first novel, and is considered a highly autobiographical American Bildungsroman. The character of Eugene Gant is generally believed to be a depiction of Wolfe himself. The novel cover...
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The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
A treasure worth killing for. Sam Spade, a slightly shopworn private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. A perfumed grafter named Joel Cairo, a fat man name Gutman, and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, ...
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Her Privates We by Frederic Manning
First published privately in 1929 as The Middle Parts of Fortune, Her Privates We is the novel of the Battle of the Somme told from the perspective of Bourne, an ordinary private. A raw and shockin...
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The Apes of God by Wyndham Lewis
The Apes of God is a 1930 novel by the British artist and writer Wyndham Lewis. It is a satire of London's contemporary literary and artistic scene. The novel is set in 1926, leading up to the Ge...
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Monica by Saunders Lewis
Opinion on Monica has been deeply divided since its publication in 1930. Saunders Lewis's first novel was fiercely attacked by Welsh-speaking critics for its portrayal of sexual obsession and manip...
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Insatiability by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
Insatiability (Polish: Nienasycenie) is a novel by the Polish writer, dramatist, philosopher, painter and photographer, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy). Nienasycenie was written in 1927 and f...
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The Waves by Virginia Woolf
The Waves, first published in 1931, is Virginia Woolf's most experimental novel. It consists of soliloquies spoken by the book's six characters: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis.[1]...
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To the North by Elizabeth Bowen
A young woman’s secret love affair leads to a violent and tragic act in one of Elizabeth Bowen’s most acclaimed novels. To the North centers on two young women in 1920s London, the recently widowed...
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The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett
The Thin Man (1934) is a detective novel by Dashiell Hammett, originally published in the December 1933 issue of Redbook. It appeared in book form the following month. Hammett never wrote a sequel...
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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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The Return of Philip Latinowicz by Miroslav Krleža
The Return of Philip Latinowicz (Croatian: Povratak Filipa Latinovicza, pronounced [pǒvratak fǐlipa latǐːnoʋitɕa]) is a novel by the Croatian author Miroslav Krleža. It is considered the first mode...
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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 Forbidden Kingdom by Jan Jacob Slauerhoff
Slauerhoff’s The Forbidden Kingdom is a blend of historical chronicle, fiction and commentary, bringing together the seemingly unrelated lives of a twentieth century ship’s radio operator and the s...
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Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
When sensible, sophisticated Flora Poste is orphaned at nineteen, she decides her only choice is to descend upon relatives in deepest Sussex. At the aptly named Cold Comfort Farm, she meets the doo...
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Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Set in the London of AD 2540 (632 A.F. in the book), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology and sleep-learning that combine to change society. The future society is an embod...
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Viper’s Tangle by François Mauriac
The masterpiece of one of the twentieth century’s greatest Catholic writers, Vipers’ Tangle tells the story of Monsieur Louis, an embittered aging lawyer who has spread his misery to his entire est...
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The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
The Man without Qualities (1930-42) is a novel in three books by the Austrian novelist and essayist Robert Musil. The main issue of this "story of ideas", which takes place in the time of the Au...
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Cheese by Willem Elsschot
When the ambitious but inept clerk Frans Laarmans is offered a job managing an Edam distribution company in Antwerp, he jumps at the chance, despite his professed dislike for cheese in all its form...
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A Day Off by Storm Jameson
First published in 1933, this outstanding collection is made up of two short novels, A Day Off and The Single Heart, and three long stories which show the variety of the author's great writing skil...
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Testament Of Youth by Vera Brittain
Testament of Youth is the first instalment, covering 1900–1925, in the memoir of Vera Brittain (1893–1970). It was published in 1933. Brittain's memoir continues with Testament of Experience, publi...
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The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
Largely to amuse herself, Gertrude Stein wrote this book in 1932..using as a sounding board her companion Miss Toklas, who had been with her for twenty-five years. The book is full of the most luci...
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Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L Sayers
Murder Must Advertise is a 1933 mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, the eighth in her series featuring Lord Peter Wimsey.
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Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West
First published in 1933, Miss Lonelyhearts remains one of the most shocking works of 20th century American literature, as unnerving as a glob of black bile vomited up at a church social: empty, bla...
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Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
Call It Sleep is the story of an Austrian-Jewish immigrant family in New York in the early part of the twentieth century. Six-year-old David Schearl has a close and loving relationship with his mot...
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The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz
The Street of Crocodiles (Polish: Sklepy cynamonowe, lit. "Cinnamon Shops") is a 1934 collection of short stories written by Bruno Schulz. First published in Polish, the collection was translated ...
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Thank You, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse
Thank You, Jeeves is a Jeeves comic novel by P.G. Wodehouse, first published in the United Kingdom on 16 March 1934 by Herbert Jenkins, London, and in the United States on 23 April 1934 by Little, ...
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Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The story is that of the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychoanalyst and his wife, Nicole, who is also one of his patients. It would be Fitzgerald's first novel in nine years, and ...
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Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
Set in France (primarily Paris) during the 1930s, it is the tale of Miller's life as a struggling writer. Combining fiction and autobiography, some chapters follow a strict narrative and refer to M...
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The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
An amoral young tramp. A beautiful, sullen woman with an inconvenient husband. A problem that has only one grisly solution — a solution that only creates other problems that no one can ever solve. ...
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On the Heights of Despair by Emil Cioran
Born of a terrible insomnia—"a dizzying lucidity which would turn even paradise into hell"—this book presents the youthful Cioran, a self-described "Nietzsche still complete with his Zarathustra, h...
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The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L Sayers
The Nine Tailors is a 1934 mystery novel by the British writer Dorothy L. Sayers, her ninth featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. It has been described as her finest literary achievement.
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Auto Da Fé by Elias Canetti
Auto Da Fé is the story of Peter Kien, a distinguished, reclusive sinologist living in Germany between the wars. With masterly precision, Canetti reveals Kien's character, displaying the flawed per...
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They Shoot Horses, Don't They? by Horace McCoy
They Shoot Horses, Don't They? is a novel written by Horace McCoy and first published in 1935. The story mainly concerns a dance marathon during the Great Depression. It was adapted into Sydney Po...
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Mr Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood
Two Englishmen meeting on a train to Berlin in 1930 kick off one of Isherwood’s most enduring novels On a train to Berlin in late 1930, William Bradshaw locks eyes with Arthur Norris, an irresistib...
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Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand
Untouchable is a novel by Mulk Raj Anand published in 1935. The novel established Anand as one of India's leading English authors. The book was inspired by his aunt's experience when she had a meal...
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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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Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
The fiery and enigmatic masterpiece—one of the greatest novels of the Modernist era.
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At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft
At the Mountains of Madness is a science fiction-horror novella by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written in February/March 1931 and rejected that year by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright on ...
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Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Absalom, Absalom! is a Southern Gothic novel by the American author William Faulkner, first published in 1936. It is a story about three families of the American South, taking place before, during,...
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War with the Newts by Karel Čapek
War with the Newts (Válka s mloky in the original Czech), also translated as War with the Salamanders, is a 1936 satirical science fiction novel by Czech author Karel Čapek. It concerns the discove...
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Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell
Keep the Aspidistra Flying, first published in 1936, is a socially critical novel by George Orwell. It is set in 1930s London. The main theme is Gordon Comstock's romantic ambition to defy worship ...
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Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Gone With the Wind is set in Jonesboro and Atlanta, Georgia during the American Civil War and Reconstruction and follows the life of Scarlett O'Hara, the daughter of an Irish immigrant plantation o...
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The Thinking Reed by Rebecca West
West’s thoughtful romantic novel—now available as an ebook A tale of love found, lost, rekindled, and redefined Isabelle, a wealthy American widow, arrives in France to restart her life and discove...
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Eyeless in Gaza by Aldous Huxley
Eyeless in Gaza is a bestselling novel by Aldous Huxley, first published in 1936. The title originates from a phrase in John Milton's Samson Agonistes: ... Promise was that I Should Israel fr...
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Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Sophia Willoughby, a young Englishwoman from an aristocratic family and a person of strong opinions and even stronger will, has packed her cheating husband off to Paris. He can have his tawdry mist...
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Rickshaw Boy by Lao She
Rickshaw Boy or Camel Xiangzi (Chinese: 骆驼祥子; pinyin: Luòtuo Xiángzi; literally: 'Camel Auspicious Lad') is a novel by the Chinese author Lao She about the life of a fictional Beijing rickshaw man....
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Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
Out of Africa is a memoir by Isak Dinesen, a nom de plume used by the Danish author Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke. The book, first published in 1937, recounts events of the seventeen years when...
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In Parenthesis by David Jones
In Parenthesis is an epic poem of the First World War by David Jones first published in England in 1937. Although Jones had been known solely as an engraver and painter prior to its publication, th...
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Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz
Ferdydurke is a novel by the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, published in 1937. Gombrowicz himself wrote of his novel that it is not "... a satire on some social class, nor a nihilistic attack ...
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The Blind Owl by Ṣādiq Hidāyat
The Blind Owl (1936; Persian: بوف کور, Boof-e koor, listen ) is Sadegh Hedayat's magnum opus and a major literary work of 20th century Iran. Written in Persian, it tells the story of an unnamed pe...
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The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
A fantasy novel and children's book by J. R. R. Tolkien. Set in a time "Between the Dawn of Færie and the Dominion of Men", The Hobbit follows the quest of home-loving Bilbo Baggins to win a share ...
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Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
The main character, an African American woman in her early forties named Janie Crawford, tells the story of her life and journey via an extended flashback to her best friend, Pheoby, so that Pheoby...
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Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Published in 1937, it tells the tragic story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers during the Great Depression in California. Based on Steinbeck's own experiences a...
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Murphy by Samuel Beckett
Edited by J. C. C. Mays Murphy, Samuel Beckett's first novel, was published in 1938. Its work-shy eponymous hero, adrift in London, realises that desire can never be satisfied and withdraws from li...
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U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos
The U.S.A. Trilogy is the major work of American writer John Dos Passos, comprising the novels The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919, also known as Nineteen Nineteen (1932), and The Big Money (1936). The ...
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Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
Pinkie, a boy gangster in pre-war Brighton, is a Catholic dedicated to evil and damnation. In a dark setting of double crossing and razor slashes, his ambition and hatreds are horribly fulfilled, u...
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Cause for Alarm by Eric Ambler
Cause for Alarm is a novel by Eric Ambler first published in 1938. Set in Fascist Italy in that year, the book is one of Ambler's classic spy thrillers.
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Alamut by Vladimir Bartol
Alamut is a novel by Vladimir Bartol, first published in 1938 in Slovenian, dealing with the story of Hassan-i Sabbah and the Hashshashin, and named after their Alamut fortress. Bartol first start...
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Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Rebecca is considered to be one of her best works. Some observers have noted parallels with Jane Eyre. Much of the novel was written while she was staying in Alexandria, Egypt, where her husband wa...
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Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre
Sartre's greatest novel — and existentialism's key text — now introduced by James Wood. Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressio...
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Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson
Miss Pettigrew, a governess looking for work, is sent by mistake to the home of Delysia LaFosse, a glamorous nightclub singer involved with three different men and is invited to stay after offering...
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On the Edge of Reason by Miroslav Krleža
"On the Edge of Reason is one of the great European novels of the first half of the twentieth century – and Krleza's themes, his seriousness, his protest against the normality of delusion and cruel...
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The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Big Sleep (1939) is a crime novel by Raymond Chandler, the first in his acclaimed series about hardboiled detective Philip Marlowe. The work has been adapted twice into film, once in 1946 and a...
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Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood
Isherwood's classic story of Berlin in the 1930s - and the inspiration for Cabaret - now in a stand-alone edition. First published in 1934, Goodbye to Berlin has been popularized on stage and scree...
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The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on a poor family of sharecroppers, the Joads, driven from their home by drought, economic hardship, and changes in the agriculture industry. In a ...
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Native Son by Richard Wright
The novel tells the story of 20-year old Bigger Thomas, an African American living in utter poverty. Bigger lived in Chicago's South Side ghetto in the 1930s. Bigger was always getting into troubl...
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The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati
Often Likened to Kafka's The Castle, this great Italian novel, first published in 1945, is both a scathing criticism of military life and a meditation on the human thirst for glory. It tells of you...
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The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
The novel tells the story of a Roman Catholic priest in the state of Tabasco in Mexico during the 1930s, a time when the Mexican government, still effectively controlled by Plutarco Elías Calles, s...
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For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
It tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to a communist guerilla unit during the Spanish Civil War. As an expert in the use of explosives, he is ...
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The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
The novel tells the story of a highly dysfunctional family, the Pollits. The story centers on the family's impoverishment, the failure of the father Sam to provide for them, the parents' marital ba...
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The Living and the Dead by Patrick White
The Living and the Dead is a novel by Australian Nobel Prize laureate Patrick White, his second published book (1941). It was written in the early stages of World War II whilst the author alternate...
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Conversations in Sicily by Elio Vittorini
Conversazione in Sicilia (Italian pronunciation: [koɱversatˈtsjoːne in siˈtʃiːlja]) is a novel by the Italian author Elio Vittorini. It originally appeared in serial form in the literary magazine L...
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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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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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The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig
On a cruise ship bound for Buenos Aires, an electifying encounter takes place between the reigning world chess champion and an unknown passenger. The stranger’s diffident manner masks his extraordi...
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The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
In an unspecified future symbolic world of the twenty-third century, Joseph Knecht achieves and rejects his long-sought ideal of uniting thought and action in isolated Castalia, where scholar-playe...
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Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann
Joseph and His Brothers (Joseph und seine Brüder) is a four-part novel by Thomas Mann, written over the course of 16 years. Mann retells the familiar stories of Genesis, from Jacob to Joseph (chapt...
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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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Dangling Man by Saul Bellow
Dangling Man is a 1944 novel by Saul Bellow. It is his first published work.
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The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute. The progress of his spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham's most brilliant characters - his fiancée Isabel whose choice be...
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Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
Pippi Longstocking is a children's book written in 1945 by Astrid Lindgren. Pippi is a 9-year old that lives in an old villa in a Swedish town. (which remains unnamed for the series) She meet To...
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Loving by Henry Green
Loving tells the story of the servants in Kinalty Castle, an upper-class Irish household during World War II.
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Animal Farm by George Orwell
Animal Farm is a dystopian novella by George Orwell. Published in England on 17 August 1945, the book reflects events leading up to and during the Stalin era before World War II. Orwell, a democrat...
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The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrić
The Bridge on the Drina (Serbo-Croatian: Na Drini ćuprija, Serbian Cyrillic: На Дрини ћуприја) is a historical novel by the Yugoslav writer Ivo Andrić. It revolves around the Mehmed Paša Sokolović ...
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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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Arcanum 17 by André Breton
Arcane 17 is a poetic text by André Breton (1896-1966) written from August 20 to October 20 , 19445 during a trip to the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec , on the east coast of Canada , with Elisa Claro ,...
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Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder is a novel by the English writer Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1945. Waugh wrote that the novel "deals with what is t...
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Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andrić
The Nobel Prize–winning author’s sweeping historical novel of Bosnia is “rich with humanity and the humor that comes with wisdom” (Library Journal). Set in the town of Travnik, Bosnian Chronicle pr...
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The Tin Flute by Gabrielle Roy
The Tin Flute (original French title Bonheur d'occasion, "secondhand happiness"), Gabrielle Roy’s first novel, is a classic of Canadian fiction. Imbued with Roy’s brand of compassion and understand...
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Nada by Carmen Laforet
Nada, which means "nothing" in Spanish, is the first novel of Spanish author Carmen Laforet, published in 1945.
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Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch
It is the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and Publius Vergilius Maro, the poet of the Aeneid and Caesar's enchanter, has been summoned to the palace, where he will shortly die. Out of the last hours...
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Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
An undisputed classic of epic fantasy, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels represent one of the most brilliantly sustained flights of Gothic imagination. As the novel opens, Titus, heir to Lord Sepul...
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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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The Path to the Nest of Spiders by Italo Calvino
The Path to the Nest of Spiders (Italian: Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno) is a 1947 novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino. The narrative is a coming-of-age story, set against the backdrop of Wor...
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Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
To describe his perennial theme, Lowry once borrowed the words of the critic Edmund Wilson: "the forces in man which cause him to be terrified of himself." You see exactly what he means in this cor...
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If This Is a Man by Primo Levi
If This Is a Man is a work of witness by the Italian author Primo Levi. It was influenced by his experiences in the concentration camp at Auschwitz during the Second World War. It can be described ...
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Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau
Exercises in Style (French: Exercices de style), written by Raymond Queneau, is a collection of 99 retellings of the same story, each in a different style. In each, the narrator gets on the "S" bus...
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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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Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann
Doctor Faustus is a German novel written by Thomas Mann, begun in 1943 and published in 1947 as Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde ("Doct...
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Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz
This article is about the Naguib Mahfouz novel. For the film of the novel, see Midaq Alley (film). For the alley, see Khan El-Khalili. Midaq Alley is the English Translation of Zuqāq al-Midaq by...
