The 100 Best Books of World Literature by ABC.es
A Spanish based list made by Fifty writers, critics and personalities from the world of culture have chosen their literary preferences to compile this list.
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1. 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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2. The Odyssey by Homer
The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work traditionally ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the m...
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4. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Belonging in the immortal company of the great works of literature, Dante Alighieri's poetic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, is a moving human drama, an unforgettable visionary journey through the ...
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5. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601. The play, set in Denmark, recounts how Pri...
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6. The Bible by Christian Church
The Authorized King James Version is an English translation of the Christian Bible begun in 1604 and completed in 1611 by the Church of England. Printed by the King's Printer, Robert Barker, the fi...
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7. 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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8. The Aeneid by Virgil
The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem written by Virgil in the late 1st century BC (29–19 BC) that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who traveled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the...
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9. Essays by Michel de Montaigne
Essays is the title given to a collection of 107 essays written by Michel de Montaigne that was first published in 1580. Montaigne essentially invented the literary form of essay, a short subjectiv...
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10. 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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11. 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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11. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
Oedipus the King is an Athenian tragedy by Sophocles that was first performed c. 429 BC. It was the second of Sophocles's three Theban plays to be produced, but it comes first in the internal chron...
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13. King Lear by William Shakespeare
King Lear is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1603 and 1606. It is considered one of his greatest works. The play is based on the legend of Leir of Britain, a...
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14. 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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15. The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross by St. John of the Cross
John of the Cross (born Juan de Yepes y Álvarez; Spanish: Juan de la Cruz; 24 June 1542 — 14 December 1591), venerated as Saint John of the Cross, was a Spanish Catholic priest, mystic, and a Carme...
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15. Macbeth by William Shakespeare
The Tragedy of Macbeth, commonly just Macbeth, is a play by William Shakespeare about a regicide and its aftermath. It is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy and is believed to have been written sometim...
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17. De Rerum Natura by Lucretius
De rerum natura is a first century BC epic poem by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius with the goal of explaining Epicurean philosophy to a Roman audience. The poem, written in dactylic hexam...
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18. Life Is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Considered one of the outstanding Spanish dramas of all time, this 17th-century allegory explores the mysteries of human destiny, the illusory nature of existence, and the struggle between predesti...
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18. Epic of Gilgamesh by Unknown
The Epic of Gilgamesh is an epic poem from Ancient Iraq and is among the earliest known works of literary writings. Scholars believe that it originated as a series of Sumerian legends and poems abo...
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20. 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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23. 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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24. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world, and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning car...
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25. Petrarch's Songbook by Francesco Petrarca
"Petrarch's Canzoniere is a body of 366 poems, mostly sonnets but including forms such as madrigals and canzoni. These wonderful poems marked the intellectual and cultural divide between the Middle...
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26. Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted ...
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26. Family Sayings by Natalia Ginzburg
Family Sayings (Original title Lessico famigliare) is a novel by the Italian author Natalia Ginzburg, first published in 1963. It is a semi-biographical description of aspects of the daily life of ...
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28. 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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28. Lazarillo de Tormes by Unknown
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 servic...
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30. 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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31. El Buscón by Francisco de Quevedo
El Buscón (full title Historia de la vida del Buscón, llamado Don Pablos, ejemplo de vagamundos y espejo de tacaños (literally: History of the life of the Swindler, called Don Pablos, model for hob...
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31. The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
The Sea, the Sea is the 19th novel by Iris Murdoch. It won the Booker Prize in 1978. The Sea, the Sea is a tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a self-satisfied playwright and director as h...
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33. Collected Fiction by Jorge Luis Borges
From his 1935 debut with The Universal History of Iniquity, through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, these enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display Borges'...
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33. 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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33. Poems by Machado by Antonio Machado
Antonio Machado, a school teacher and philosopher and one of Spain’s foremost poets of the twentieth century, writes of the mountains, the skies, the farms and the sentiments of his homeland clearl...
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37. The Interior Castle by Teresa of Avila
The Interior Castle, or The Mansions, (Spanish: El Castillo Interior or Las Moradas) was written by Teresa of Ávila, the Spanish Carmelite nun and famed mystic, in 1577, as a guide for spiritual de...
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37. 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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39. 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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39. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Metamorphosis (German: Die Verwandlung) is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915. It is often cited as one of the seminal works of short fiction of the 20th century and is widely st...
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39. Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo
Pedro Páramo is a short novel written by Juan Rulfo, originally published in 1955. In just the 23 FCE editions and reprintings, it had sold by November 1997 1,143,000 copies. Other editions in Mexi...
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39. Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
In the early summer of the year 1348, as a terrible plague ravages the city, ten charming young Florentines take refuge in country villas to tell each other stories — a hundred stories of love, adv...
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39. Celestina by Fernando de Rojas
The racy and irreverent Spanish tragicomedy that is considered the first European novel-in a spirited new translation A Spanish Romeo and Juliet, Celestina was published in 1499 and became Spain's ...
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39. The Tempest by William Shakespeare
The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, estimated to have been written in 1610–11, (although some researchers have argued for an earlier dating). The play's protagonist is the banished sorcer...
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45. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, The Karamazov Brothers, is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate. The dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is mur...
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45. 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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45. 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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45. 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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49. Poet in New York by Federico García Lorca
Poet in New York is one of the most important works of Spanish author Federico García Lorca. It is a body of poems composed during the visit of the poet to Columbia University in New York in the ye...
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49. 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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49. Soledades by Luis de Góngora
Las Soledades (Solitudes) is a poem by Luis de Góngora, composed in 1613 in silva (Spanish strophe) in hendecasyllables (lines of eleven syllables) and heptasyllables (seven syllables). Góngora in...
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49. The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine De Pizan
The Book of the City of Ladies or Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (finished by 1405), is perhaps Christine de Pizan's most famous literary work, and it is her second work of lengthy prose. Pizan use...
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53. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Love in the Time of Cholera is a novel by Nobel Prize winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez that was first published in Spanish in 1985, with an English translation released in 1988 by Al...
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53. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass (1855) is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt Whitman. Among the poems in the collection are "Song of Myself," "I Sing the Body Electric," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Roc...
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53. 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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53. 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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53. Song of Songs by Christian Church
The Song of Songs, also Song of Solomon or Canticle of Canticles (Hebrew: שִׁיר הַשִּׁירִים Šîr Hašîrîm, Greek and Ancient Greek: Ἆισμα Ἀισμάτων, romanized: Âsma Āsmátōn; Latin: Canticum Canticōru...
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53. 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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53. 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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53. The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
Written for publication as a serial, The Pickwick Papers is a sequence of loosely-related adventures. The novel's main character, Mr. Samuel Pickwick, Esquire, is a kind and wealthy old gentleman, ...
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53. Sóngoro cosongo by Nicolás Guillén
Sóngoro cosongo is a book of poetry by the Cuban writer Nicolás Guillén . Published after The reasons for the son , it established him as a great poet. It was published in 1931. It belongs to mu...
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53. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by . First published during 24 October 1929, it was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges ...
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53. The Stories of Raymond Carver by Raymond Carver
Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver was a notable writer of the late 20th century and a contributor to the revitalization ...
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53. Metaphysics by Aristotle
Metaphysics (Greek: τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικά; Latin: Metaphysica; lit: "the beyond the physical") is one of the principal works of Aristotle and one of the first major works of the branch of philosophy wi...
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53. The Poetry of Luis Cernuda by Luis Cernuda
A study of the work of the Spanish poet Luis Cernuda (1902-1963).
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53. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is an 1,181-page travel book written by Dame Rebecca West, published in 1941. The book gives an account of Balkan history and ethnography, and the significance of Nazi...
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53. Curial e Güelfa by Anonymous
Curial e Güelfa is an Italian "humanistic chivalry" novel written in Valencian or Western Catalan 1 and with many Italianisms. 2 It was probably written between the courts of Milan and Naples by th...
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53. América Hispánica: (1492-1898) by Guillermo Céspedes del Castillo
No son tantos los libros escritos por historiadores españoles que merezcan el título de «clásicos». Sin la menor duda, América Hispánica (1492-1898) (Barcelona, Labor, 1983) es uno de ellos. Ponemo...
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69. 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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69. 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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69. A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud
"With skill and imagination, Bertrand Mathieu gives us an intimacy of the spoken American that allows readers to absorb themselves in Rimbaud's private drama as in an obsessive dream of our own.......
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69. 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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69. The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian short-story writer, playwright and physician, considered to be one of the greatest short-story writers in the history of world literature. His career as a dram...
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69. Coplas por la muerte de su padre by Jorge Manrique
Coplas por la Muerte de su Padre (English: "Stanzas about the Death of his Father") is Jorge Manrique's best composition. In fact, Lope de Vega pronounced it in humbled admiration to its superior c...
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69. Ada or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov
Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov published in 1969. Ada began to materialize in 1959, when Nabokov was flirting with two projects, "The Texture of Time" and "Letter...
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69. The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
The Snow Leopard is a 1978 book by Peter Matthiessen, which is an account of his two month journey along with naturalist George Schaller in 1973 to Crystal Mountain, in the Dolpo region on the Tibe...
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69. La siesta de M. Andesmas by Marguerite Duras
Monsieur Andesmas, sesenta y ocho años, compra una casa para su hija Valérie. Quiere construir una terraza que domine sobre la llanura, un pueblo, el Mediterráneo. Espera al contratista, que se ha ...
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69. 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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69. The Way of a Pilgrim by Anonymous
The Way of a Pilgrim, or The Pilgrim's Tale is the English title of a 19th-century Russian work, recounting the narrator's journey as a mendicant pilgrim while practising the Jesus Prayer. The pilg...
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69. Calila e Dimna by Anonymous
Calila e Dimna is an Old Castilian collection of tales from 1251, translated from the Arabic text Kalila wa-Dimna by the order of the future King Alfonso X while he was still a prince. The Arabic t...
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81. Sanctuary by William Faulkner
A powerful novel examining the nature of evil, informed by the works of T. S. Eliot and Freud, mythology, local lore, and hardboiled detective fiction, Sanctuary is the dark, at times brutal, story...
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81. Fortunata and Jacinta by Benito Pérez Galdós
Fortunata y Jacinta (Fortunata and Jacinta), was written by Benito Pérez Galdós in 1887. It is, together with Leopoldo Alas y Ureña's La Regenta (The Judge's Wife), one of the most popular and repr...
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81. 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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81. 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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81. 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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81. Guzmán de Alfarache by Mateo Alemán
Guzmán de Alfarache [ɡuðˈman de alfaˈɾatʃe] is a picaresque novel written by Mateo Alemán and published in two parts: the first in Madrid in 1599 with the title Primera parte de Guzmán de Alfarache...
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81. The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster
The Invention of Solitude is Paul Auster's first memoir, published in the year 1982. The book is divided into two separate parts, Portrait of an Invisible Man, which concerns the sudden death of Au...
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81. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis by José Saramago
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (in Portuguese: O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis) is a 1984 novel by Portuguese novelist José Saramago, the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in literature. It tell...
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81. Gospels by Various Authors
Gospel originally meant the Christian message, but in the 2nd century it came to be used also for the books in which the message was set out; in this sense a gospel can be defined as a loose-knit, ...
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81. Upanishads by Hindu scripture
The Upanishads are Hindu scriptures that constitute the core teachings of Vedanta.[1] They do not belong to any particular period of Sanskrit literature: the oldest, such as the Brhadaranyaka and C...
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81. Letters from a Stoic by Seneca
The Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Latin for "Moral Letters to Lucilius"), also known as the Moral Epistles and Letters from a Stoic, is a collection of 124 letters that Seneca the Younger wrote at...
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81. Elizabeth Costello by J M Coetzee
Elizabeth Costello is a 2003 novel by South African-born Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee. In this novel, Elizabeth Costello, a celebrated aging Australian writer, travels around the world and gives...
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81. 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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81. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology by Edmund Husserl
The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (German: Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomen...
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97. 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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97. Poetry by Quintus Lutatius Catulus
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and im...
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97. The Nibelungenlied by Anonymous
Thought to have been first written down in the 12th century by an author who is still unknown, the Nibelungenlied, translated from Middle High German as the Song of the Nibelungs, is an epic German...
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97. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot (pronounced /ˈɡɒdoʊ/) is a play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait for someone named Godot. Godot's absence, as well as numerous other aspects...
