100 Essential Books

This is one of the 759 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.

About this list

Bravo! Magazine, 100 Books

The Brazilian cultural magazine Bravo! selects 100 essential books.

This list was originally published in 2009 and was added to this site over 11 years ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
37 The Iliad Homer -750 Greek Ancient greek
24 The Odyssey Homer -740 Greek Ancient greek
71 Hamlet William Shakespeare 1600 British English
8 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 1605 Spanish Spanish
30 The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri 1308 Italian Italian
2 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust 1913 French French
1 Ulysses James Joyce 1922 Irish English
12 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy 1869 Russian Russian
11 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky 1866 Russian Russian
75 Essays Michel de Montaigne 1580 French French
106 Oedipus the King Sophocles -429 Greek Ancient greek
1109 Othello William Shakespeare 1603 British English
20 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857 French French
96 Faust Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1808 German German
21 The Trial Franz Kafka 1925 Czech German
135 Doctor Faustus Thomas Mann 1947 German German
178 The Flowers of Evil Charles Baudelaire 1857 French French
9 The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner 1929 American English
111 The Waste Land T. S. Eliot 1922 British English
3256 The Theogony Hesiod -700 Greek Ancient greek
175 Metamorphoses Ovid 8 Roman Latin
42 The Red and the Black Stendhal 1830 French French
3 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 American English
238 A Season in Hell Arthur Rimbaud 1873 French French
40 Les Misérables Victor Hugo 1862 French French
23 The Stranger Albert Camus 1942 French French
307 Medea Euripides -431 Greek Ancient greek
70 The Aeneid Virgil -19 Roman Latin
5987 Twelfth Night William Shakespeare 1602 British English
67 A Farewell to Arms Ernest Hemingway 1929 American English
31 Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad 1899 British English
50 Brave New World Aldous Huxley 1932 British English
32 Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf 1925 British English
7 Moby-Dick Herman Melville 1851 American English
98 The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe 1902 American English
341 The Human Comedy Honoré de Balzac 1830 French French
38 Great Expectations Charles Dickens 1860 British English
82 The Man Without Qualities Robert Musil 1930 Austrian German
65 Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift 1726 British English
257 Finnegans Wake James Joyce 1939 Irish English
481 The Lusiad Luís Vaz Camões 1572 Portuguese Portuguese
119 The Three Musketeers Alexandre Dumas 1844 French French
73 The Portrait of a Lady Henry James 1881 American English
122 Decameron Giovanni Boccaccio 1353 Italian Italian
101 Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett 1953 Irish French
6 Nineteen Eighty Four George Orwell 1949 British English
2422 Galileo Bertolt Brecht 1938 German German
463 The Songs of Maldoror Comte de Lautréamont 1868 French French
1304 Collected Poems Stéphane Mallarmé 1887 French French
14 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov 1955 American English
984 Tartuffe Molière 1664 French French
572 Three Sisters Anton Chekhov 1901 Russian Russian
46 One Thousand and One Nights Unknown 800 Multiple Arabic
4953 The Trickster of Seville and His Guest of Stone Tirso de Molina 1630 Spanish Spanish
11197 Mensagem Fernando Pessoa 1934 Portuguese Portuguese
127 Paradise Lost John Milton 1667 British English
69 Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe 1719 British English
213 The Counterfeiters André Gide 1925 French French
301 The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas Machado de Assis 1881 Brazilian Portuguese
89 The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde 1890 Irish English
1386 Six Characters in Search of an Author Luigi Pirandello 1921 Italian Italian
35 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll 1865 British English
245 Nausea Jean Paul Sartre 1938 French French
147 Confessions of Zeno Italo Svevo 1923 Italian Italian
1305 Long Day's Journey Into Night Eugene O'Neill 1956 American English
172 Man's Fate Andre Malraux 1933 French French
1441 The Cantos Ezra Pound 1933 American English
1229 Songs of Innocence and Experience William Blake 1789 British English
599 A Streetcar Named Desire Tennessee Williams 1947 American English
45 Fictions Jorge Luis Borges 1944 Argentinian Spanish
3515 Rhinoceros and Other Plays Eugène Ionesco 1959 Romanian French
231 Death of Virgil Hermann Broch 1945 Austrian German
77 Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman 1855 American English
263 The Tartar Steppe Dino Buzzati 1940 Italian Italian
5 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez 1967 Colombian Spanish
48 Journey to the End of The Night Louis-Ferdinand Céline 1932 French French
11233 The Illustrious House of Ramires Eça de Queirós 1900 Portuguese Portuguese
354 Hopscotch Julio Cortazar 1963 Argentinian Spanish
26 The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck 1939 American English
123 Memoirs of Hadrian Marguerite Yourcenar 1951 French French
4 The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger 1951 American English
22 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884 American English
225 Fairy Tales and Stories Hans Christian Andersen 1835 Danish Danish
56 The Leopard Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa 1958 Italian Italian
51 The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne 1759 British English
78 A Passage to India E. M. Forster 1924 British English
13 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen 1813 British English
239 Tropic of Cancer Henry Miller 1934 American English
179 Fathers and Sons Ivan Turgenev 1862 Russian Russian
4587 The Loser Thomas Bernhard 1983 Austrian German
264 The Epic Of Gilgamesh Unknown -2100 Multiple Akkadian
323 Mahabharata Vyasa -400 Indian Sanskrit
202 Invisible Cities Italo Calvino 1972 Italian Italian
41 On the Road Jack Kerouac 1957 American English
171 Steppenwolf Hermann Hesse 1927 German German
241 Portnoy's Complaint Philip Roth 1969 American English
248 Atonement Ian McEwan 2001 British English
255 Disgrace J. M. Coetzee 1999 South African English
1360 The Makioka Sisters Junichiro Tanizaki 1948 Japanese Japanese
124 Pedro Páramo Juan Rulfo 1955 Mexican Spanish