1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die
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A Thousand Cranes
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Casino Royale
Junkie
Lucky Jim
The Lost Steps
The Hothouse
The Long Good-Bye
The Go-Between
The Dark Child
A Day in Spring
A Ghost at Noon
The Story of O
Under the Net
Lord of the Flies
The Mandarins
Bonjour Tristesse
Death in Rome
The Sound of Waves
The Unknown Soldier
I’m Not Stiller
The Ragazzi
The Recognitions
The Burning Plain
The Quiet American
The Trusting and the Maimed
The Tree of Man
The Last Temptation of Christ
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
Lolita
The Talented Mr. Ripley
The Lord of the Rings
The Lonely Londoners
The Roots of Heaven
The Floating Opera
Giovanni’s Room
Justine
The Glass Bees
Doctor Zhivago
Pnin
On the Road
The Manila Rope
The Deadbeats
Homo Faber
Blue of Noon
The Midwich Cuckoos
Voss
Jealousy
The Birds
The Once and Future King
The Bell
Borstal Boy
Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Things Fall Apart
The Bitter Glass
The Guide
The Leopard
Deep Rivers
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Pluck the Bud and Destroy the Offspring
Billiards at Half-Past Nine
Down Second Avenue
Cider With Rosie
The Tin Drum
The Naked Lunch
Billy Liar
Absolute Beginners
Promise at Dawn
Rabbit, Run
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Magician of Lublin
Halftime
The Country Girls
Bebo’s Girl
God’s Bits of Wood
The Shipyard
Catch-22
Solaris
Cat and Mouse
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
A Severed Head
Franny and Zooey
No One Writes to the Colonel
Faces in the Water
Memoirs of a Peasant Boy
Stranger in a Strange Land
Labyrinths
The Golden Notebook
Time of Silence
Pale Fire
A Clockwork Orange
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Girl with Green Eyes
The Death of Artemio Cruz
The Time of the Hero
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
The Third Wedding
Dog Years
The Bell Jar
Inside Mr. Enderby
The Girls of Slender Means
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
Manon des Sources
The Graduate
Cat’s Cradle
V.
Herzog
The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein
Arrow of God
Three Trapped Tigers
Sometimes a Great Notion
The Passion According to G. H.
Back to Oegstgeest
Closely Watched Trains
The River Between
Garden, Ashes
Everything That Rises Must Converge
Things
In Cold Blood
Death and the Dervish
Silence
To Each His Own
The Crying of Lot 49
Giles Goat-Boy
Marks of Identity
The Vice-Consul
The Magus
The Master and Margarita
Wide Sargasso Sea
The Third Policeman
Miramar
Z
Pilgrimage
The Manor
One Hundred Years of Solitude
No Laughing Matter
Day of the Dolphin
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Eva Trout
The Cathedral
A Kestrel for a Knave
In Watermelon Sugar
The German Lesson
The Quest for Christa T.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
2001: A Space Odyssey
Belle du Seigneur
Cancer Ward
Myra Breckinridge
The First Circle
A Void / Avoid
them
Ada
The Godfather
Portnoy’s Complaint
Jacob the Liar
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Slaughterhouse Five
Blind Man with a Pistol
Pricksongs and Descants
Tent of Miracles
The Case Worker
Moscow Stations
Heartbreak Tango
Seasons of Migrations to the North
Here’s to You, Jesusa!
Fifth Business
Play It As It Lays
Jahrestage
A World for Julius
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
The Bluest Eye
The Sea of Fertility
Rabbit Redux
Cataract
Group Portrait With Lady
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
The Book of Daniel
Lives of Girls & Women
House Mother Normal
In a Free State
Surfacing
G
The Summer Book
The Twilight Years
The Optimist’s Daughter
Invisible Cities
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Honorary Consul
Crash
The Castle of Crossed Destinies
The Siege of Krishnapur
A Question of Power
Fear of Flying
The Dispossessed
The Diviners
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum
Dusklands
The Fan Man
The Port
Ragtime
The Commandant
The Year of the Hare
Humboldt’s Gift
Woman at Point Zero
Willard and His Bowling Trophies
Fateless
The Dead Father
Correction
A Dance to the Music of Time
W, or the Memory of Childhood
Autumn of the Patriarch
Patterns of Childhood
Blaming
Cutter and Bone
Interview With the Vampire
The Left-Handed Woman
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Almost Transparent Blue
In the Heart of the Country
The Engineer of Human Souls
Quartet in Autumn
The Hour of the Star
Song of Solomon
The Wars
Dispatches
The Shining
Delta of Venus
The Beggar Maid
Requiem for a Dream
The Singapore Grip
The Sea, The Sea
Life: A User’s Manual
The Back Room
The Virgin in the Garden
The Cement Garden
Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
So Long a Letter
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Burger’s Daughter
A Bend in the River
A Dry White Season
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Fool’s Gold
Smiley’s People
Southern Seas
The Name of the Rose
Clear Light of Day
Confederacy of Dunces
Rituals
Smell of Sadness
Broken April
Midnight’s Children
Waiting for the Barbarians
Summer in Baden-Baden
The House with the Blind Glass Windows
Leaden Wings
The War at the End of the World
Lanark: A Life in Four Books
Rabbit is Rich
Couples, Passerby
July’s People
On the Black Hill
The House of the Spirits
Schindler’s Ark
A Pale View of Hills
Wittgenstein’s Nephew
The Color Purple
A Boy’s Own Story
If Not Now, When?
The Book of Disquiet
Baltasar and Blimunda
The Sorrow of Belgium
The Piano Teacher
The Life and Times of Michael K
Waterland
LaBrava
The Christmas Oratorio
Fado Alexandrino
The Witness
Shame
Money: A Suicide Note
Flaubert’s Parrot
Professor Martens’ Departure
Blood and Guts in High School
Larva: Midsummer Night’s Babel
Nights at the Circus
Neuromancer
The Wasp Factory
Democracy
The Lover
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
Empire of the Sun
The Busconductor Hines
Dictionary of the Khazars
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Legend
The Young Man
Love Medicine
White Noise
Half of Man Is Woman
Reasons to Live
The Handmaid’s Tale
Hawksmoor
Perfume
Blood Meridian
Contact
Simon and the Oaks
The Cider House Rules
Annie John
The Parable of the Blind
Love in the Time of Cholera
Ancestral Voices
The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman
The Drowned and the Saved
Watchmen
Extinction
An Artist of the Floating World
Memory of Fire
The Old Devils
Matigari
Anagrams
Lost Language of Cranes
The Taebek Mountains
Ballad for Georg Henig
Enigma of Arrival
World’s End
The Pigeon
Of Love and Shadows
Beloved
All Souls
The New York Trilogy
Black Box
The Bonfire of the Vanities
The Black Dahlia
The Afternoon of a Writer
The Radiant Way
Kitchen
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
Cigarettes
Nervous Conditions
The First Garden
The Last World
Oscar and Lucinda
The Swimming-Pool Library
The Satanic Verses
Wittgenstein’s Mistress
Paradise of the Blind
Foucault’s Pendulum
Gimmick!
Obabakoak
Inland
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Like Water for Chocolate
The History of the Siege of Lisbon
The Trick is to Keep Breathing
The Great Indian Novel
The Melancholy of Resistance
The Remains of the Day
London Fields
Moon Palace
Sexing the Cherry
Like Life
The Buddha of Suburbia
The Shadow Lines
The Midnight Examiner
The Things They Carried
The Music of Chance
Stone Junction
Amongst Women
Get Shorty
The Daughter
Vertigo
American Psycho
The Laws
Faceless Killers
Astradeni
Regeneration
Typical
Mao II
Wild Swans
Arcadia
Hideous Kinky
Memoirs of Rain
Asphodel
The Butcher Boy
Smilla’s Sense of Snow
The Dumas Club
Written on the Body
The Crow Road
Indigo
The English Patient
Possessing the Secret of Joy
All the Pretty Horses
The Triple Mirror of the Self
Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture
The Discovery of Heaven
Life is a Caravanserai
Before Night Falls
The Secret History
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
Remembering Babylon
The Holder of the World
The Virgin Suicides
The Stone Diaries
A Suitable Boy
What a Carve Up!
On Love
The Twins
Looking for the Possible Dance
Birdsong
The Shipping News
Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light
The Invention of Curried Sausage
Disappearance
Deep River
Felicia’s Journey
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
How Late It Was, How Late
City Sister Silver
Pereira Declares: A Testimony
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Our Lady of the Assassins
Land
Whatever
Troubling Love
The Late-Night News
The End of the Story
Love’s Work
A Fine Balance
The Reader
Santa Evita
Morvern Callar
The Unconsoled
Alias Grace
The Clay Machine-Gun
Infinite Jest
Forever a Stranger
The Ghost Road
Fugitive Pieces
Hallucinating Foucault
A Light Comedy
Fall on Your Knees
Silk
The God of Small Things
Margot and the Angels
The Life of Insects
Money to Burn
Jack Maggs
Underworld
Enduring Love
Crossfire
The Poisonwood Bible
Veronika Decides to Die
The Hours
All Souls Day
The Heretic
Elementary Particles
The Talk of the Town
Dirty Havana Trilogy
Savage Detectives
Disgrace
As If I Am Not There
Pavel’s Letters
In Search of Klingsor
The Museum of Unconditional Surrender
Fear and Trembling
1900s
Sandokan: The Tigers of Mompracem
Emilio Salgari
Lifespan | b. 1862 (Italy), d. 1911
First Published | 1900
First Published by | A. Donath (Genoa)
Original Title | Le Tigri di Mompracem
“On December 20th 1849, a violent hurricane raged over Mompracem . . . home to t
he most feared pirates in the Sea of Malaysia.”
The Tigers of Mompracem, Emilio Salgari’s most famous novel and the greatest Italian bestseller of all time, features the first adventure of Sandokan, Salgari’s enduring creation that spawned a whole legion of sequels. The Tigers are a band of rebel pirates fighting against the colonial power of the Dutch and British empires. They are led by Sandokan, the indomitable Tiger of Malaysia, and his loyal friend, Yanez de Gomera, a Portuguese wanderer and adventurer (his bearing a Spanish name was an error of the writer). After twelve years of spilling blood and spreading terror throughout Malaysia, Sandokan has reached the height of his power, but when the pirate learns of the existence of the Pearl of Labuan, his fortunes begin to change.
In the dozen novels that comprise the Sandokan series, Salgari’s pen transformed the bloodthirsty pirate into a noble warrior, a kind of Malay Robin Hood, imbuing his character with a strong sense of idealism, passion, and loyalty. Though popular with the masses, Salgari was shunned by critics throughout his life and for most of the twentieth century. It was not until the late 1990s that his writings began to be revisited and new translations appeared in print, becoming very popular, especially in Italy, Spain, and Latin America. The adventurous flair of the books has inspired numerous writers, from Umberto Eco, who would read Salgari as a way to explore the world, to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who devoured his books as a young man. LB
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1900s
Sister Carrie
Theodore Dreiser
Lifespan | b. 1871 (U.S.), d. 1945
First Published | 1900
First Published by | Doubleday, Page & Co.
Original Language | English
Sister Carrie is a gripping and grim novel that charts the fortunes of three main characters making their way at the turn of the nineteenth century. Carrie Meeber moves from the Midwest to Chicago to live with relatives who feel obliged to take her in. She takes a menial job and then moves in with the raffish salesman, Charles Drouet. However, she soon tires of him and attaches herself to the more socially elevated George Hurstwood. He leaves his wife and family for her, steals a large sum of money from his employers, and they run off to New York. There, Carrie rises while George falls. She becomes a celebrated actress and dancer, while he lapses into poverty after she leaves him.
Theodore Dreiser’s novel is a major landmark in American fiction, which helped to establish a distinctly American literary identity. Sister Carrie is significant for a number of reasons. Dreiser’s sparse, journalistic style depicts the realities of everyday city life in a powerful language that seems to hide nothing, so that we feel we see characters as they really are. Equally important, the novel does not serve as a fable, and no serious judgments are offered on the protagonists’ behavior. Carrie is a woman dealt a bad hand, who determines to make the most of what she has, seizing opportunity when it is offered. Charles is a pleasure-seeker, a mixture of the vulgar and the appealing. And George, a tormented and unhappy man, loses all he has in pursuit of a modest, but unobtainable, goal. AH
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1900s
None but the Brave
Arthur Schnitzler
Lifespan | b. 1862 (Austria), d. 1931