Recommended Reading/Literature by type

By format

Doorstoppers
Essentials Doorstoppers
The Tale of Genji (11th century) by Murasaki Shikibu	The Story of the Stone (18th century) by Cao Xueqin	The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) by Alexander Dumas	In Remembrance of Things Past (1927) by Marcel Proust	The Man Without Qualities (1942) by Robert Musil
Additional Doorstoppers
Outlaws of the Marsh (14th century) by Shi Nai’an
Three Kingdoms (14th century) by Luo Guanzhong
The Decameron (14th century) by Giovanni Boccaccio
Gargantua and Pantagruel (16th century) by Francois Rabelais
Journey to the West (16th century) by Wu Cheng’en
The Faerie Queene (1596) by Edmund Spenser
Don Quixote (1615) by Miguel Cervantes
The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by Robert Burton
Nicholas Nickleby (1839) by Charles Dickens
David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens
Bleak House (1853) by Charles Dickens
Les Miserables (1862) by Victor Hugo
War and Peace (1869) by Leo Tolstoy
Middlemarch (1874) by George Eliot
The Way We Live Now (1875) by Anthony Trollope
Kristin Lavransdatter (1920–1922) by Sigrid Undset
Before the Dawn (1929) by Toson Shimazaki
Musashi (1935) by Eiji Yoshikawa
The Arcades Project (1940) by Walter Benjamin
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) by Rebecca West
The Recognitions (1955) by William Gaddis
Life and Fate (1959) by Vasily Grossman
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965) by Marguerite Young
Women and Men (1987) by Joseph McElroy
Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace
Rising Up and Rising Down (2003) by William T. Vollmann
2666 (2004) by Roberto Bolano
Parallel Stories (2005) by Peter Nadas
Against the Day (2006) by Thomas Pynchon
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Novellas
Heart of a Dog (1925) by Mikhail Bulgakov	Dream Story (1926) by Arthur Schnitzler	Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad	Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) by Nathanael West	Animal Farm (1945) by George Orwell
A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens
A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess
A Room of One's Own (1929) by Virginia Woolf
Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury
First Love (1860) by Ivan Turgenev
A Pale View of Hills (1982) by Kazuo Ishiguro
Around the World in 80 Days (1873) by Jules Verne
At the Mountains of Madness (1931) by H.P. Lovecraft
Bartleby the Scrivener (1853) by Herman Melville
Billy Budd (1888) by Herman Melville
The Call of the Wild (1903) by Jack London
Candide (1759) by Voltaire
Cannery Row (1945) by John Steinbeck
Junky (1953) by William S. Burroughs
Master and Man (1895) by Leo Tolstoy
The Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka
Botchan (1906) by Natsume Soseki
The Horla (1887) by Guy de Maupassant
Looking Backward (1887) by Edward Bellamy
Child of God (1973) by Cormac McCarthy
Of Mice and Men (1937) by John Steinbeck	Nausea (1938) by Jean-Paul Sartre	Notes from Underground (1864) by Fyodor Dostoevsky	One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) by Solzhenitsyn	The Ballad of Sad Cafe (1951) by Carson McCullers
Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Daisy Miller (1878) by Henry James
Death in Venice (1912) by Thomas Mann
Night (1955) by Elie Wiesel
No One Writes the Colonel (1961) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Mathilda (1820) by Mary Shelley
Pedro Paramo (1955) by Juan Rulfo
Snow Country (1947) by Yasunari Kawabata
South of the Border, West of the Sun (1992) by Haruki Murakami
Diary of a Madman (1835) by Nikolai Gogol
Dusklands (1974) by J.M. Coetzee
Ethan Frome (1911) by Edith Wharton
The Dying Animal (2001) by Phillip Roth
Outer Dark (1968) by Cormac McCarthy
Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) by George Eliot
Everyman (2006) by Phillip Roth
The Fox (1923) by D.H. Lawrence
The Girl With the Golden Eyes (1833) by Honore de Balzac
Seize the Day (1956) by Saul Bellow
Siddhartha (1922) by Hermann Hesse
The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) by Thomas Pynchon	The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea (1965) by Yukio Mishima	The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald	The Unnamable (1953) by Samuel Beckett	Thousand Cranes (1952) by Yasunari Kawabata
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut
Story of the Eye (1928) by Georges Bataille
The Cossacks (1863) by Leo Tolstoy
The Dead (1914) by James Joyce
The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) by Leo Tolstoy
The Loved One (1848) by Evelyn Waugh
The Pathseeker (1977) by Imre Kertesz
The Secret Sharer (1909) by Joseph Conrad
Taras Bulba (1835) by Nikolai Gogol
The Awakening (1899) by Kate Chopin
The Big Sleep (1939) by Raymond Chandler
The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger
The Devil (1889) by Leo Tolstoy
The Double (1846) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Eternal Husband (1870) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Tenth Man (1985) by Graham Greene
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Lemoine Affair (1919) by Marcel Proust
The Lifted Veil (1859) by George Eliot
The Old Man and the Sea (1951) by Ernest Hemingway	The Pearl (1947) by John Steinbeck	Too Loud a Solitude (1976) by Bohumil Hrabal	The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973) by Italo Calvino	The Key (1956) by Junichiro Tanizaki
The Man Who Would be King (1888) by Rudyard Kipling
The Stranger (1942) by Albert Camus
The Subterraneans (1958) by Jack Kerouac
The Time Machine (1895) by H.G. Wells
The Torrents of Spring (1871) by Ivan Turgenev
A Hero of Our Time (1839) by Mikhail Lermontov
Alien Hearts () by Guy de Maupassant
Giovanni's Room (1956) by James Baldwin
Pierre and Jean (1887) by Guy de Maupassant
The Murders of the Rue Morgue (1841) by Edgar Allen Poe
The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) by Johann Woflgang von Goethe
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) by James M. Cain
The Turn of the Screw (1898) by Henry James
Three Lives (1906) by Gertrude Stein
The Red Badge of Courage (1895) by Stephen Crane
The Duel (1891) by Anton Chekhov
The Actual (1997) by Saul Bellow
The Body Artist (2001) by Don Delillo
The Mysterious Stranger (1910) by Mark Twain
Therese Raquin (1867) by Emile Zola
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Contemporary Novellas
1970s
Dark Spring (1970) by Unica Zurn	The White Ship (1970) by Chinghiz Aitmatov	Flats/Quake (1971-4) by Rudolph Wurlitzer	Love (1971) by Angela Carter	Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine (1972) by Stanley Crawford
Further 1970s
The Summer Book (1972) by Tove Jansson
Motorman (1972) by David Ohle
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1972) by Peter Handke
Roadside Picnic (1972) by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky
Asleep in the Sun (1973) by Adolfo Bioy Casares
Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973) by B.S. Johnson
Telegram (1973) by Putu Wijaya
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1974) by Heinrich Boll
For Love of Norway (1975) by Pal Espolin Johnson
Travesty (1976) by John Hawkes
Journey into the Past (1976) by Stefan Zweig
P’s Three Women (1977) by Paulo Emilio Slaes Gomes
Fatale (1977) by Jean-Patrick Manchette
The Hour of the Star (1977) by Clarice Lispector
The Painter of Signs (1977) by R.K. Narayan
Secret Rendezvous (1977) by Kobo Abe
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (1978) by Danilo Kis
Sleepless Nights (1979) by Elizabeth Hardwick
Volcano (1979) by Shusaku Endo
1980s
The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980) by Bruce Chatwin	A Month in the Country (1980) by J.L. Carr	A Bohemian Youth (1980) by Josef Hirsal	Loitering With Intent (1981) by Muriel Spark	Concrete (1982) by Thomas Bernhard
Further 1980s
So the Wind Won’t Blow it All Away (1982) by Richard Brautigan
The Witch-Herbalist of the Remote Town (1982) by Amos Tutuola
The Assault (1982) by Harry Mulisch
The Wine of Astonishment (1982) by Earl Lovelace
A Tiger for Malgudi (1983) by R.K. Narayan
Mr. Palomar (1983) by Italo Calvino
The Cannibal Galaxy (1983) by Cynthia Ozick
Alladin's Problem (1984) by Ernst Junger
The Lover (1984) by Marguerite Duras
In the Dutch Mountains (1984) by Cees Nooteboom
Isle of Dreams (1985) by Hino Keizo
Old Floating Cloud: Two Novellas (1983-6) by Can Xue
Stone in a Landslide (1985) by Maria Barbal
The Day the Leader was Killed (1985) by Naguib Mahfouz
In the Country of Last Things (1987) by Paul Auster
The Pigeon (1987) by Patrick Suskind
Kitchen (1988) by Banana Yoshimoto
The Swordfish (1989) by Hugo Claus
Mister Blue (1989) by Jacques Poulin
1990s
Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990) by Imre Kertesz	The Following Story (1991) by Cees Nooteboom	Chaos and All That (1991) by Lui Sola	Babyfucker (1992) by Urs Allemann	The Death of the Author (1992) by Gilbert Adai
Further 1990s
Angels and Insects (1992) by A.S. Byatt
The Other City (1993) by Michal Ajvaz
Loving Sabotage (1993) by Amelie Nothomb
The Marx Family Saga (1993) by Juan Goytisolo
The Crime Studio (1994) by Steve Aylett
Shyness and Dignity (1994) by Dag Solstad
Of Love and Other Demons (1994) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Pereira Declares (1994) by Antonio Tabucchi
Phosphor in Dreamland (1995) by Rikki Ducornet
Panther in the Basement (1995) by Amos Oz
I Have the Right to Destroy Myself (1996) by Kim Young-ha
Escape Hatch (1996) by Vladimir Makanin
The Diary of Mr. Pinke (1995) by Ewald Murrer
Reader's Block (1996) by David Markson
A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family (1998) by Peter Dimock
Kneller's Happy Campers (1998) by Etgar Keret
Honk if you Love Aphrodite (1999) by Daniel Evan Weiss
The Literary Conference (1999) by Cesar Aira
Earth and Ashes (1999) by Atiq Rahimi
2000s
In Her Absence (2000) by Antonio Munoz Molina	Kafka's Leopards (2000) by Moacyr Scliar	The Colors of Infamy (2000) by Albert Cossery	Tales of Galicia (2001) by Andrzej Stasiuk	Besides the Sea (2001) by Veronique Olmi
Further 2000s
Inez (2001) by Carlos Fuentes
Bait (2001) by David Albahari
Europeana (2001) by Patrik Ourednik
Good Morning Comrades (2001) by Ondjaki
All This Belongs to Me (2002) by Petra Hulova
Conversations with Spinoza (2002) by Gocec Smilevski
In the Flesh (2002) by Christa Wolf
Agape Agape (2002) by William Gaddis
The Blue Fox (2003) by Sjon
Piano (2003) by Jean Echenoz
The Housekeeper and the Professor (2003) by Yoko Ogawa
The Book of Words (2004) by Jenny Erpenbeck
Moving Parts (2004) by Magdalena Tulli
Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest (2005) by Amos Oz
Bonsai (2006) by Alejandro Zambra
The Waitress Was New (2008) by Dominique Fabre
The North of God (2008) by Steve Stern
The Hermaphrodite (2009) by Daniel Grandbois
Next World Novella (2009) by Matthias Politycki
2010s
The Brothers (2010) by Asko Sahlberg	Lightning (2010) by Jean Echenoz	Train Dreams (2011) by Denis Johnson	Down the Rabbit Hole (2011) by Juan Pablo Villalobos
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Short Story Collections
Classic
A Parisian Affair and Other Stories by Guy de Maupassant	First Love and Other Stories by Ivan Turgenev	The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy	Three Tales by Gustav Flaubert	Dead Men Tell No Tales by Emile Zola
Further classic collections
The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings by Edgar Allan Poe
The Kruezter Sonata and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy
The Queen of Spades and Other Stories by Alexander Pushkin
Ward No. 6 and Other Stories, 1892–1895 by Anton Chekhov
The Lady With the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896–1904 by Anton Chekhov
Carmen and Other Stories by Prosper Merimee
Modern
Elephant by Raymond Carver	Dubliners by James Joyce	Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges	Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway	South of No North by Charles Bukowski
Further modern collections
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Six Other Short Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald
In the Heart of the Country by William Gass
Selected Short Stories of William Faulkner
The Return by Andrei Platonov
The Collected Short Stories by Roald Dahl
Contemporary
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace	The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami	Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño	The Dog of the Marriage by Amy Hempel	Life After God by Douglas Coupland
Further contemporary collections
How We are Hungry by Dave Eggers
Drown by Junot Diaz
Break it Down by Lydia Davis
No One Belongs Here More than You by Miranda July
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Flash Fiction Collections
Pre-1950
The Waste Books by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg	The Complete Fables of Jean de la Fontaine	Nature Stories by Jules Renard	Microscripts by Robert Walser	Today I Wrote Nothing by Daniil Kharms
Further Pre-1950
Novels in Three Lines by Felix Feneon
The Collected Stories by Colette
The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights
41 Stories by O. Henry
Post-1950
Palm-of-the-Hand Stories by Yasunari Kawabata	Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth	The Voice Imitator by Thomas Bernhard	The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus	Metrophilias by Brendan Connell
Further Post-1950
The Book of Fables by W.S. Merwin
The Nimrod Flip-out by Etgar Keret
Murder in the Dark by Margaret Atwood
The Collected Stories by Lydia Davis
AM/PM by Amelia Gray
The Black Sheep and Other Fables by Augusto Monterroso
Road-Side Dog by Czeslaw Milosz
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Theatre/Drama
Classical through Medieval
The Three Theban Plays by Sophocles	The Oresteia by Aeschylus	Electra and Other Plays by Euripides	The Complete Plays by Aristophanes	Plays and Fragments by Menander
Classical through Medieval cont.
The Pot of Gold and Other Plays by Plautus
Four Tragedies and Octavia by Seneca
The Comedies by Terence
The Loom of Time by Kalidasa
The Plays of Hrotswitha of Gandersheim
Japanese Noh Dramas
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By theme

Depressing Literature
No Longer Human () by Osamu Dazai	Stoner () by John Edward Williams	Journey to the End of the Night () by Louis-Ferdinand Celine	The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years () by Chinghiz Aitmatov	The Book of Disquiet () by Fernando Pessoa
Moravagine ( ) by Blaise Cendrars
The Thorn Birds ( ) by Colleen McCullough
To Live ( ) by Yu Hua
The Tartar Steppe ( ) by Dino Buzzati
The Setting Sun ( ) by Osamu Dazai
On the Heights of Despair ( ) by E.M. Cioran
The Emigrants ( ) by W.G. Sebald
The Sufferings of Prince Stenenhoch ( ) by Ladislav Klima
The Tunnel ( ) by Ernesto Sabato
Wide Sargasso Sea ( ) by Jean Ryhs
Rituals ( ) by Cees Nooteboom
If This is a Man ( ) by Primo Levi
The Maimed ( ) by Hermann Ungar
This Business of Living ( ) by Cesare Pavese
On the Marble Cliffs ( ) by Ernst Junger
The Lost Weekend ( ) by Charles Jackson
Thousand Cranes ( ) by Yasunari Kawabata
Of Mice and Men ( ) by John Steinbeck
Last Exit to Brooklyn ( ) by Hubert Selby Jr.
Our Lady of the Flowers ( ) by Jean Genet
The Trouble With Being Born ( ) by E.M. Cioran
Germinal ( ) by Emile Zola
Jude the Obscure ( ) by Thomas Hardy
Kokoro ( ) by Natsume Soseki
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter ( ) by Carson McCullers
Hunger ( ) by Knut Hamsun
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake ( ) by Aimee Bender
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ( ) by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Ask the Dust ( ) by John Fante
Death on Installment Plan ( ) by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Snow Country ( ) by Yasunari Kawabata
Death and the Dervish ( ) by Mes Selimovic
Tess of the D'Urbervilles ( ) by Thomas Hardy
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? ( ) by Lorrie Moore
Mouchette ( ) by Georges Bernanos
4:48 Psychosis ( ) by Sarah Kane
The Hour of the Star ( ) by Clarice Lispector
The Death of Ivan Ilyich ( ) by Leo Tolstoy
Death of a Salesman ( ) by Arthur Miller
Will O'The Wisp ( ) by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle
Oblomov ( ) by Ivan Goncharov
The Road ( ) by Cormac McCarthy
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