Recommended Reading/Literature by type
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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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Poetry | ||||
| English-language Poetry | ||||
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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 | ||||
 Journey to the End of the Night (1932) by Celine |
 The Book of Disquiet (1935) by Fernando Pessoa |
 No Longer Human (1948) by Osamu Dazai |
 Stoner (1965) by John Edward Williams |
 The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years (1980) by Chinghiz Aitmatov |
| Moravagine (1926) by Blaise Cendrars | ||||
| The Thorn Birds (1977) by Colleen McCullough | ||||
| To Live (1993) by Yu Hua | ||||
| The Tartar Steppe (1940) by Dino Buzzati | ||||
| The Setting Sun (1947) by Osamu Dazai | ||||
| On the Heights of Despair (1934) by E.M. Cioran | ||||
| The Emigrants (1992) by W.G. Sebald | ||||
| The Sufferings of Prince Stenenhoch (1928) by Ladislav Klima | ||||
| The Tunnel (1948) by Ernesto Sabato | ||||
| Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Ryhs | ||||
| Rituals (1980) by Cees Nooteboom | ||||
| If This is a Man (1947) by Primo Levi | ||||
| The Maimed (1923) by Hermann Ungar | ||||
| This Business of Living (1952) by Cesare Pavese | ||||
| On the Marble Cliffs (1939) by Ernst Junger | ||||
| The Lost Weekend (1944) by Charles Jackson | ||||
| Thousand Cranes (1952) by Yasunari Kawabata | ||||
| Of Mice and Men (1937) by John Steinbeck | ||||
| Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) by Hubert Selby Jr. | ||||
| Our Lady of the Flowers (1943) by Jean Genet | ||||
| The Trouble With Being Born (1973) by E.M. Cioran | ||||
| Germinal (1885) by Emile Zola | ||||
| Jude the Obscure (1895) by Thomas Hardy | ||||
| Kokoro (1914) by Natsume Soseki | ||||
| The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) by Carson McCullers | ||||
| Hunger (1890) by Knut Hamsun | ||||
| The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010) by Aimee Bender | ||||
| One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) by Alexander Solzhenitsyn | ||||
| Ask the Dust (1939) by John Fante | ||||
| Death on Installment Plan (1936) by Louis-Ferdinand Celine | ||||
| Snow Country (1947) by Yasunari Kawabata | ||||
| Death and the Dervish (1966) by Mes Selimovic | ||||
| Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) by Thomas Hardy | ||||
| Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994) by Lorrie Moore | ||||
| Mouchette (1937) by Georges Bernanos | ||||
| 4:48 Psychosis (1999) by Sarah Kane | ||||
| The Hour of the Star (1977) by Clarice Lispector | ||||
| The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) by Leo Tolstoy | ||||
| Death of a Salesman (1949) by Arthur Miller | ||||
| Will O'The Wisp (1931) by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle | ||||
| Oblomov (1859) by Ivan Goncharov | ||||
| The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy | ||||
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