The 999 Greatest Works of Literature

The three fictional works from ancient Egypt remaining in nearly full condition are all very different. "The Shipwrecked Sailor" is an adventure. "The Tale of Sinuhe" is a patriotic epic. And "The Eloquent Peasant" is something else.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

This one has it all. The Odyssey is not only a great romantic, adventure epic, but it's terribly realistic in its depiction of human nature and a brilliantly crafted narrative. Authors today could learn from.... Critique • Quotes • Translations • Buy

Works and Days is so different from Theogony that many scholars think it couldn't have been composed by the same author. Which sounds like welcome news for anyone who yawned through Theogony and now faces the.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It can be difficult to read Edward II today as a Christopher Marlow play. One keeps sliding into thinking of it as minor Shakespeare—you know, all those early plays with kings and numerals in their titles. Partly this is a matter of.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

The major issue of contention whenever The Merchant of Venice comes up, of course, is the portrayal of Shylock, the Jewish money-lender, the villain of the piece for the most part. So let's deal with that first. On the side of.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Macbeth was actually king of Scotland for seventeen years, though you would never get this from one of Shakespeare's most popular plays. Historians consider Macbeth and his wife to have been relatively good and.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy,

By several standards Frankenstein is a very poorly written novel. The narrative wanders all over, bogging down in irrelevant subplots and extraneous characters, the characters (except for one) are thinly and.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

First thing to remember about "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is that it's a short work. By word count it qualifies as a story, as opposed to a novella or a novel, which it is sometimes called. It's to the credit.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Thanks in part to movies based on it, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame calls up images of Gothic horror in the public imagination. The novel is associated with other dark nineteenth-century classics like Frankenstein.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

First, put this book's title aside. No one really knows what "tales of the grotesque and arabesque" means. Poe himself indicated he intended more than the usual meanings of bizarre and fanciful writing; his theories on.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is often called the first detective story or the first modern murder mystery. It and the two sequels also featuring amateur sleuth C. Auguste Dupin, "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" and.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

I'm somewhat stumped by Wuthering Heights. It's solidly ensconced in the literary canon and inflicted on classes of students. And plenty of people—readers and writers alike—seem to love it. But three readings.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

The first half of David Copperfield, concerning a young boy's struggles against repressive step-parents and draconian schoolmasters, is one of the greatest, most affecting novels ever written. The second half.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

Everyone knows the general story of The Scarlet Letter as referenced in the title. A young, married woman in an early American colony, Hester Prynne, becomes pregnant from an affair with a man she refuses to name, and.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Some critics and writers consider it the greatest novel ever. And most consider it the most influential. Yet, Madame Bovary on first reading may strike the modern reader in English as, well, all right but hardly the best.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

George Eliot's first great popular novel gives only hints of the depths to be plumbed in the future, yet it has become an enduring favourite for its own virtues. In many ways, The Mill on the Floss is a silly romantic.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Les Misérables is one of the few translated books English speakers know by the original title, in part because we are familiar with the name (or its abbreviation Les Miz) from popular film and stage productions. But.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

All fiction—all art or entertainment really—is either disturbing or comforting. Most works both disturb and comfort in varying measures. It's why we read: to experience ups and down of life outside our own. Some works.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

I'm not sure we should even call Erewhon a novel. If it is one, it's a novel of ideas. Not like, say, one of Aldous Huxley's novels of ideas though. Great ideas don't play out among characters or decide the plot. In Butler's.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

What's incredible about Middlemarch, George Eliot's masterwork, is how engrossing it is. I mean, this is a novel that deals with issues of art, education reform, scholarly research, medical science and provincial British politics.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

In our world the escapades of young Tom Sawyer are recounted in the shadow cast by his more famous friend, Huckleberry Finn. Yet, during author Mark Twain's life, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was his most.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

It's easy to overlook Mark Twain's bite in The Prince and the Pauper. The social criticism is not as sharp as in some of his later novels, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

No one needs to be told what Treasure Island is about. Robert Louis Stevenson's novel has defined the pirate story, not to mention the treasure-hunting story, the mutiny-on-the-seas story—and.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

In the article on John Buchan, I called his novels seminal thrillers surpassed by the later best-selling works of intrigue for which they showed the way. Stevenson's Kidnapped takes us back yet another generation.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

The surprising thing about Robert Louis Stevenson's horror story, if you had previously known the Jekyll and Hyde character only indirectly through popular culture, is that it's so brief. Not only is the novella short.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

If your first exposure to Mark Twain's time travel tale was the Disney or other screen adaptations, you may be shocked by your reading of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Shocked by how rough.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

Everyone knows the central conceit of The Picture of Dorian Gray: a beautiful young man remains unblemished by age, while his painted portrait, hidden from public sight, grows older and corrupted by moral degradation.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

It's instructive how much of our literature has to do with warfare. From ancient works like the Iliad, through the epics of medieval slaughter and Shakespeare's historical dramas, to modern novels—bloody conflict has.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

A Shropshire Lad hasn't much to do with Shropshire. A.E. Housman famously had little personal acquaintance with that part of the English countryside, and his local references in his "Shropshire" poems are either generically.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

If we have to pick one aspect that might make Buddenbrooks the first important novel of the twentieth century, it could be its moral ambiguity. The story of the Buddenbrook family is told over four generations.... Critique • Quotes • Translations • Buy

First thing you have to do is forget all the movie and television productions you might have seen of this tale. Those misty, moody scenes on the moors.... The horror of the hound from hell, eyes blazing as it attacks.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Joseph Conrad's novel of a century earlier was apparently widely read again, especially in Western intelligence circles. I'm not sure, though, what those new readers.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

At least one reprint edition of Under Western Eyes is decorated with nautical graphics, as someone must have thought befitting a Joseph Conrad yarn. Not realizing, of course, this is a Conrad story unlike almost any other.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Stephen Leacock gets compared to Mark Twain all the time, which means people like me have to keep pointing out how different he is. We have to keep pointing to Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town and showing.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

The argument over Death in Venice is usually about whether the theme is homosexual desire. Which is too bad really. When I first read Thomas Mann's short novel as a young man myself, I was adamant.... Critique • Quotes • Translations • At the movies • Buy

There is not a lot to say about the narrative structure or the characters or the writing in this famous novel. The Thirty-Nine Steps is a seminal tale of intrigue, a classic early story of an innocent man drawn into dark.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

I really wanted to love this book. It's one of the sharpest indictments of war ever written in fictional form, a groundbreaking work by a sincere, progressive author. But I found I cannot love it as a whole. I can only like it.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

I love the way this novel starts. If you're doing a biographical story, why not start at the very beginning with the perceptions of an infant? Well, baby tuckoo grows up quickly in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and becomes.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It doesn't sound promising. Like one of those dreary, early Canadian novels some of us had to read in school about settlers in rural North America. Immigrants set up house and farm in the new land, discover the country is harsh, the.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Life in smalltown America has long been celebrated or satirized in fiction, but seldom as comprehensively or as pointedly as in Sinclair Lewis's first great novel, some would argue his greatest work. The impact of Main Street.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

Eliot's masterwork? The poetic masterpiece of the twentieth century? Here's the problem I have with that: I don't like reading The Waste Land. It's hard. Lines in foreign languages. References to classical literature.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

I've read Ulysses five times. It's not that I love it so much. It may be because I've heard so often this is the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Or perhaps because it's so difficult, I figured I had to keep reading it until I got it.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

If you wonder how Katherine Mansfield who published so little could have such a wide influence on modern writing, spend some time with this collection. Reading The Garden Party and Other Stories is like perusing.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Scott Fitzgerald's prolific output of stories for magazines early in his career was distinguished by at least one that was undoubtedly great, many that could be called interesting, and more that are best forgotten.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

A century after its first publication, the story of George Babbitt can elicit reactions of both "This is so dated!" and "Just like today!" And often from the same readers. Sinclair Lewis's most influential novel, Babbitt, deftly satirizes.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

All the important elements of Eliot's longer, more difficult poem The Waste Land are in "The Hollow Men". The view of this world as insubstantial, a realm for the living dead. The attempts to revive religious concepts, to offer.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Partway though a rereading of Mrs Dalloway a sudden idea threatened to upset everything I had ever thought about the author. Was it possible Virginia Woolf was really making fun of her insufferably effete lead characters.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Unbelievably, few people read The Great Gatsby when it was first published. In the roaring Twenties, its questioning of the American Dream may not have been welcome. Other American writers, like Sinclair Lewis.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It may seem perverse to pick In Our Time as Ernest Hemingway's greatest story collection because many individual stories in later collections have become more familiar—and are arguably more accomplished than these earlier.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It's an irony that the first successful novel by the writer often accused of being mindlessly ballsy features a hero without a penis. Jake Barnes had it shot off in the war, a tragedy that prevents him and the woman who....Critique • Quotes • Buy

Death Comes for the Archbishop is often considered Willa Cather's masterpiece and is on several lists as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century—which may be surprising if you read it alongside other.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

All Quiet on the Western Front is the kind of book you've heard about forever as a Great Book, one you've always meant to read some day, and yet it sounds so heavy and depressing and so...so worthwhile...that.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

A Farewell to Arms has been called the best American novel to come out of World War I. That could be accurate. I can think of few other American novels that are even contenders, though I can also think of.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Everyone who loves classic film noir knows the complicated storyline from the 1941 flick starring Humphrey Bogart. The Maltese Falcon involves intrigue among shady, eccentric characters to find a black bird made of gold.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Pearl S. Buck has sometimes been accused of stereotyping the Chinese peasants as noble, simple creatures. But this was hardly the reaction to The Good Earth in the early 1930s when it became a sensation in the West and.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Some writers are not really good novelists—don't seem to have the artistic talents to shape words, sentences and paragraphs into conventional novelistic form—and yet can recognize a great story and marshal the.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

What a debut. The Postman Always Rings Twice was James M. Cain's first novel, published relatively late in life for a writer, when he was in his forties. But already his writing is as tight and intense as any work of the past.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

A tip for reading Tender Is the Night. Don't try it right after The Great Gatsby, even though it was Scott Fitzgerald's next novel. If you do, you'll be disappointed. The tight writing of Gatsby—with its unforgettable.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

If you've read or heard about Dashiell Hammett's hardboiled detective fiction, you may not be prepared for what you'll find in The Thin Man. Sure, there's a somewhat jaded private eye, one Nick Charles, as well as a..... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Appointment in Samarra is about as perfectly structured and written a novel of American social critique as you could find in the first half of the twentieth century—up there with Babbitt and The Great Gatsby. True.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Either of the two other major story collections published during Lu Hsun's life—Wandering or Call to Arms— could have been chosen to spotlight. They're all great. But the most important piece in those two volumes.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

The short story "The Doctor's Son" could alone carry John O'Hara's reputation as a story writer. Conversely the collection in which it appears, his first book of short stories, is not enough to give justice to his reputation.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It has always seemed like the perfect American novella. A poignant and disturbing story told effortlessly, of simple folks on the fringe of society who turn out to be quite complex. But read Of Mice and Men a second.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

On the early covers of Thornton Wilder's play, Our Town, a small community is shown perched on the side of a lofty hill or mountain, giving the illustration a kind of aspirational feeling. What isn't immediately clear.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

"Science split the atom and Joyce split the word." This summary of progress in the first half of the twentieth century has often been stated in reference to Finnegans Wake. James Joyce chops up words and fuses syllables.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

My comments upon first reading Raymond Chandler's famous detective novel, The Big Sleep, were all about how sparse and direct his prose was. Just the facts. Plain, chiselled sentences à la Hemingway and Hammett.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

What may be most surprising about Lillian Hellman's play The Little Foxes is it's such an absorbing piece of drama despite being about a business deal. The Hubbard siblings—brothers Oscar and Ben and sister Regina.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

The Grapes of Wrath is John Steinbeck's most controversial work, seeming to advocate a socialist revolution to end the misery of the dispossessed folks during the dirty nineteen-thirties. It can only be this apparent political.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

The Day of the Locust was so underrated in 1939 when it came out and in the years immediately following author Nathanael West's death in 1940, that when critics eventually rediscovered the man's works they.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Darkness at Noon was not quite what I had expected, based on what I had heard. Fans and critics had described it as presenting the ordeal of an innocent man charged during the Moscow show trials of the 1930s. Torture.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

For me this is the big Hemingway book—his greatest work and one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century. And it is a big book, his longest. But For Whom the Bell Tolls does not read as long. Partly.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

If your exposure to James M. Cain was his popular short novels, like The Postman Always Rings Twice or Double Indemnity and their movies, or if it came via the 1945 Joan Crawford film adaptation of this book.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Animal Farm is a work I include on the list of greatest works under protest. It's not that I dislike George Orwell. I like most of his work very much. Nor do I consider Animal Farm particularly bad. It's very cleverly done for.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Why do we still read Brideshead Revisited? An account of aimless, upper-class, young men wasting their time at Oxford University in hedonism. Until the story is swallowed by the larger theme of an intensely Catholic.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

By rights, there should be little interest remaining in Graham Greene's 1948 story of a white colonialist policeman, wracked with guilt over his lapsed Catholicism, corruption, career failures and duplicitous relationships.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

This was hailed by Time as the best novel about the Second World War. And for once, Time might have had it right. If we add the qualifier "American" between "best" and "novel". I was surprised in reading Norman.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

George Orwell's dystopian novel has had the fortune to be acclaimed in the West by two usually opposed groups—right wingers and left wingers. The former saw it as a denunciation of collectivism in all its forms.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

How strange that the most affecting characters Asimov ever created were robots. Perhaps it's the same phenomenon we find in film and television dramas in which synthetic creatures like Frankenstein's monster and.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Few novels divide readers as The Catcher in the Rye does. This may sound like a bizarre thing to say, since J.D. Salinger's novel has been wildly popular since it came out in 1951. It's been lauded as changing the course of.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

In the 1980s Isaac Asimov reread the Foundation stories he had written in the 1940s and had compiled as a trilogy of books in the 1950s, and he was appalled. The stories had no action, no suspense, no romance—they were.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

A lot has been said about Hemingway's ideals of courage, grace under pressure, and all that. My own feeling is that what he really wanted was to be considered wise. His lead characters usually have a stillness about them.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Is it all timshel? Steinbeck has his main character drop the word at the end of the novel. Earlier it had been explained that the Hebrew word from the Bible meant that humankind may or may not triumph over evil, that we're.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

It may seem Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is becoming less relevant these days, as hard-copy books are at risk of disappearing, pushed aside by digital communications. Without paper media, warnings about.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Chandler's longest novel is also his most praised. Which makes me wonder whether it's the length the critics are praising. Or if maybe they think it must be deep since it's so long. Is The Long Goodbye long because.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Lolita is the kind of book that grows thicker each time you read it. The first time you may race through the novel to take in the plot of the man who loves and loses a preadolescent girl, what he calls a "nymphet". More.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

It's interesting and odd that On the Beach and On the Road came out the same year. Both are dated 1957, but how very different they are. Only the accident of their titles being sequential in an alphabetical list could make.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

The Stars My Destination has often been called one of science fiction's greatest works, sometimes the greatest. Yet, the first time I read it, I didn't get the fuss. The novel was supposed to feature an unforgettable.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

On the Road is the easiest novel to find "great lines" in. Open to any page. Jack Kerouac's writing is at such a consistent intensity that important, poetic, rhythmic, quotable sentences typical of the book's overall tone.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

John Updike is most known for Rabbit, Run but it's not his best or best-reviewed novel. It's not even his best or best-reviewed novel in the book series it kicks off. That would be the sequel, Rabbit Redux, the one critics.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Stranger in a Strange Land may be an old favourite of many readers who were first exposed to it in their youth, but the time may have come to drop it from the list of great novels. It has certainly lost the cult status.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Whenever he was told he's never written anything else as good as Catch-22, Joseph Heller was tempted to reply, "Who has?" A bit of hyperbole. There are plenty of modern novels as good as, or better than, Catch-22.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Around the time of this novel, Philip K. Dick was being heralded as the next scifi writer to break into mainstream popularity after Kurt Vonnegut. The Man in the High Castle won the prestigious Hugo Award for science fiction.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Sometimes it seems the English-speaking world spent the entire twentieth century trying to shake off the repressions of the Victorian era. The rebellious 1960s, for example, may have prided themselves on rejecting.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

The Left Hand of Darkness is about a lot of things. But, unlike many science fiction writers, Ursula K. Le Guin doesn't lay it all out for you in comic-book-style exposition. Rather, like a serious mainstream author.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It was one of the naughtier books—but not the naughtiest—in a long line of books that scandalized some and enticed many more in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even if you never read Portnoy's Complaint then, you'd heard.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Larry Niven's popular novel has dated in the five-plus decades it's been around—though you can still find plenty of hard science fiction fans who consider it a modern classic. Ringworld arose from a certain tradition in.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Two kinds of people are apt to hate Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: advanced philosophy majors and advanced novel readers. As a novel, Zen is terrible. Virtually no narrative, cardboard characters, and generally.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

You may find online a video of John Irving discussing how both he and Stephen King have striven not to please, but to appall. Once you get over the shock of discovering literary icon Irving and horrormeister King are mutual.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

The story behind the discovery of this novel has become such an inspiring and sad modern legend that I want to be able to say the novel itself is brilliant. Either that, or be able to call it a disaster—to spite misguided.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

The English title of José Saramago's most acclaimed novel, Baltasar and Blimunda, gives the impression it's a love story, about the love between the soldier who has lost a hand in battle and the girl who has been orphaned by.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

After his post-apocalyptic tales of psychological horror, after his scandalous work on human mangling and perverse sexuality, J.G. Ballard turned to producing his most conventional, biographical and realistic.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

If you're well-versed in science fiction—or speculative fiction as it's often called—and you approach The Handmaid's Tale as an example of that genre, you may be disappointed. The world of Margaret.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Love in the Time of Cholera is a favourite novel for lovers who take from it something like "Love conquers all" or "Follow your heart". Yet, Gabriel García Márquez's story also appeals to cynics who see the yearning.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

When I first finished Ender's Game, before starting the second book in the series, I wondered what all the fuss was about. Oh, I enjoyed Ender's Game. It was a real scifi page-turner. But I did not feel good about.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

From those wonderful, shocking opening lines to the end, Ellen Foster is a completely absorbing novel, and the incredible thing is that Kaye Gibbons seems not to work at it. It all just flows straight from Ellen's strange young.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

So many people, whose opinions I otherwise value, have told me how incredibly impressed they were by The Bonfire of the Vanities that I wonder what I'm missing, as I have only a middling appreciation for.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy