Classics that still hit

Paulo Coelho

A shepherd boy's journey to a treasure that was never where he thought.

George Orwell

Big Brother is watching — the novel that named our fears.

Frank Herbert

Spice, sand, and the most influential sci-fi world ever built.

J.R.R. Tolkien

There and back again — the adventure that started modern fantasy.

Margaret Atwood

A dystopia built entirely from things that have already happened.

Harper Lee

A childhood, a trial, and a conscience for a whole country.

Jane Austen

The sharpest, funniest marriage plot in the language.

Dale Carnegie

The 1936 handbook on people that has never stopped being right.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The greenest light in American literature — and the emptiest party.

J.D. Salinger

Three days in New York with literature's most imitated voice.

J.R.R. Tolkien

The one book that built modern fantasy — 150 million copies and counting.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

A children's book that adults reread for the rest of their lives.

Gabriel García Márquez

Seven generations of the Buendía family in the town that invented magical realism.

George Orwell

All animals are equal — the fable that outlived the regime it mocked.

Aldous Huxley

The dystopia where nobody has to be forced — everyone's too comfortable to object.

Ray Bradbury

The fireman whose job is burning books — until he reads one.

Ernest Hemingway

An old fisherman, a giant marlin, and the sentence-by-sentence perfection that won the Nobel.

Toni Morrison

The ghost story that made America face what it buried — Morrison's Pulitzer masterpiece.

Chinua Achebe

The most-read African novel ever written — colonial history from the other side.

Anne Frank

Two years in a hidden annex — the most widely read testimony of the Holocaust.

Napoleon Hill

The 1937 study of 500 fortunes that started the entire success-literature genre.

Miguel de Cervantes

An old man reads too many chivalry novels and decides to become a knight — the first modern novel, and still the funniest.

Leo Tolstoy

All happy families are alike — the novel that follows the unhappy ones.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

A student murders a pawnbroker to prove a theory — and the theory murders him back.

Charlotte Brontë

Poor, obscure, plain, and little — and the most defiant heroine of her century.

Emily Brontë

Love as haunting: two souls wrecking two generations on the Yorkshire moors.

Louisa May Alcott

Four sisters, one genteel-poor household, and the most loved coming-of-age novel in American literature.

Mary Shelley

A scientist makes a creature and abandons it — science fiction's founding document, written by a teenager.

Bram Stoker

The Count comes to London — the vampire novel every vampire since has been answering.

Oscar Wilde

A portrait ages so its subject doesn't have to — Wilde's only novel, and his sharpest epigram.

Alexandre Dumas

Betrayed, imprisoned, escaped, enriched — literature's greatest revenge, served over 1,200 pages.

Herman Melville

One captain, one white whale, and everything else in the world stuffed in between.

Kurt Vonnegut

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time — Vonnegut survives Dresden by breaking the novel. So it goes.

John Steinbeck

Cain and Abel replayed across two California families — Steinbeck called it the book he was practicing for.

Alice Walker

Celie writes letters to God because no one else listens — until she finds her own voice. Pulitzer, 1983.

Hermann Hesse

A Brahmin's son walks away from every teacher — including the Buddha — to learn from a river.

Marcus Aurelius

A Roman emperor's private notes to himself — never meant for us, indispensable ever since.

Sun Tzu

Win without fighting — 2,500 years of strategy in thirteen brief chapters.

Maya Angelou

The memoir that turned a silenced Black girlhood in the Jim Crow South into American literature.

Joseph Heller

The paradox that named every no-win rule since: sane enough to fear flying is sane enough to fly.

John Steinbeck

The Joads drive west from the Dust Bowl into the promise of California — and the promise breaks. Pulitzer, 1940.

Margaret Mitchell

Scarlett O'Hara survives the collapse of her whole world by refusing, ever, to stay down.

E.B. White

Some Pig. A spider saves a pig's life with four words — the best children's book about death ever written.

William Golding

Schoolboys, an island, no adults — and the thin crust of civilization cracking.

Charles Dickens

London, Paris, the guillotine — and the far, far better thing at the end.

Victor Hugo

One stolen loaf of bread, nineteen years, and the most relentless policeman in literature.

Homer

Ten years of war, ten years of getting home — the story under every story since.

Sylvia Plath

A brilliant young woman's New York summer — and the glass descending.

Ken Kesey

McMurphy vs. Nurse Ratched — the ward as America, the bet as everything.

C.S. Lewis

A wardrobe, a lamppost, and always winter but never Christmas.

Albert Camus

A man shoots a stranger on a beach and feels nothing — and the world decides that is his real crime.

Franz Kafka

A traveling salesman wakes up transformed into a monstrous insect, and his family's love curdles into disgust.

Vladimir Nabokov

The most beautiful sentences in English, deployed by one of literature's most monstrous narrators.

Mikhail Bulgakov

The Devil arrives in Soviet Moscow with a talking black cat, and chaos becomes a kind of justice.

Ralph Ellison

A Black man in mid-century America discovers that no one, Black or white, actually sees him.

Isaac Asimov

A mathematician foresees the fall of a galactic empire and builds a secret plan to shorten the dark age to come.

Agatha Christie

Ten strangers are lured to an island and killed one by one — and the murderer is among them.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

In Puritan Boston, a woman branded with a scarlet A guards the identity of her child's father.

Joseph Conrad

A sailor journeys up the Congo to find a legendary ivory trader who has become a god to the people he exploits.

Charles Dickens

An orphaned boy meets an escaped convict in a graveyard, and a mysterious fortune turns him into a gentleman who forgets who he was.

Leo Tolstoy

Five aristocratic families live, love, and lose across the years Napoleon marches on Russia — the novel against which all others are measured.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Three brothers, one loathsome father, and a murder that forces each to confront God, freedom, and the limits of reason.

John Steinbeck

Two migrant workers chase the dream of a little farm of their own, and one of them is a gentle giant who doesn't know his own strength.

Zora Neale Hurston

A Black woman in the rural South tells the story of her three marriages and her long search for a life, and a love, of her own.

Shirley Jackson

Four strangers spend a summer in a house with a violent history, and the house begins to choose one of them.

Rachel Carson

The book that launched the environmental movement, revealing how pesticides were silently poisoning the natural world.

Mark Twain

A runaway boy and an escaped slave raft down the Mississippi, and the journey quietly indicts a whole country.

Jane Austen

A clever, wealthy young woman who fancies herself a matchmaker keeps engineering romances, and getting everything wrong.

Thomas Hardy

A poor country girl is destroyed by the double standards of Victorian society, one cruelty at a time.

Virginia Woolf

A single June day in London as a society hostess plans a party, and a shell-shocked veteran unravels across town.

Ernest Hemingway

American and British expatriates drift from Paris cafes to Spanish bullfights, chasing meaning after a war that took it.

Betty Friedan

The book that named 'the problem that has no name' and helped launch second-wave feminism.

Edith Wharton

In Gilded Age New York, a proper gentleman engaged to the perfect wife falls for her scandalous cousin, and old-money society closes ranks.

E.M. Forster

A friendship between an Indian doctor and an English visitor collapses under the weight of colonial suspicion after a fateful, ambiguous incident in the Marabar Caves.

Henry James

A spirited young American inherits a fortune and the freedom to shape her own destiny, then makes the one choice that quietly closes every door.

Jack London

A pampered dog is stolen and sold into the brutal world of Klondike sled teams, where the ancient wild slowly reawakens inside him.

Robert Louis Stevenson

A respectable doctor concocts a potion to separate his two natures, and unleashes the monstrous self he thought he could control.

L. Frank Baum

Lewis Carroll

J.M. Barrie

L.M. Montgomery

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Robert Louis Stevenson

H.G. Wells

Alexandre Dumas