The Tartar Steppe
1940 · 288 pages
Giovanni Drogo rides out to a frontier fortress and gives it his life, scanning an empty desert for the enemy who would justify it. Buzzati turned postponement into a form of terror.
★ 6.3
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Existentialism Is a Humanism
1946 · 128 pages
Existence precedes essence, Sartre told a packed Paris hall in 1945: you invent yourself by choosing and may blame nothing. The student torn between the Resistance and his mother is told to choose.
★ 6.3
The Moviegoer
1961 · 272 pages
Binx Bolling sells stocks in a New Orleans suburb, sits through afternoon movies, and calls his way out of everydayness the search. Percy's first novel beat Catch-22 to the National Book Award.
★ 6.5
No Exit
1944 · 275 pages
Hell is other people, and Sartre proves it by locking a coward, a seducer, and a mother who drowned her baby in one bright room with no mirrors and no sleep.
★ 6.5
The Sickness Unto Death
1849 · 179 pages
Despair, Kierkegaard argues, is not a passing mood but the standing condition of a self refusing to be itself. He catalogs its forms with clinical precision, and the diagnosis reaches everyone.
★ 6.8
Nausea
1938 · 192 pages
Roquentin, a scholar alone in a French port town, watches ordinary objects turn strange and sickening in his hands. Under a chestnut tree the bare fact that anything exists at all overwhelms him.
★ 6.9
Either/Or
1843 · 640 pages
Two ways of living stand side by side, unreconciled: the aesthete who lives for the interesting moment and whose papers include a seducer's diary, and the judge who defends marriage and duty.
★ 7.0
The Myth of Sisyphus
1942 · 212 pages
The only serious philosophical question, Camus opens, is whether to kill yourself. His answer: the universe will never explain itself, so you live anyway, unreconciled, like Sisyphus happy pushing his rock uphill forever.
★ 7.2
The Idiot
1869 · 656 pages
Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from a Swiss clinic, epileptic and incapable of guile, and Petersburg cannot decide whether to adore him or use him. The world takes a genuinely good man apart.
★ 8.1
Portrait of a Lady
1881 · 656 pages
Isabel Archer, an American with opinions and a sudden fortune, turns down good proposals and marries badly in Italy. James stays so close inside her mind that her mistakes feel like your own.
★ 8.1
Being and Time
1927 · 592 pages
Philosophy forgot to ask what it means for anything to exist. Heidegger rebuilds the question around the ordinary human being, thrown into a world he did not choose and running out of time.
★ 8.5
The Stranger
1942 · 123 pages
Meursault buries his mother without crying, takes a lover, and shoots a man on a hot Algiers beach. At his trial the tears he never shed matter more than the killing.
★ 8.9
The Metamorphosis
1915 · 128 pages
Gregor Samsa wakes as an enormous insect and worries first about missing his train. The horror turns domestic fast, and his family decides the son who supported them is now a burden.
★ 9.0