Bread Givers
1925 · 240 pages
Sara Smolinsky's father studies Torah in a Lower East Side tenement while her mother takes in boarders and he marries her sisters to men they dread. She leaves at seventeen for night school.
★ 5.2
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.
The Collected Stories
1994 · 386 pages
Paley wrote as people talk, in the Bronx Yiddish and Greenwich Village argument of women raising children alone, and got more life into three slim collections than most novelists manage in a career.
★ 5.5
The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists
1914 · 624 pages
The philanthropists of the title are house painters who give their labor away and defend the system that ruins them. Owen, the socialist, cuts up bread to demonstrate the money trick.
★ 5.7
Housekeeping
1980 · 240 pages
Two sisters in an Idaho lake town are raised by a drifter aunt who leaves the doors open and lets leaves blow through the house. Robinson makes transience a form of faith.
★ 6.0
Clear Light of Day
1980 · 182 pages
In a decaying Old Delhi house, two sisters reopen everything the family did to each other in 1947, the year of Partition. Desai makes still summer afternoons unbearable.
★ 6.1
Memed, My Hawk
1955 · 392 pages
Five villages belong to Abdi Agha. The boy Memed runs, is dragged back, kills, and takes to the mountains, where Kemal turns a peasant's revolt into an epic of Turkey's Çukurova plain.
★ 6.2
Ask the Dust
1939 · 165 pages
Arturo Bandini starves in a Bunker Hill hotel in Depression Los Angeles, wanting to be a great writer and loving a Mexican waitress he cannot stop insulting. Bukowski called Fante his god.
★ 6.2
Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories
1962 · 117 pages
Three Palestinian men pay a driver to smuggle them from Iraq into Kuwait inside a water tanker. Kanafani turned those hours in the metal into the defining image of Palestinian exile.
★ 6.2
The Kreutzer Sonata
1889 · 95 pages
On a night train, a man tells strangers how he came to kill his wife, then turns the confession into an assault on marriage and desire itself. Russia's censors suppressed it.
★ 6.5
Sketches from a Hunter's Album
1852 · 403 pages
Turgenev sends a hunter across the provinces with a gun and a dog, and the serfs he meets emerge as individuals. The book did for serfdom what Uncle Tom's Cabin did for slavery.
★ 6.6
Effi Briest
1895 · 255 pages
Married at seventeen to a baron of thirty-eight who once courted her mother, Effi is stranded in a bleak Baltic town. Fontane lets a code nobody believes in destroy her anyway.
★ 6.6
The Street
1946 · 448 pages
Lutie Johnson believes what Benjamin Franklin promised about work and thrift, and rents an apartment on 116th Street to raise her son. The men who watch her climb the stairs have other plans.
★ 6.7
Revolutionary Road
1961 · 337 pages
Frank and April Wheeler tell themselves they are too fine for Connecticut and plan an escape to Paris. Yates tracks every evasion and self-flattering lie until the marriage has nothing underneath it.
★ 6.8
Conversation in The Cathedral
1969 · 601 pages
At what moment did Peru screw itself up? A newspaperman and his father's chauffeur drink through an afternoon in a Lima bar called the Cathedral, and their talk rebuilds a country under dictatorship.
★ 6.9
Cannery Row
1945 · 192 pages
Mack and his friends, unemployed and unhurried, decide to repay Doc the marine biologist with a party. Steinbeck writes a Monterey street of bums and grocers and whores as a functioning society.
★ 6.9
Red Cavalry
1926 · 320 pages
Riding with Bolshevik Cossacks through Poland in 1920, a Jewish intellectual watches them sack towns and kill prisoners. Babel writes the atrocity in sentences so beautiful that the effect is obscene.
★ 7.0
Independent People
1934 · 482 pages
Eighteen years of hired labor buy Bjartur a stretch of Icelandic moorland, and he defends his independence against weather, debt, and his own family. Laxness makes stubbornness heroic and ruinous at once.
★ 7.0
Sentimental Education
1869 · 479 pages
Frédéric Moreau spends his youth in Paris loving a married woman he will never have and drifting through the 1848 revolution. Flaubert made wasted life a permanent subject for the novel.
★ 7.0
Kolyma Tales
1978 · 508 pages
Shalamov spent seventeen years in the Kolyma camps. His stories are short, about frostbite and stolen bread and men too weak to lift a shovel, and he insists that suffering teaches nothing.
★ 7.1
Cousin Bette
1846 · 490 pages
Passed over by her rich relations, a poor spinster sets out to ruin them, helped by a wife who bankrupts men for a living. Balzac makes envy a protagonist and never looks away.
★ 7.1