Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
1925 · 160 pages
Lorelei Lee, a blonde from Arkansas, keeps a diary about the men who buy her diamonds and gives away far more than she knows. Edith Wharton called it the great American novel.
★ 4.8
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.
Fight Club
1996 · 208 pages
Men beat each other in basements because nothing else in their lives is real. Palahniuk's narrator fakes illness for the support groups, meets the soap salesman Tyler Durden, and builds an army.
★ 4.8
The Diary of a Nobody
1892 · 176 pages
Charles Pooter, a London clerk of vast unearned dignity, records every slight from tradesmen and every dinner-party triumph. He paints his bath red with enamel and mistakes the dissolving water for blood.
★ 4.8
The Complete Little World of Don Camillo
1948 · 272 pages
The comic cycle that became Italian folklore sets a hot-tempered priest against the Communist mayor of a Po Valley village, with the crucifix above the altar talking Don Camillo down from revenge.
★ 5.0
The Painted Word
1975 · 106 pages
Modern painting had become an illustration of theory, Wolfe argued, invisible without the words. He named the three critics who ruled taste in New York, and the art world came after him howling.
★ 5.1
The Bonfire of the Vanities
1987 · 720 pages
Sherman McCoy, a Park Avenue bond trader who calls himself a Master of the Universe, takes a wrong turn into the Bronx. A boy is struck, and Wolfe feeds him to New York.
★ 5.3
American Psycho
1991 · 399 pages
Patrick Bateman works mergers and acquisitions, agonizes over the typeface on a colleague's business card, and narrates atrocities in the voice he uses for Huey Lewis albums. Reagan's Wall Street becomes horror comedy.
★ 5.4
Sixty Stories
1981 · 451 pages
A balloon settles over forty-five blocks of Manhattan and New Yorkers read meanings into it. Barthelme's deadpan collages taught two generations of American writers that a story need not make ordinary sense.
★ 5.5
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
1889 · 410 pages
Knocked cold in a Hartford arms factory, Hank Morgan wakes in Camelot and sets about industrializing it. The comedy runs a long way before Twain turns it into mechanized slaughter.
★ 5.5
The Way of All Flesh
1903 · 315 pages
Theobald Pontifex beats piety into his son with perfect Christian conviction, and Ernest spends the novel working free of him. Butler handed the revolt against Victorian respectability its sharpest and funniest weapon.
★ 5.7
Scoop
1938 · 304 pages
Mistaken for a famous novelist with the same surname, a nature columnist who writes about questing voles is shipped off to cover an African war. Reporters still quote Waugh's newsroom to each other.
★ 6.0
The Miser and Other Plays
1668 · 304 pages
Harpagon keeps a cash box buried in his garden, intends to marry his son's beloved himself, and gives his daughter to whoever asks no dowry. Moliere made him Europe's byword for greed.
★ 6.0
The Alchemist
1610 · 530 pages
Plague empties London, a master flees, and his butler turns the house into a con shop, selling the philosopher's stone to every greedy fool who knocks. Jonson built the swindle like clockwork.
★ 6.1
Main Street
1920 · 898 pages
Carol Milford marries a doctor and moves to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, determined to civilize it. The town wins, and Lewis made Main Street a byword for everything narrow and self-satisfied in American life.
★ 6.1
A Clockwork Orange
1962 · 357 pages
Alex is fifteen and narrates his nights of assault in Nadsat, a slang welded from Russian and Cockney. The state conditions the violence out of him, and Burgess asks whether forced goodness counts.
★ 6.3
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
1966 · 128 pages
Two minor courtiers from Hamlet wait in the wings of a play they cannot follow, flipping a coin that lands heads ninety two times running. Stoppard wrings comedy and dread from their helplessness.
★ 6.4
Cat's Cradle
1963 · 287 pages
Ice-nine, a crystal left by a father of the atomic bomb, freezes any water it touches. Vonnegut sets the scramble for it on an island whose religion is founded on comforting lies.
★ 6.4
A Handful of Dust
1934 · 273 pages
Tony Last loves his ugly Gothic house and believes his wife Brenda is content. Waugh gives her a dull London lover, kills the thing Tony cannot lose, and strands him far from England.
★ 6.5
Fortress Besieged
1947 · 448 pages
Fang Hongjian returns to wartime China with a mail-order diploma and no plan. Qian gave Chinese its image of the besieged life: those outside the fortress want in, those inside want out.
★ 6.6
The Good Soldier Svejk
1923 · 784 pages
Josef Svejk, a Prague dealer in stolen dogs officially certified an idiot, is swept into the Austro-Hungarian army and obeys every order so eagerly that the whole war machine looks ridiculous.
★ 6.6