The Taste of Country Cooking
1976 · 310 pages
Freetown, Virginia was founded by freed slaves, including Edna Lewis's grandfather, and her cookbook is that community's year: what the farm gave in each season and the meal it made.
★ 4.7
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.
Bitter Lemons of Cyprus
1957 · 288 pages
Buying a house in the hill village of Bellapais, Durrell watched Cyprus slide from Mediterranean idyll into insurgency, and ended up speaking for the British government as his Greek friends turned against him.
★ 4.8
South from Granada
1957 · 320 pages
In 1920 an Englishman settled in the mountains south of Granada, in a village called Yegen. Brenan sets down its customs, its poverty and its gossip, an Andalusia the Civil War would erase.
★ 4.8
Rebecca
1938 · 448 pages
The second Mrs. de Winter is never given a name, which is the point. She marries a widower, arrives at his Cornish estate, Manderley, and finds the drowned first wife occupying every room.
★ 5.0
A Man's Place
1983 · 90 pages
Ernaux's father ran a café and grocery in Normandy, terrified all his life of using the wrong word. Educated out of his class, she writes him in flat sentences that never condescend.
★ 5.4
The Snows of Yesteryear
1989 · 290 pages
Rezzori rebuilds vanished Czernowitz, the eastern edge of the Habsburg world, through the five people who filled his childhood. His father hunts, his mother panics, and his nursemaid teaches him about death.
★ 5.7
Poems New and Collected, 1957-1997
1998 · 273 pages
Forty years of poems that begin with an ordinary question and end somewhere you never agreed to go. In "Cat in an Empty Apartment," a cat waits for the owner who has died.
★ 5.9
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
Dora Bruder
1997 · 119 pages
A missing-person notice from December 1941 sends Modiano into Paris archives after Dora Bruder, a Jewish fifteen-year-old who fled her convent school. He recovers her addresses and the date she was deported.
★ 6.1
A Heart So White
1992 · 278 pages
A woman returns from her honeymoon, goes to the bathroom, and shoots herself while the family eats lunch. Marías gives the story to her nephew, an interpreter afraid to know.
★ 6.4
Embers
1942 · 213 pages
Two officers who trained together meet for dinner after forty-one years. The general has questions about a morning hunt and his dead wife, and the candles burn down while he circles them.
★ 6.5
Out of Africa
1937 · 399 pages
"I had a farm in Africa," Dinesen begins. Seventeen years below the Ngong Hills end in ruined coffee and a forced sale, and she tells it in prose that never asks for sympathy.
★ 6.5
The Street of Crocodiles
1934 · 368 pages
Shot by a Gestapo officer in 1942, Schulz left stories that turn a Galician backwater into a world where his father breeds birds in the attic and the calendar grows a thirteenth month.
★ 6.5
The Poetics of Space
1957 · 268 pages
Bachelard reads the house as our first universe: the cellar holds our fears, the attic our reveries, and drawers, shells, and corners hold the rest. Architects have designed by it since the 1960s.
★ 6.6
The Hare with Amber Eyes
2010 · 368 pages
A maid hid 264 Japanese carvings in her mattress while the Nazis stripped the Vienna palace of the Ephrussi bankers. De Waal, their descendant, follows the objects through his family's rise and ruin.
★ 6.7
The Rings of Saturn
1995 · 304 pages
Sebald walks the Suffolk coast, and each mile opens onto herring fleets, the wandering skull of the physician Thomas Browne, a town swallowed by the sea. Essayists have spent thirty years imitating this.
★ 6.7
The Complete Poems
1966 · 908 pages
Waiting outside a Leningrad prison with a parcel for her son, Akhmatova was asked whether she could describe this. Requiem was the answer. Her love lyrics have the same merciless exactness.
★ 7.1
Hope Against Hope
1970 · 442 pages
Osip Mandelstam wrote sixteen lines mocking Stalin and died in a camp for them. His widow Nadezhda memorized the poems to keep them alive, then set down exactly how the fear worked.
★ 7.1
A Time of Gifts
1977 · 321 pages
At eighteen in 1933 Fermor set off on foot from Holland for Constantinople, sleeping in barns one night and in castles the next, and caught central Europe in its last clear light.
★ 7.1
My Antonia
1918 · 166 pages
Jim Burden arrives orphaned in Nebraska and finds Antonia Shimerda, an immigrant girl whose family is barely surviving the winter. Cather writes the prairie so well the book reads like your own childhood.
★ 7.2
Austerlitz
2001 · 298 pages
A stranger in an Antwerp waiting room talks about architecture, and over years of meetings tells how he was sent out of Prague on a train in 1939. The grief is never named.
★ 7.6
Selected Stories
1996 · 412 pages
Munro set her stories in Ontario towns where a woman's life can turn on something said at a kitchen table. She fits more into forty pages than most novelists get into a novel.
★ 7.7
Poems
1979 · 352 pages
Bishop looks at a fish, a filling station, a moose in the road, and never tells you what to feel. In "One Art" she calls losing things an art you can master.
★ 7.8
In Search of Lost Time (set of 6)
1922 · 4211 pages
The most complete account of memory ever written. A man tastes a madeleine, and three thousand pages of remembered love, jealousy, and vanished aristocrats change permanently how you look at your own past.
★ 9.7