Philosophy in the Boudoir
1795 · 173 pages
Two libertines take a girl of fifteen through atheism, pleasure and cruelty, pausing for a pamphlet urging the Republic to abolish God with the king. Sade takes reason to its worst conclusion.
★ 4.2
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.
Justine
1791 · 336 pages
Twelve years old and orphaned, Justine chooses virtue and is punished for it by monks, surgeons, and noblemen who argue at length that nature rewards cruelty. Napoleon had Sade arrested for writing it.
★ 4.2
Adventures on the Wine Route
A Wine Buyer's Tour of France
1988 · 288 pages
A Berkeley merchant drives France cellar by cellar, buying from small growers and arguing that filtering a wine bright strips out what you want to drink. Lynch taught Americans to taste for place.
★ 4.5
Pietr the Latvian (Inspector Maigret)
1931 · 176 pages
Inspector Maigret arrives fully formed in his first case, following a con man off the Paris express to a Normandy fishing port. He solves people rather than puzzles, and Simenon wrote seventy-four more.
★ 4.6
Fatale
1977 · 98 pages
Aimee Joubert kills for hire. She arrives in a smug French seaside town, learns everyone's secrets over dinner, and sets the notables to destroying each other. Manchette writes crime as class war.
★ 4.9
Band of Brothers
1992 · 336 pages
Easy Company jumped into Normandy on D-Day, held Bastogne through the snow short of ammunition and coats, and finished the war at Hitler's alpine retreat. Ambrose built it from the men's own accounts.
★ 4.9
Bonjour Tristesse
1954 · 240 pages
On the Riviera, seventeen-year-old Cécile sets out to break up her widowed father's engagement to an elegant, exacting woman, and finds she is good at it. Sagan wrote it at eighteen.
★ 5.0
An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris
1975 · 72 pages
For three days in October 1974, Perec sat in cafes on the Place Saint-Sulpice and wrote down every bus, pigeon, and passerby. Look long enough, he shows, and nothing is background.
★ 5.0
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
A Memoir of Life and Death
1997 · 144 pages
A stroke left the editor of French Elle able to move one eyelid. Blinking while an assistant recited the alphabet, Bauby composed a memoir of appetite, his children, and the body holding him.
★ 5.0
The Map and the Territory
2010 · 288 pages
Jed Martin, an artist, makes his name photographing Michelin road maps and painting people at their trades. Houellebecq writes himself into the novel, has himself murdered, and gives Jed a dying father.
★ 5.0
The Man Who Planted Trees
1953 · 72 pages
In a dead Provencal valley a shepherd pushes acorns into the ground, one at a time. Thirty years and two wars later the forest holds ten thousand people who never learn his name.
★ 5.2
Twenty Years After
1845 · 845 pages
Twenty years on the musketeers are older and on opposite sides: d'Artagnan and Porthos serve Cardinal Mazarin, Athos and Aramis the rebels, and the quarrel carries all four to Charles I's scaffold.
★ 5.3
Between Meals
An Appetite for Paris
1962 · 185 pages
Sent to the Sorbonne in 1926, Liebling studied restaurants instead. Proust, he argues, simply lacked the appetite to eat properly. What follows is a young man's gluttonous education in Paris.
★ 5.3
The Physiology of Taste
1825 · 464 pages
Brillat-Savarin, a French magistrate, made the table a subject for philosophy: tell me what you eat, he wrote, and I will tell you what you are. No food writer has bettered him.
★ 5.4
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
Flaubert's Parrot
1984 · 190 pages
Barnes sends a retired English doctor after the stuffed parrot once on Flaubert's desk. The search becomes chronologies, a bestiary, a mock exam, and under all of it the doctor's dead wife.
★ 5.4
The Coming of the French Revolution
1939 · 280 pages
1789 was four revolutions at once, Lefebvre shows: nobles against the king, the bourgeoisie against nobles, Paris crowds against bread prices, and peasants burning the records of what they owed.
★ 5.8
Persian Letters
1721 · 341 pages
Two Persian travelers in Paris write home about a king who conjures money from paper and a pope who makes bread into flesh. In Isfahan, the harem one of them left is collapsing.
★ 5.9
Viper's Tangle
1932 · 220 pages
Louis, a rich dying lawyer, fills a long letter to his wife with decades of hatred and the fortune he means to withhold from his children. Mauriac tracks the moment the hardness breaks.
★ 6.0
Therese Desqueyroux
1927 · 128 pages
Cleared of poisoning her husband because her family closes ranks, Therese rides home through the pine forests of the Landes trying to explain herself. Mauriac makes provincial Catholic marriage feel like slow suffocation.
★ 6.0