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
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 Outsiders
1967 · 160 pages
Greasers and Socs settle their hatred with fists and knives in Tulsa, narrated by fourteen-year-old Ponyboy Curtis. Hinton wrote it at sixteen, and it is still the novel American schools hand to thirteen-year-olds.
★ 5.0
City of Quartz
Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
1990 · 512 pages
Los Angeles read as a machine for excluding people: Davis strips the sunshine myth to find speculators, bum-proof benches, and a police force patrolling from helicopters. Two years later the city burned.
★ 5.3
Lady Chatterley's Lover
1928 · 342 pages
Paralyzed in the war, Clifford Chatterley loses his wife to the gamekeeper. Lawrence insists tenderness is physical or nothing, and the 1960 jury that cleared the book remade what British publishers could print.
★ 6.5
North and South
1855 · 450 pages
Gaskell moves Margaret Hale from a soft southern parish to a smoke-blackened cotton town, where she despises the mill owner Thornton until a strike teaches her what masters and workers each risk.
★ 6.6