Malina
1971 · 283 pages
In a Vienna apartment a woman without a name loves Ivan and lives with Malina, and her interior life comes apart. Bachmann writes private ruin and Austria's buried fascism as the same catastrophe.
★ 6.1
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 Bell Jar
1963 · 288 pages
Esther Greenwood wins a month at a New York fashion magazine and comes home unable to want anything. Plath writes breakdown from the inside, down to the fig tree of futures rotting unchosen.
★ 6.3
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 Tenant of Wildfell Hall
1848 · 576 pages
Helen Graham bolts her bedroom door against a drunk husband, takes her son, and lives by selling paintings. Victorian reviewers called it coarse and unfit to put in a girl's hands.
★ 6.6
Orlando
A Biography
1928 · 333 pages
Orlando starts as a boy at Queen Elizabeth's court and ends as a woman in 1928 London, changing sex without fuss. Woolf wrote it for her lover Vita Sackville-West, and the joy shows.
★ 7.0
Lysistrata and Other Plays
411 BC · 241 pages
Twenty years into a war they never voted for, the women of Greece refuse their husbands until the men make peace. Aristophanes also hoists Socrates over the stage in a basket.
★ 7.1
The Handmaid's Tale
1985 · 336 pages
In the theocracy that replaced the United States, fertile women are assigned to powerful men to bear their children. Atwood put nothing in it that had not already happened somewhere.
★ 7.7
Their Eyes Were Watching God
1937 · 219 pages
Janie comes home to a Black town in Florida and tells a friend about her three marriages and how she found her own voice. Hurston writes porch talk exactly as it sounded.
★ 8.0
Wuthering Heights
1847 · 353 pages
Heathcliff, a foundling on a Yorkshire farm, spends his life destroying two families over the girl he loves. The poet Rossetti called it a fiend of a book, its action laid in hell.
★ 8.8