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.

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

Winesburg, Ohio

1919 · 153 pages

Twenty-two linked stories about people in an Ohio town who cannot say what they feel, except to the young reporter George Willard. Faulkner called Anderson the father of his generation of American writers.

★ 6.6

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