The Tartar Steppe
1940 · 288 pages
Giovanni Drogo rides out to a frontier fortress and gives it his life, scanning an empty desert for the enemy who would justify it. Buzzati turned postponement into a form of terror.
★ 6.3
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.
Voss
1957 · 464 pages
In 1845 a German explorer attempts to cross Australia, bound across the desert to a woman in Sydney he barely knows. It took the inaugural Miles Franklin Award, Australia's foremost literary prize.
★ 6.6
The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas
1881 · 368 pages
Bras Cubas writes from beyond the grave, dedicating his memoirs to the first worm that gnawed his corpse. A rich Brazilian idler tallies a wasted life with wit, malice, and zero remorse.
★ 6.6
The Sickness Unto Death
1849 · 179 pages
Despair, Kierkegaard argues, is not a passing mood but the standing condition of a self refusing to be itself. He catalogs its forms with clinical precision, and the diagnosis reaches everyone.
★ 6.8
Life is a Dream
1635 · 96 pages
Spanish Golden Age drama peaks here. King Basilio locks his newborn son in a tower to outrun a prophecy, then has him drugged, brought to court, and told it was a dream.
★ 7.0
Gilead
2004 · 247 pages
John Ames, an old preacher in Iowa, is dying and sets his life down for the seven-year-old son who will not remember him. Robinson makes an ordinary afternoon feel like grace.
★ 7.7