Crime and Punishment
1866 · 565 pages
Raskolnikov murders a pawnbroker to prove he stands above ordinary morality, then comes apart as a magistrate circles him. It reads like a thriller and works like a confession.
★ 9.6
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 Red and the Black
1830 · 576 pages
Julien Sorel, a carpenter's son with a memorized Bible and enormous nerve, climbs out of provincial France into Paris society by way of two women. Stendhal reports each calculation without excusing him.
★ 8.5
Lord Jim
1900 · 400 pages
Jim jumps from a sinking pilgrim ship that then does not sink, and never afterward proves to himself the jump was not really him. Conrad makes one second of cowardice bottomless.
★ 7.1
Hunger
1890 · 206 pages
Starving in Kristiania, the city that became Oslo, a young writer gives away money he lacks and refuses food when offered. Hamsun tracks a mind sliding toward derangement, and modern fiction followed.
★ 7.0
A Hero of Our Time
1840 · 168 pages
Pechorin seduces, duels, and wrecks lives across the Caucasus, then records in his diary exactly why he does it. Russian fiction took its habit of merciless self-analysis from this bored young officer.
★ 6.6
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
1956 · 262 pages
Mizoguchi stammers, and the beauty of Kyoto's Golden Pavilion stands between him and every living thing. Mishima builds the 1950 arson by an acolyte into a case for destroying what you cannot possess.
★ 6.6
Zeno's Conscience
1923 · 464 pages
Zeno quits smoking constantly and never quits. Told by his analyst to write his life, he sets down a marriage begun by proposing to three sisters in one evening, and lies gorgeously throughout.
★ 6.6
The Secret History
1992 · 557 pages
At a Vermont college a transfer student joins five classics majors and their charismatic tutor, then learns their rite to Dionysus left a farmer dead. Dark academia has been rewriting it since.
★ 6.4
A Heart So White
1992 · 278 pages
A woman returns from her honeymoon, goes to the bathroom, and shoots herself while the family eats lunch. Marías gives the story to her nephew, an interpreter afraid to know.
★ 6.4
The Talented Mr. Ripley
1955 · 288 pages
Sent to Italy to fetch a shipping magnate's son, Tom Ripley falls for the life instead, murders his friend, and wears his name. Highsmith makes you want him to get away with it.
★ 6.3
Clear Light of Day
1980 · 182 pages
In a decaying Old Delhi house, two sisters reopen everything the family did to each other in 1947, the year of Partition. Desai makes still summer afternoons unbearable.
★ 6.1
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
The Blind Owl
1937 · 108 pages
Persian fiction's darkest book: an opium-addicted painter of pen cases draws the same scene, an old man and a girl in black offering a lily, then finds it living behind his wall.
★ 5.3
The Haunting of Hill House
1959 · 288 pages
Nothing in horror is more frightening, and Jackson never shows you the thing doing it. Eleanor, who nursed her mother for years, joins a study at Hill House, and the house wants her.
★ 5.1
Rebecca
1938 · 448 pages
The second Mrs. de Winter is never given a name, which is the point. She marries a widower, arrives at his Cornish estate, Manderley, and finds the drowned first wife occupying every room.
★ 5.0
Out
1997 · 400 pages
Four women pack boxed lunches on a Tokyo night shift. One strangles her husband, the others take the body apart, and the invisibility that shrank their lives turns out to protect them.
★ 4.9