The Metamorphosis
1915 · 128 pages
Gregor Samsa wakes as an enormous insect and worries first about missing his train. The horror turns domestic fast, and his family decides the son who supported them is now a burden.
★ 9.0
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 Little Prince
1943 · 96 pages
Crash-landed in the Sahara, a pilot meets a boy from a tiny planet who worries about his rose. Saint-Exupéry writes for children and lands hardest on adults who have stopped looking properly.
★ 8.6
Heart of Darkness
1899 · 110 pages
Marlow steams up the Congo to retrieve an ivory agent gone strange upriver. Conrad found empire hollow, and the novelist Achebe's charge of racism has kept the book under argument ever since.
★ 8.6
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
1886 · 499 pages
Nothing in fiction gets nearer to dying. Ivan Ilyich knocks his side hanging a curtain, and his family and his doctors keep up the pretense while a peasant servant tells the truth.
★ 7.3
Bartleby the Scrivener (and other short stories)
1853 · 176 pages
Hired to copy documents in a Wall Street office, a clerk answers every request with "I would prefer not to." He explains nothing, and quiet refusal turns out to be unanswerable.
★ 7.1
A Christmas Carol
1843 · 116 pages
Scrooge hates Christmas until his dead business partner turns up wrapped in chains and three spirits walk him through his own life. The modern Christmas takes its shape from this book.
★ 7.1
The Old Man and the Sea
1952 · 127 pages
Eighty-four days without a fish, and an old Cuban fisherman hooks a marlin longer than his boat and is towed out to sea. A man can be destroyed but not defeated, Santiago thinks.
★ 7.0
Billy Budd, Sailor
1924 · 385 pages
Struck dumb by a false charge of mutiny, a beautiful young sailor answers with his fist and kills his accuser. Melville leaves his captain to choose between the law and the plain truth.
★ 7.0
Of Mice and Men
1937 · 107 pages
George looks after Lennie, huge and slow-witted, across the California ranches, and the two of them keep describing a farm they mean to buy. Steinbeck presses the Depression into that dream.
★ 7.0
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
And Other Tales of Terror
1886 · 224 pages
Stevenson handed psychology its permanent image of the divided self. A respectable London doctor admits a brutal little stranger to his house, and the lawyer who investigates finds the truth worse than blackmail.
★ 6.9
A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
1976 · 240 pages
In our family, Maclean writes, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. Two brothers and their minister father on the Big Blackfoot, and a love that cannot save anyone.
★ 6.9
The Crying of Lot 49
1966 · 183 pages
Named executor of an ex-lover's estate, Oedipa Maas keeps finding a muted post horn on bathroom walls. Either a secret postal system has run under America for centuries or she is unraveling.
★ 6.8
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
1981 · 120 pages
Two brothers spend a morning announcing they will kill Santiago Nasar over their sister's wedding night, and nobody stops them. García Márquez reconstructs it from the witnesses who let it happen.
★ 6.8
The Time Machine
1895 · 320 pages
Wells sent his traveler to the year 802,701, where the gentle Eloi live above ground and the Morlocks feed on them below. Every time machine since is a copy of his.
★ 6.6
The Foundation Pit
1930 · 224 pages
Workers dig a foundation for the building that will house the whole proletariat, and the pit keeps widening. Platonov's Russian buckles under its own slogans, and the Soviets suppressed the book until 1987.
★ 6.6
The Kreutzer Sonata
1889 · 95 pages
On a night train, a man tells strangers how he came to kill his wife, then turns the confession into an assault on marriage and desire itself. Russia's censors suppressed it.
★ 6.5
Chess Story
1941 · 104 pages
Aboard a liner to Buenos Aires, the world chess champion meets a stranger who learned the game in Gestapo isolation from one stolen book. Zweig makes chess an instrument of torture.
★ 6.5
The Day of the Owl
1961 · 124 pages
A small-time builder is shot running for a bus in a Sicilian square, and every passenger saw nothing. Sciascia named the Mafia as an organization while Italy still insisted it did not exist.
★ 6.5
Breakfast at Tiffany's
1958 · 178 pages
Holly Golightly, born Lulamae Barnes in rural Texas, charms money out of men in wartime New York and belongs to nobody. Norman Mailer said he would not have changed two words in it.
★ 6.4
A Clockwork Orange
1962 · 357 pages
Alex is fifteen and narrates his nights of assault in Nadsat, a slang welded from Russian and Cockney. The state conditions the violence out of him, and Burgess asks whether forced goodness counts.
★ 6.3
Zadig and L'Ingenu
1747 · 191 pages
Voltaire uses wit as a demolition tool. Zadig reconstructs a dog and horse from their tracks and is fined for knowing too much, and a Canadian Huron in Brittany finds French religion absurd.
★ 5.9
First Love
1860 · 298 pages
Turgenev said this was the only work of his that still gave him pleasure. Vladimir, sixteen, loves the princess next door, twenty-one, and her secret lover is nobody he can fight.
★ 5.6
Too Loud a Solitude
1976 · 98 pages
Thirty-five years in a Prague cellar, Haňťa crushes wastepaper and saves the banned books he is paid to destroy, wrapping each bale in an art print with a rescued volume inside.
★ 5.5
The Pledge
1958 · 192 pages
An inspector swears to a murdered girl's mother he will find her killer, then quits, buys a filling station, and waits with a child as bait. Durrenmatt wrote it against the detective genre.
★ 5.2
The Call of Cthulhu
1928 · 420 pages
Lovecraft pitched horror at cosmic scale, where the terror is an indifferent universe rather than any monster. A sculptor's dreams and a Louisiana swamp cult lead to a sunken city.
★ 5.1
At the Mountains of Madness
1936 · 192 pages
Antarctic explorers find a stone city older than mankind, its history painted on the walls. Lovecraft's real monster is deep time, and this novella is where his cosmic dread reaches full scale.
★ 5.0
The Patience Stone
2008 · 141 pages
A woman tends her comatose husband, a bullet in his neck, and tells him everything Afghanistan never let her say. In Persian legend the patience stone absorbs every confession until it shatters.
★ 5.0
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