The Great Gatsby
1925 · 208 pages
Gatsby throws enormous parties hoping the woman he loved will wander into one. Fitzgerald made the Jazz Age America's myth of itself, and the last page is the most beautiful in American writing.
★ 9.4
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.
Death of a Salesman
1949 · 139 pages
Willy Loman, a traveling salesman worn down to nothing, argues with his grown sons and with people who are not in the room. Audiences have recognized their own fathers in him since 1949.
★ 8.7
Sister Carrie
1900 · 494 pages
Carrie Meeber leaves Wisconsin for Chicago and rises through two men to the New York stage. Dreiser lets her prosper without remorse or retribution, and American fiction has been freer ever since.
★ 7.0
Revolutionary Road
1961 · 337 pages
Frank and April Wheeler tell themselves they are too fine for Connecticut and plan an escape to Paris. Yates tracks every evasion and self-flattering lie until the marriage has nothing underneath it.
★ 6.8
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
1971 · 204 pages
Raoul Duke and his attorney drive to Las Vegas with a trunk of narcotics to cover a desert motorcycle race and a drug enforcement conference. The bender becomes Thompson's autopsy of the sixties.
★ 6.4
Middlesex
2002 · 544 pages
Cal Stephanides was born a girl in Detroit and became a boy at fourteen, and traces the gene responsible back through Asia Minor to grandparents who were brother and sister.
★ 5.2