The Brothers Karamazov
1880 · 832 pages
Old Karamazov is murdered and each of his three sons had reason. Around the crime Dostoevsky stages the fiercest argument fiction has ever made about God and the suffering of children.
★ 9.7
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.
Fear and Trembling
1843 · 158 pages
Abraham climbs the mountain to sacrifice Isaac, and Kierkegaard asks how obedience to God can require a murder. Faith suspends ethics altogether, and the believer cannot explain himself to anyone.
★ 7.1
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
Cry, the Beloved Country
1948 · 320 pages
A Zulu parson goes to Johannesburg to find his son and learns the boy killed a white man who fought for black South Africans. Paton's fifteen million readers made apartheid a world scandal.
★ 6.7
The Book of Psalms
500 BC · 560 pages
One hundred fifty poems of praise, terror, and rage at God, restored to their Hebrew compression by the translator Robert Alter. The shepherd psalm sits beside one ending with infants dashed on rocks.
★ 6.7
Cash
The Autobiography
1997 · 320 pages
Cash tells it in his own voice: picking cotton in Dyess, Arkansas, the brother a saw killed at fifteen, the amphetamine decades, and the night he crawled into Nickajack Cave to die.
★ 4.6