A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
1916 · 329 pages
Stephen Dedalus grows from a small boy into a young man set on leaving Ireland to make art. The prose matures sentence by sentence with him, from baby talk to fierce argument.
★ 8.7
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.
The Savage Detectives
1998 · 592 pages
Two young poets calling themselves visceral realists vanish into the Sonoran desert hunting a woman who published a single poem decades earlier. Forty voices over twenty years piece together where they went.
★ 7.7
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
Crossing to Safety
1987 · 335 pages
Two couples meet as junior faculty in Depression-era Madison and stay bound to each other for forty years. Stegner locates the drama of a life in devotion, illness, and one woman's will.
★ 5.5
Studs Lonigan Trilogy
1935 · 988 pages
On the Irish Catholic South Side of Chicago, a boy leaves eighth grade certain he is somebody. Farrell tracks Studs through poolrooms, gangs, and drink into the Depression, withholding every consolation.
★ 5.3