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
Browse by time · decade
1890s
1890 – 1899
Showing 21 books from the 1890s
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
1891 · 342 pages
Zarathustra comes down from his mountain to announce that God is dead and man is something to be overcome. Nietzsche wrote it as scripture rather than argument, and readers take it personally.
★ 8.5
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
1891 · 492 pages
Tess, a poor farm girl, is sent to claim kinship with rich relatives, and what happens there decides the rest of her life. Hardy called her a pure woman and Victorian England erupted.
★ 8.1
The Importance of Being Earnest
1895 · 431 pages
Wilde gives two idle men imaginary people, a wicked brother and an invalid friend, to escape their obligations, then sets them courting women who will marry no one but a man named Ernest.
★ 8.0
The Interpretation of Dreams
1899 · 512 pages
Every dream is a disguised wish, Freud claims, and the mind disguises it by condensation and displacement. Psychoanalysis rests on this book, and the dreams it dissects are mostly Freud's own.
★ 7.3
The Awakening and Selected Stories
1899 · 286 pages
On a Louisiana resort island a married woman learns to swim, and the pleasure undoes everything she agreed to be. Edna Pontellier wants a life of her own, and 1899 offers none.
★ 7.1
The Picture of Dorian Gray
1891 · 112 pages
Told by a charming aristocrat that beauty is everything, Dorian Gray wishes his portrait would age in his place, and it does. Wilde's epigrams carry every page, and the horror arrives beneath them.
★ 7.0
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
Dracula
1897 · 512 pages
An English solicitor rides into the Carpathians to close a property deal and finds his client is a corpse with plans for London. Every undead figure since works from Stoker's Count.
★ 7.0
The Turn of the Screw
1898 · 134 pages
A governess at a country house becomes certain that two dead servants are working on the children in her care. James engineered the ambiguity so precisely that critics have argued for a century.
★ 7.0
Suicide
A Study In Sociology
1897 · 405 pages
Protestants kill themselves more often than Catholics, single people more often than married. Durkheim turned the most private act into a social fact, and every social science since counts the way he counted.
★ 6.8
The Division of Labor in Society
1893 · 362 pages
What holds a modern society together when its members no longer share a creed? Durkheim's answer is the division of labor itself: the more specialized we become, the more we need each other.
★ 6.8
The Theory of the Leisure Class
1899 · 304 pages
Veblen argued that the rich buy expensive things to prove they can afford waste, and that idleness is itself a display. He named it conspicuous consumption, and nobody has improved on the term.
★ 6.7
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
1892 · 213 pages
Twelve cases at 221B Baker Street, from the king undone by Irene Adler to the whistle in the night at Stoke Moran. No human character in fiction has been played by more actors.
★ 6.7
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
Effi Briest
1895 · 255 pages
Married at seventeen to a baron of thirty-eight who once courted her mother, Effi is stranded in a bleak Baltic town. Fontane lets a code nobody believes in destroy her anyway.
★ 6.6
The War of the Worlds
1897 · 138 pages
Cylinders fall on Horsell Common outside Woking, and the Martians rise out of them with heat-rays and walking machines. Wells turned the British Empire's own conquests around and pointed them at Surrey.
★ 6.6
Jungle Book
1894 · 256 pages
Raised by wolves and schooled by a bear and a black panther, Mowgli lives hunted by the tiger Shere Khan. Kipling's Law of the Jungle went into English as a phrase everyone uses.
★ 6.4
Paul Verlaine
Selected Poems (Oxford World's Classics)
1896 · 368 pages
Music before everything else, Verlaine demanded, and wrote French verse so hushed composers could not leave it alone. Rain on the town becomes weeping in the heart, with no reason given.
★ 5.4
How the Other Half Lives
1890 · 228 pages
Riis went into New York's tenements at night with a camera and flash powder, and brought back the room where twelve people slept. Roosevelt sought him out, and the worst blocks came down.
★ 5.4