
Ulysses
Leopold Bloom walks Dublin for one day in June 1904, and Joyce pours the whole English language into it. Bloom, advertising canvasser and cuckold, is the kindest man in fiction.

Leopold Bloom walks Dublin for one day in June 1904, and Joyce pours the whole English language into it. Bloom, advertising canvasser and cuckold, is the kindest man in fiction.

The most complete account of memory ever written. A man tastes a madeleine, and three thousand pages of remembered love, jealousy, and vanished aristocrats change permanently how you look at your own past.

April is the cruellest month, and from that line Eliot assembles a ruined Europe out of voices, tarot cards, and pub talk. The fragments lodge in the memory for good.

A court ordered every print destroyed and the film survived anyway: Murnau's unauthorized Dracula gave horror its first permanent image, a shadow climbing a staircase toward a door.

Seven numbered propositions draw the limits of what can be said. Language pictures facts, Wittgenstein argues, so ethics and God fall outside it, and the final proposition tells you to stop talking.


Siddhartha leaves home to seek enlightenment, meets the Buddha and declines to follow him, then spends years chasing money and a courtesan. What finally teaches him is a river and its ferryman.

Lawrence rode with the Arab tribes revolting against the Ottoman Empire, dynamited their trains, and took Aqaba from the desert side. He tells it as epic and never stops accusing himself.

Three men hauled sledges through five weeks of Antarctic winter darkness to fetch penguin eggs, in cold that cracked Cherry-Garrard's teeth. That was before Scott's polar party failed to come back.

George Babbitt sells real estate in a booming midwestern city, loves his car, and believes whatever his club believes. When he finally tries to break out, Lewis is merciless and then unexpectedly kind.

Three nudes turned on a lathe, smooth and tubular, laid out among furniture built to match. The odalisque redone for the age of the factory.

Modern Chinese literature begins here. Ah Q, a village laborer, turns every beating into a spiritual victory, and a madman reads the Confucian classics until the words eat people surface between the lines.

Anthony Patch and his wife Gloria decide to wait for his grandfather's millions rather than work. Fitzgerald follows the waiting year by year, as the parties thin out and the drinking never does.

A toy becomes Real only when a child has loved it for years, by which time its fur is rubbed off and its eyes are gone. Williams's stuffed rabbit is loved that hard.