skip navigation links

Readers > Booklists > Adult & teen lists > 100 World Fiction Classics

100 World Fiction Classics

Fiction

Nobel laureates are marked with an asterisk (*), original publication date in parentheses ( ).

Achebe, Chinua
Things Fall Apart
(1958)
Modern values challenge tradition in a Nigerian village.
Allende, Isabel
The House of the Spirits
(1982)
Four generations of a Chilean family are marked by politics and magic.
Atwood, Margaret
The Handmaid's Tale
(1985)
A fundamentalist government ends women's rights in a grim future.
Austen, Jane
Pride and Prejudice
(1813)
Two independent spirits tangle with society's expectations in the first Regency romance.
Balzac, Honore de
Pere Goriot
(1833)
A father sacrifices for his ungrateful daughters' dowries.
Bellow, Saul *
Herzog
(1964)
A compulsive writer facing madness seeks balance in an imperfect world.
Borges, Jorge Luis
Collected Fictions
(1935-1983)
Dreamlike labyrinths explore time and memory.
Bronte, Charlotte
Jane Eyre
(1847)
A plain governess finds love in this supenseful gothic melodrama.
Bronte, Emily
Wuthering Heights
(1847)
Passion, revenge and the supernatural arise on the harsh Yorkshire moors.
Calvino, Italo
Invisible Cities
(1972)
Marco Polo and Kublai Khan meet to talk of fabulous imagined cities.
Camus, Albert *
The Stranger
(1942)
A pointless murder forces the narrator into an existential search for meaning.
Cather, Willa
My Antonia
(1918)
A Bohemian immigrant woman embodies the spirit of the Nebraska prairies.
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de
Don Quixote
(1615)
The misadventures of a poor elderly knight make for timeless social satire.
Chopin, Kate
The Awakening
(1899)
Stifled by the limits of New Orleans Creole society, a young wife and mother breaks free.
Coetzee, J. M. *
Disgrace
(1999)
In South Africa, a shamed professor faces difficult changes on his daughter's farm.
Conrad, Joseph
Nostromo
(1904)
Revolution, shipwreck and a hoard of silver reveal a complexity of human emotions.
Cortazar, Julio
Hopscotch
(1963)
The reader becomes a character in this jazz-flavored story of an Argentine expatriate in Paris.
Crane, Stephen
The Red Badge of Courage
(1895)
A young recruit faces terror and ambiguity in his first Civil War battle.
Defoe, Daniel
Robinson Crusoe
(1719)
Faith and self-reliance sustain the famous desert-island hero.
Dickens, Charles
Great Expectations
(1861)
A mysterious benefactor helps orphaned Pip toward wealth and status.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
The Brothers Karamazov
(1879)
Self-denial and the spirit are at war with passion and violence in this family tragedy.
Dreiser, Theodore
An American Tragedy
(1925)
A young social climber, craving riches and pleasure, faces ruin.
Dumas, Alexandre
The Three Musketeers
(1844)
A swashbuckling trio combats sinister schemes in the French court.
Eliot, George
Middlemarch
(1871)
The fates of three couples shape a richly detailed Victorian village portrait.
Ellison, Ralph
Invisible Man
(1952)
An African-American's experience is rendered in the literary equivalent of the blues.
Faulkner, William *
Absalom, Absalom!
(1936)
Innovative style distinguishes this chronicle of an archetypal Southern family.
Fielding, Henry
Tom Jones
(1749)
The early adventures of a flawed English Everyman show the customs of an era.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
The Great Gatsby
(1925)
Self-made tycoon Gatsby, seeking love, embodies a tragic American dream.
Flaubert, Gustave
Madame Bovary
(1857)
Adulterous Emma, bored in the provinces, disastrously plays out her romantic ambitions.
Forster, E. M.
A Passage to India
(1924)
Cultures clash in an ironic social comedy set in the waning years of the British Raj.
Fuentes, Carlos
The Death of Artemio Cruz
(1962)
The narrative of an old revolutionary forms a modernist portrait of Mexico.
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel *
One Hundred Years of Solitude
(1967)
Magic realism began with this chronicle of the Colombian fantasy world of Macondo.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
The Sorrows of Young Werther
(1774)
The original Romantic hero suffers for his sensibilities.
Gogol, Nikolai
Dead Souls
(1842)
Banality triumphs in this grotesquely comic satire of Russian society.
Grass, Gunter *
The Tin Drum
(1959)
Collective guilt over Nazism's horrors pulses through this incendiary German social satire.
Greene, Graham
The Heart of the Matter
(1948)
A British officer in West Africa grapples with dilemmas of love and sin.
Hardy, Thomas
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
(1891)
An English country girl attempts to prevail despite poverty and tragedy.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
The Scarlet Letter
(1850)
"A" is for adultery in a Puritan Massachusetts not immune to hypocrisy.
Heller, Joseph
Catch-22
(1961)
Outrageous humor exposes war's folly in WWII Italy.
Hemingway, Ernest *
The Sun Also Rises
(1926)
Self-exiled "Lost Generation" Americans seek truth at Spanish bullfights and Paris cafes.
Hesse, Hermann *
Steppenwolf
(1947)
A tormented loner struggles in a dualistic world of mirrors and mysticism.
Hugo, Victor
Les Miserables
(1862)
An outsized epic melodrama of love and social justice takes place in the streets of Paris.
Hurston, Zora Neale
Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937)
African-American folk tales and vernacular speech flavor the story of an independent woman.
Ishiguro, Kazuo
The Remains of the Day
(1989)
An elderly butler's life of devotion and self-denial leads to painful reflection.
James, Henry
The Portrait of a Lady
(1881)
Worldly experience vs. idealistic innocence: A young American's Italian stay turns tragic.
Joyce, James
Ulysses
(1922)
A Dublin man's day is rendered extraordinary through wordplay and stream-of-consciousness.
Kafka, Franz
The Trial
(1925)
Surreally arrested for an unknown crime, a defenseless man must justify his life.
Kawabata, Yasunari *
Snow Country
(1937)
A beauty-obsessed Tokyo man has a years-long affair with a geisha at a hot springs resort.
Kerouac, Jack
On the Road
(1957)
Spiritual restlessness fuels the cross-country wanderings of the Beat Generation.
Kesey, Ken
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
(1962)
The forces of freedom and oppression collide in an Oregon mental hospital.
Kipling, Rudyard *
Kim
(1901)
A street boy in British-ruled India gets caught up in a spy adventure.
Kundera, Milan
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
(1984)
A Czech doctor fights alienation with promiscuity during the last years of communism.
Lawrence, D. H.
Women in Love
(1920)
Courtship, power and intimacy: Two sisters explore the psychological intricacies of love.
Lee, Harper
To Kill a Mockingbird
(1960)
Ten-year-old Scout sees her lawyer father combat racism with compassion in a Mississippi town.
Lermontov, Mikhail
A Hero of Our Time
(1840)
Duels and doomed affairs await a cynical Russian cavalry officer in the snowy Caucasus.
Lewis, Sinclair *
Babbitt
(1922)
A Midwestern real-estate man finds that the pursuit of prosperity leads to deadly conformity.
London, Jack
The Call of the Wild
(1903)
A sled dog narrates his heroic adventures during the Alaska Gold Rush.
Mahfuz, Najib *
The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk (1956); Palace of Desire (1957); Sugar Street (1958)
From the end of WWI to 1935, al-Sayyid Ahmad's family struggles with poverty, faith and change.
Malamud, Bernard
The Assistant
(1957)
In 1930s Brooklyn, an aging Jewish grocer and his young Italian assistant face ethical dilemmas.
Mann, Thomas
The Magic Mountain
(1924)
A young man's prolonged visit to an alpine sanatorium sets the stage for this complex novel of ideas.
Maugham, W. Somerset
Of Human Bondage
(1915)
A clubfooted orphan, though thinking himself a blighted outsider, moves toward love and success.
McCarthy, Cormac
All the Pretty Horses
(1992)
His family's Texas ranch sold, a teenager and his friend ride to Mexico and adventure in 1949.
Melville, Herman
Moby Dick
(1851)
Revenge sends a maimed Nantucket captain and his crew after a diabolical white whale.
Mishima, Yukio
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea
(1963)
A precocious adolescent boy seeks order and meaning through voyeurism and shocking violence.
Morrison, Toni *
Beloved
(1987)
Searing flashbacks tell the Reconstruction-era story of a slave woman's desperate acts.
Murasaki Shikibu
The Tale of Genji
(c. 1000)
This historical romance of a prince's search for fulfillment is regarded as the world's first novel.
Nabokov, Vladimir
Lolita
(1955)
Humbert Humbert's tale of his obsession with a young girl is frightening, funny and wholly original.
Naipaul, V. S. *
A Bend in the River
(1979)
After colonialism's end, corruption and disillusion beset an imagined Central African nation.
O'Brien, Tim
The Things They Carried
(1990)
In Vietnam, a platoon of young American soldiers struggles for courage and survival.
Orwell, George
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1949)
This vision of a nightmare future gave us "Big Brother", "doublethink" and the "Thought Police."
Proust, Marcel
In Search of Lost Time
(1913-27)
Introspective and richly detailed, this multivolume work explores the meaning of memory.
Remarque, Erich Maria
All Quiet on the Western Front
(1928)
A WWI soldier endures the horror and bewilderment of trench warfare.
Rushdie, Salman
Midnight's Children
(1981)
A magic-realist memoir of the first generation born in post-1947 independent India and Pakistan.
Salinger, J. D.
The Catcher in the Rye
(1951)
Expelled from prep school, a sensitive teen misfit spends a weekend wandering New York City.
Sartre, Jean Paul *
Nausea
(1938)
A young French historian experiences existential despair as a strange sickness.
Scott, Walter
Waverley; Or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since
(1814)
The Scottish Highlands frame Bonnie Prince Charlie's attempt to claim the throne of England.
Shelley, Mary
Frankstein
(1818)
The famous monster comes to life in this 19-year-old author's gothic thriller.
Soyinka, Wole *
The Interpreters
(1965)
Foreign-educated Nigerian intellectuals return home to a country in confusing transition.
Steinbeck, John *
The Grapes of Wrath
(1939)
Dust Bowl devastation sends the Joad family from Oklahoma to California's Central Valley.
Stendhal
The Red and the Black
(1830)
In post-Revolution France, both the army (red) and the church (black) fail an optimistic hero.
Sterne, Laurence
Tristram Shandy
(1760-67)
Satirical, ribald and absurd, Shandy's tale shows human life in all its rich peculiarity.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886)
The best and worst of human nature are revealed in a doomed doctor's transformations.
Stoker, Bram
Dracula
(1897)
A young English lawyer travels to the Transylvanian castle of a certain pale, oddly-fanged count.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Uncle Tom's Cabin
(1852)
This passionate melodrama of brutal plantation life fueled the American anti-slavery movement.
Swift, Jonathan
Gulliver's Travels
(1726)
Shipwreck sends Gulliver to fantastic lands that sharply satirize English society and politics.
Thackeray, William Makepeace
Vanity Fair
(1847-48)
Poor but shrewd, ambitious Becky Sharp climbs upward in fickle Regency society.
Tolstoy, Leo
War and Peace
(1863-1869)
The Napoleonic Wars in Russia form the backdrop to a vast, romantic family saga.
Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe
The Leopard
(1958)
Garibaldi's 1860s revolution sees the decline of a Sicilian feudal prince.
Trollope, Anthony
Barchester Towers
(1857)
This droll, detailed portrait brings the foibles of Victorian village folk to life.
Turgenev, Ivan
Fathers and Sons
(1862)
Nihilist anti-hero Bazarov confronts the complexities of political upheaval.
Twain, Mark
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1884)
A boy's Mississippi raft trip serves as a comic portrait of America in this still-controversial story.
Updike, John
Rabbit, Run
(1960)
A former high school basketball star, now a salesman: Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom wants more.
Voltaire
Candide
(1759)
A simple young man searches for truth and the best of all possible worlds in this picaresque satire.
Walker, Alice
The Color Purple
(1982)
Poor, barely literate and the victim of violence and racism, Celie yet finds a path to joy.
Waugh, Evelyn
Brideshead Revisited
(1945)
An ironic outsider observes the life of an upper-class English Catholic family between two world wars.
Wharton, Edith
The Age of Innocence
(1920)
New York City's Gilded Age is the setting for a love triangle.
Wilde, Oscar
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891)
A vain aristocrat pays a grim price for trading places with his youthful portrait.
Woolf, Virginia
To the Lighthouse
(1927)
Luminous moments of a family's seaside vacation are captured in an impressionistic, experimental style.
Wright, Richard
Native Son
(1940)
Oppression leads Bigger Thomas to horrifying violence in a Chicago ghetto.
Zola, Emile
Germinal
(1885)
French coal miners are forced toward a strike in this groundbreaking documentary-style story.

Selected Short Story Writers