How to be well-read in no time: 100 short novels
How to be well-read in no time: 100 short novels is a list of books that provides a varied glimpse of the written style of many of the great authors. A concise selection, the titles can be worked through over a very short period, or, alternatively, they can be sandwiched between larger classics in an even more ambitious reading program. For further reading suggestions see our Top 100 Novels of All Time.
1. Slaughterhouse-Five
By Kurt Vonnegut | Used Price: 80% Off
Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world's great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most. More »
2. The Trial
By Franz Kafka | Used Price: 70% Off
Written in 1914, The Trial is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century: the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read ... More »
3. Animal Farm
By George Orwell | Used Price: 60% Off
This is a classic tale of humanity awash in totalitarianism. A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. First published during the epoch of Stalinist Russia, ... More »
4. Of Mice And Men
By John Steinbeck | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
A controversial tale of friendship and tragedy during the Great Depression  They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have ... More »
5. The Waves
'I, who would wish to feel close over me the protective waves of the ordinary, catch with the tail of my eye some far horizon.' Intensely visionary yet absorbed with the everyday; experimental, daring and challenging, The Waves is regarded by many as Virginia Woolf's greatest achievement. ... More »
6. The Old Man and the Sea
By Ernest Hemingway | Used Price: 60% Off
The last novel Ernest Hemingway saw published, The Old Man and the Sea has proved itself to be one of the enduring works of American fiction. It is the story of an old Cuban fisherman and his supreme ordeal: a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far ... More »
7. Waiting for the Barbarians
By J. M. Coetzee | Used Price: 70% Off
A modern classic, this early novel by Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee centers on the crisis of conscience and morality of the Magistrate-a loyal servant of the Empire working in a tiny frontier town, doing his best to ignore an inevitable war with the "barbarians." More »
8. A Christmas Carol
By Charles Dickens | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
This new selection of Dickens's Christmas writings confirms his lasting influence upon our idea of the Christmas spirit: that Christmas is a time for celebration, charity, and memory. In addition to the beloved A Christmas Carol, this volume includes such festive works as ... More »
9. Things Fall Apart
By Chinua Achebe | Under $1.00
Things Fall Apart tells two intertwining stories, both centering on Okonkwo, a “strong manâ€Â of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first, a powerful fable of the immemorial conflict between the individual and society, traces Okonkwo’s fall from grace with the tribal world. The second, as modern as ... More »
10. Home
By Toni Morrison | Used Price: 80% Off
A New York Times Notable BookA Washington Post Notable Work of FictionA Best Book of the Year: NPR, AV Club, St. Louis DispatchWhen Frank Money joined the army to escape his too-small world, he left behind his cherished and fragile little sister, Cee. After the war, his shattered ... More »
11. The Stranger
By Albert Camus | Used Price: 70% Off
Albert Camus's spare, laconic masterpiece about a Frenchman who murders an Arab in Algeria is famous for having diagnosed, with a clarity almost scientific, that condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life. Possessing both the force of a parable and the ... More »
12. Notes from the Underground
By Fyodor Dostoevsky | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
In 1864, just prior to the years in which he wrote his greatest novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) penned the darkly fascinating Notes from the Underground. Its nameless hero is a profoundly alienated individual in whose brooding self-analysis ... More »
13. Invisible Cities
By Italo Calvino | Used Price: 70% Off
“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.â€Â — from Invisible Cities In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo — Mongol ... More »
14. Heart of Darkness
By Joseph Conrad | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
Although Polish by birth, Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) is regarded as one of the greatest writers in English, and Heart of Darkness, first published in 1902, is considered by many his "most famous, finest, and most enigmatic story." — Encyclopaedia Britannica. The tale concerns the journey of the narrator ... More »
15. The Day of the Owl
By Leonardo Sciascia | Used Price: 80% Off
A man is shot dead as he runs to catch the bus in the piazza of a small Sicilian town. Captain Bellodi, the detective on the case, is new to his job and determined to prove himself. Bellodi suspects the Mafia, and his suspicions grow when he finds ... More »
16. The Quiet American
By Graham Greene | Used Price: 80% Off
Graham Greene's classic exploration of love, innocence, and morality in Vietnam"I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused," Graham Greene's narrator Fowler remarks of Alden Pyle, the eponymous "Quiet American" of what is perhaps the most controversial novel of his career. ... More »
17. The Death of Ivan Ilyich
By Leo Tolstoy | Used Price: 60% Off
Tolstoy’s most famous novella is an intense and moving examination of death and the possibilities of redemption, here in a powerful translation by the award-winning Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.Ivan Ilyich is a middle-aged man who has spent his life focused on his career as a bureaucrat and ... More »
18. The Time Machine
By H. G. Wells | Used Price: 70% Off
Wells's genre-defining novel of time travelWhen a Victorian scientist propels himself into the year a.d. 802,701, he is initially delighted to find that suffering has been replaced by beauty, contentment, and peace. Entranced at first by the Eloi, an elfin species descended from man, he soon realizes that ... More »
19. The Bookshop
By Penelope Fitzgerald | Used Price: 80% Off
In 1959 Florence Green a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance risks everything to open a bookshop the only bookshop in the seaside town of Hardborough By making a success of a business so impractical she invites the hostility of the town s less prosperous shopkeepers By daring ... More »
20. We
By Yevgeny Zamyatin | Used Price: 60% Off
A superb new translation of the classic dystopian novel Set in the twenty-sixth century AD, Zamyatin's masterpiece describes life under the regimented totalitarian society of OneState, ruled over by the all-powerful 'Benefactor'. Recognized as the inspiration for George ... More »
21. The Great Gatsby
By F. Scott Fitzgerald | Used Price: 80% Off
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. This exemplary novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers.The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. This exemplary novel ... More »
22. Darkness at Noon
By Arthur Koestler | Used Price: 80% Off
Originally published in 1941, Arthur Koestler's modern masterpiece, Darkness At Noon, is a powerful and haunting portrait of a Communist revolutionary caught in the vicious fray of the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s. During Stalin's purges, Nicholas Rubashov, an aging revolutionary, is imprisoned and ... More »
23. The Picture of Dorian Gray
By Oscar Wilde | Under $1.00
Since its first publication in 1890, Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, has remained the subject of critical controversy. Acclaimed by some as an instructive moral tale, it has been denounced by others for its implicit immorality. After having his ... More »
24. The Red Badge of Courage
By Stephen Crane | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
Enriched Classics offer readers accessible editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and commentary. Each book includes educational tools alongside the text, enabling students and readers alike to gain a deeper and more developed understanding of the writer and their work.The Red Badge of Courage ... More »
25. The Catcher in the Rye
By J. D. Salinger | Under $1.00
Anyone who has read J.D. Salinger's New Yorker stories--particularly A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, The Laughing Man, and For Esme With Love and Squalor--will not be surprised by the fact that his first novel is full of children. The hero-narrator of The Catcher in ... More »
26. Fathers and Sons
By Ivan Turgenev | Used Price: 70% Off
When a young graduate returns home he is accompanied, much to his father and uncle's discomfort, by a strange friend "who doesn't acknowledge any authorities, who doesn't accept a single principle on faith." Turgenev's masterpiece of generational conflict shocked Russian society when ... More »
27. Siddhartha
By Herman Hesse | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
This classic novel of self-discovery has inspired generations of seekers. With parallels to the enlightenment of the Buddha, Hesse's Siddhartha is the story of a young Brahmin's quest for the ultimate reality. His quest takes him from the extremes of indulgent sensuality to the rigors of ascetism and ... More »
28. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
By Robert Louis Stevenson | 60% Off
Robert Louis Stevenson's short novel, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, first published in 1886, became an instant classic, a Gothic horror originating in a feverish nightmare whose hallucinatory setting in the back streets of London gripped a nation mesmerized by crime and violence. Its revelatory ending ... More »
29. The Turn of the Screw
By Henry James | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition brings together one of literature's most famous ghost stories and one of Henry James's most unusual novellas. In The Turn of the Screw, a governess is haunted by ghosts from her young charges past; Virginia Woolf said of this masterpiece of psychological ... More »
30. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Since childhood, Kusama has been afflicted with a condition that makes her see spots, which means she sees the world in a surreal, almost hallucinogenic way that sits very well with the Wonderland of Alice. She is fascinated by childhood and the way adults have the ability, at ... More »
31. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
By Mark Twain | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
Referring to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, H. L. Mencken noted that his discovery of this classic American novel was "the most stupendous event of my whole life"; Ernest Hemingway declared that "all modern American literature stems from this one book," while T. S. Eliot called Huck "one of ... More »
32. Northanger Abbey
By Jane Austen | Used Price: 60% Off
Northanger Abbey depicts the misadventures of Catherine Morland, young, ingenuous, and mettlesome, and an indefatigable reader of gothic novels. Their romantic excess and dark overstatement feed her imagination, as tyrannical fathers and diabolical villains work their evil on forlorn heroines in isolated ... More »
33. Ethan Frome
By Edith Wharton | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
Set against the frozen waste of a harsh New England winter, Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome is a tale of despair, forbidden emotions, and sexual tensions, published with an introduction and notes by Elizabeth Ammons in Penguin Classics. Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to ... More »
34. The Abbess of Crewe: A Modern Morality Tale
By Muriel Spark | Used Price: 60% Off
An election is held at the abbey of Crewe and the new lady abbess takes up her high office with implacable serenity. "The short dirk in the hands of Muriel Spark has always been a deadly weapon," said The New York Times, and "never more so than in The Abbess ... More »
35. Candide
By Voltaire | Used Price: 70% Off
Candide is the most famous of Voltaire's "philosophical tales," in which he combined witty improbabilities with the sanest of good sense. First published in 1759, it was an instant bestseller and has come to be regarded as one of the key texts of the Enlightenment. ... More »
36. Pedro Paramo
By Juan Rulfo
Swearing to his dying mother that he'll find the father he has never met, a certain Pedro Paramo, Juan Preciado sets out across the barren plains of Mexico for Comala, the hallucinatory ghost town his father presided over like a feudal lord. Between the realms of the living ... More »
37. Silas Marner
By George Eliot | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
Falsely accused, cut off from his past, Silas the weaver is reduced to a spider-like existence, endlessly weaving his web and hoarding his gold. Meanwhile, Godfrey Cass, son of the squire, contracts a secret marriage. While the village celebrates Christmas and New Year, two apparently inexplicable events occur. ... More »
38. The Immoralist
By Andre Gide | Used Price: 90% Off
'To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom' - Andre Gide. Michel had been a blindfold scholar until, newly married, he contracted tuberculosis. His will to recover brings self-discovery and the growing desire to rebel against ... More »
39. Therese Raquin
By Emile Zola | Used Price: 80% Off
In a dingy apartment on the Passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, Thérèse Raquin is trapped in a loveless marriage to her sickly cousin, Camille. The numbing tedium of her life is suddenly shattered when she embarks on a turbulent affair with her husband’s earthy friend Laurent, but their ... More »
40. Cain
By Jose Saramago | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
“Suitably disturbing—and a pleasure to read.â€Â — The ScotsmanIn this, his last novel, José Saramago daringly reimagines the characters and narratives of the Old Testament, recalling his provocative The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. His tale runs from the Garden of Eden, when God realizes he has forgotten ... More »
41. Jamilia
By Chinghiz Aitmatov | Under $1.00
“The most beautiful love story in the world.â€Â—Louis AragonThe Second World War is raging, and Jamilia’s husband is off fighting at the front. Accompanied by Daniyar, a sullen newcomer who was wounded on the battlefield, Jamilia spends her days hauling sacks of grain from the threshing floor to ... More »
42. The Bridge of San Luis Rey
By Thornton Wilder | Used Price: 80% Off
An ancient bridge collapses over a gorge in Peru, hurling five people into the abyss. It seems a meaningless human tragedy. But one witness, a Franciscan monk, believes the deaths might not be as random as they appear. Convinced that the disaster is a punishment sent from Heaven, ... More »
43. The Sorrows of Young Werther
By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Under $1.00
Celebrated as a leading figure of the German literary movement known as Sturm und Drang ("storm and stress"), Goethe made his reputation with this short novel, originally published in 1774. Its tale of a sensitive young man's self-destructive passion for a lover who ultimately rejects him was based ... More »
44. The Call of the Wild
By Jack London | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
The Call of the Wild is a novella by American author Jack London published in 1903. The story takes place in the extreme conditions of the Yukon during the 19th-century Klondike Gold ... More »
45. Wide Sargasso Sea
By Jean Rhys | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
"A considerable tour de force by any standard."—?New York Times Book ReviewJean Rhys's reputation was made upon the publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of fiction's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Set ... More »
46. Snow Country
By Yasunari Kawabata | Used Price: 80% Off
Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country is widely considered to be the writer’s masterpiece: a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan.  At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante meets Komako, a ... More »
47. The Native Hurricane
While Onyenmuo is growing up in Umuozala, a village bound to Ozala and plagued by a murderous monster that attacks every forty years, he displays astonishing cunning and ability. For the residents of Umuozala, living in fear, he is their only hope of escape from the control of ... More »
48. The House of Jasmine
By Ibrahim Abdel Meguid | 60% Off
On June 13, 1974, Shagara, a low-level employee at the Alexandria shipyard, is charged with taking workers to cheer for the motorcade of Egyptian President Sadat and his guest President Nixon. Instructed to pay each worker half a pound at the end of NixonÂ’s visit, Shagara pays them ... More »
49. The Hour of the Star
By Clarice Lispector | Used Price: 50% Off
A new edition of Clarice Lispector's final masterpiece, now with a vivid introduction by Colm Tóibín. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor ... More »
50. Death in Venice
By Thomas Mann | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
Thomas Mann is widely acknowledged as the greatest German novelist of this century. His 1912 novella Death in Venice is the most frequently read example of Mann's early work. Clayton Koelb's masterful translation improves upon its predecessors in two ways: it renders Mann into American (not British) English, ... More »
51. The Ghost Writer
By Philip Roth | Used Price: 80% Off
The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the Great Books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff. At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a ... More »
52. Rameau's Nephew
In his brilliant and witty dialogue, Denis Diderot invents a chance encounter in a Paris café between two acquaintances. Their talk ranges broadly across art, music, education, and the contemporary scene, as the nephew of composer Rameau, amoral and bohemian, alternately shocks and amuses the moral, bourgeois figure ... More »
53. Surfacing
By Margaret Atwood | Used Price: 90% Off
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Handmaid's TalePart detective novel, part psychological thriller, Surfacing is the story of a talented woman artist who goes in search of her missing father on a remote island in northern Quebec. Setting out with her lover and another young couple, she soon ... More »
54. Adolphe
By Benjamin Constant | Used Price: 80% Off
Adolphe is a privileged and refined young man, bored by the stupidity he perceives in the world around him. After a number of meaningless conquests, he at last encounters Ellenore, a beautiful and passionate older woman. Adolphe is enraptured and gradually wears down her resistance to his declarations ... More »
55. The Death of Napoleon
By Simon Leys | Used Price: 90% Off
As he bore a vague resemblance to the Emperor, the sailors on board the Hermann-Augustus Stoeffer had nicknamed him Napoleon. And so, for convenience, that is what we shall call him. Besides, he was Napoleon. . . . Napoleon has escaped from St. Helena, leaving a ... More »
56. No One Writes to the Colonel
By Gabriel Garcia Marquez | 80% Off
Written with compassionate realism and wit, the stories in this mesmerizing collection depict the disparities of town and village life in South America, of the frightfully poor and outrageously rich, of memories and illusions, and of lost opportunities and present joys. More »
57. A Very Easy Death
By Simone de Beauvoir | Used Price: 80% Off
A Very Easy Death has long been considered one of Simone de Beauvoir’s masterpieces. The profoundly moving, day-by-day recounting of her mother’s death “shows the power of compassion when it is allied with acute intelligence” (The Sunday Telegraph). Powerful, touching, and sometimes shocking, this is an end-of-life account that ... More »
58. A Meal in Winter
By Hubert Mingarelli | Used Price: 90% Off
One morning in the dead of winter, during the darkest years of World War II, three German soldiers head out into the frozen Polish countryside. They have been charged by their commanders with tracking down and bringing back for execution ?one of them”?a Jew. Having flushed out a ... More »
59. The Return Of The Soldier
By Rebecca West
The Return of the Soldier is the debut novel of English novelist Rebecca West, first published in 1918. The novel recounts the return of the shell shocked Captain Chris Baldry from the trenches of the First World War from the perspective of his cousin Jenny. The novel grapples ... More »
60. Agnes Grey
By Anne Bronte | Used Price: 50% Off
The only one-volume hardcover edition of the two uncommonly powerful novels written by the youngest of the famous Brontë sisters. Anne Brontë wrote these two fantastically successful novels just before her tragically early death, both of them in a much more grittily realistic mode than the more romantic ones ... More »
61. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
By Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn | 80% Off
The first published novel of controversial Nobel Prize winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn- now in trade paperback. First published in 1962, this book is considered one of the most significant works ever to emerge from Soviet Russia. Illuminating a dark chapter in Russian history, it is at once a ... More »
62. Breakfast at Tiffany's
By Truman Capote | Used Price: 90% Off
In this seductive, wistful masterpiece, Truman Capote created a woman whose name has entered the American idiom and whose style is a part of the literary landscape. Holly Golightly knows that nothing bad can ever happen to you at Tiffany's; her poignancy, wit, and naïveté continue to charm.This ... More »
63. The Sound of Waves
By Yukio Mishima | Under $1.00
Set in a remote fishing village in Japan, The Sound of Waves is a timeless story of first love. A young fisherman is entranced at the sight of the beautiful daughter of the wealthiest man in the village. They fall in love, but must then endure the calumny ... More »
64. Woman at Point Zero
By Nawal El Saadawi | Used Price: 80% Off
Nawal El Saadawi's highly acclaimed feminist novel, Woman at Point Zero, follows the life of Firdaus, an Egyptian peasant girl, from her childhood of incomprehensible cruelty and neglect to her end in a grimy Cairo prison cell. From her earliest memories, Firdaus suffered at the hands of men—first ... More »
65. The Breaking Jewel
By Makoto Oda | Used Price: 80% Off
Set on an island in the South Pacific during the final days of World War II, when the tide has turned against Japan and the war has unmistakably become one of attrition, The Breaking Jewel offers a rare depiction of the Pacific War from the Japanese side and ... More »
66. The Summer Book
By Tove Jansson | Used Price: 80% Off
In The Summer Book Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer—its sunlight and storms—into twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia’s grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny ... More »
67. Frankenstein
By Mary Shelley | Under $1.00
The world's most famous work of horror fiction: a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity. Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American ReadMary Shelley's timeless gothic novel presents the epic battle between man and monster at its greatest literary pitch. In trying ... More »
68. Giovanni's Room
'Exquisite, a feat of fire-breathing, imaginative daring' Guardian David, a young American in 1950s Paris, is waiting for his fiancee to return from vacation in Spain. But when he meets Giovanni, a handsome Italian barman, the two men are drawn into an intense affair. After three months David's ... More »
69. Convenience Store Woman
By Sayaka Murata | Used Price: 50% Off
The English-language debut of one of Japan's most talented contemporary writers, selling over 650,000 copies there, Convenience Store Woman is the heartwarming and surprising story of thirty-six-year-old Tokyo resident Keiko Furukura. Keiko has never fit in, neither in her family, nor in school, but when at the age ... More »
70. First Love
By Samuel Beckett | Used Price: 80% Off
This new collection brings together First Love, The Calamative, The End and The Expelled; these four novellas are among the first major works of Beckett's decision to use French as his language of literary composition. Rich in verbal and situational humour, they offer a fascinating insight into many ... More »
71. A Rage in Harlem
By Chester Himes | Used Price: 70% Off
A Rage in Harlem is a ripping introduction to Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, patrolling New York City’s roughest streets in Chester Himes’s groundbreaking Harlem Detectives series. For love of fine, wily Imabelle, hapless Jackson surrenders his life savings to a con man who knows the secret of turning ... More »
72. A Month in the Country
By J.L. Carr | Used Price: 80% Off
In J. L. Carr's deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the bell tower, surrounded ... More »
73. The Kingdom of This World
By Alejo Carpentier | Used Price: 70% Off
A few years after its liberation from the brutality of French colonial rule in 1803, Haiti endured a period of even greater brutality under the reign of King Henri-Christophe, who was born a slave in Grenada but rose to become the first black king in the Western Hemisphere. ... More »
74. The Fifth Child
By Doris Lessing | Under $1.00
Doris Lessing's contemporary gothic horror story—centered on the birth of a baby who seems less than human—probes society's unwillingness to recognize its own brutality.Harriet and David Lovatt, parents of four children, have created an idyll of domestic bliss in defiance of the social trends of late 1960s England. ... More »
75. The Devil in the Flesh
By Raymond Radiguet | Used Price: 50% Off
Hailed by Jean Cocteau as a "masterpiece," and by the Guardian as "Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, avant la lettre," this taut tale written by a teenager in the form of a frank "confession" is a gem of early twentieth century romanticism. Long unavailable in the U.S., ... More »
76. Love in a Fallen City
By Eileen Chang | Used Price: 80% Off
A New York Review Books Original“[A] giant of modern Chinese literature” –The New York Times"With language as sharp as a knife edge, Eileen Chang cut open a huge divide in Chinese culture, between the classical patriarchy and our troubled modernity. She was one of the very few able ... More »
77. Where Angels Fear to Tread
By E. M. Forster | Used Price: 80% Off
A wonderful story of questioning, disillusionment, and conversion, Where Angels Fear to Tread tells the story of a prim English family's encounter with the foreign land of Italy. When attractive, impulsive English widow Lilia marries Gino, a dashing and highly unsuitable Italian twelve years her junior, her snobbish ... More »
78. Passing
By Nella Larsen | Used Price: 80% Off
Nella Larsen's powerful, thrilling, and tragic tale about the fluidity of racial identity that continues to resonate today. A New York Times Editors’ Choice Clare Kendry is living on the edge. Light-skinned, elegant, and ambitious, she is married to a racist white man unaware of her African ... More »
79. Change
By Mo Yan | Used Price: 70% Off
In Change, Mo Yan, the 2012 Nobel Laureate in Literature, personalizes the political and social changes in his country over the past few decades in this novella disguised as autobiography—or vice-versa. Unlike most historical narratives from China, which are pegged to political events, Change is a representative of ... More »
80. A Cool Million
By Nathanael West | Used Price: 80% Off
Library of America offers the most complete collection ever published of Nathanael West's writings. Along with the four novels for which he is famous, this authoritative collection gathers stories, poetry, essays and plays, film scripts and treatments, and letters.In the Dada-inspired The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), ... More »
81. The Awakening
By Kate Chopin | Under $1.00
When first published in 1899, The Awakening shocked readers with its honest treatment of female marital infidelity. Audiences accustomed to the pieties of late Victorian romantic fiction were taken aback by Chopin's daring portrayal of a woman trapped in a stifling marriage, who seeks and finds passionate physical ... More »
82. The White Castle
By Orhan Pamuk | Used Price: 90% Off
From a Turkish writer who has been compared with Borges, Nabokov, and DeLillo comes a dazzling novel that is at once a captivating work of historical fiction and a sinuous treatise on the enigma of identity and the relations between East and West. In the 17th century, a ... More »
83. A Clockwork Orange
By Anthony Burgess | Used Price: 50% Off
A newly revised text for A Clockwork Orange’s 50th anniversary brings the work closest to its author’s intentions.A Clockwork Orange is as brilliant, transgressive, and influential as when it was published fifty years ago. A nightmare vision of the future told in its own fantastically inventive lexicon, it ... More »
84. Sleepless Nights
By Elizabeth Hardwick | Used Price: 60% Off
In Sleepless Nights a woman looks back on her life - the parade of people, the shifting background of place - and assembles a scrapbook of memories, reflections, portraits, letters, wishes, and dreams. An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not ... More »
85. Fatale
By Jean-Patrick Manchette | 70% Off
A New York Review Books OriginalWhether you call her a coldhearted grifter or the soul of modern capitalism, there’s no question that Aimée is a killer and a more than professional one. Now she’s set her eyes on a backwater burg—where, while posing as an innocent (albeit drop-dead ... More »
86. Strange Weather in Tokyo
Shortlisted for the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize, Strange Weather in Tokyo is a story of loneliness and love that defies age. Tsukiko, thirty-eight, works in an office and lives alone. One night, she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, "Sensei," in a local ... More »
87. The Book of Chameleons
By Jose Eduardo Agualusa | 70% Off
Félix Ventura trades in an unusual commodity; he is a dealer in memories, clandestinely selling new pasts to people whose futures are secure and who lack only a good lineage to complete their lives. In this completely original murder mystery, where people are not who they seem and ... More »
88. Missing Person
Winner of the Prix GoncourtIn this strange, elegant novel, winner of France's premier literary prize, Patrick Modiano portrays a man in pursuit of the identity he lost in the murky days of the Paris Occupation, the black hole of French memory.For ten years Guy Roland has lived without ... More »
89. The River Between
By Ngugi Wa Thiong'o | Used Price: 80% Off
Christian missionaries attempt to outlaw the female circumcision ritual and in the process create a terrible rift between the two Kikuyu communities on either side of the river. More »
90. The Shell
The work of a modern-day Sozhenitsyn that exposes acts of violence and brutality committed by the Syrian regime. This compelling first novel is the astonishing story of a Syrian political prisoner of conscience atheist mistaken for a radical Islamist who was locked up for 13 years without trial ... More »
91. The Mussel Feast
The modern German classic that has shaped an entire generation. A mother and her two teenage children sit at the dinner table. In the middle stands a large pot of cooked mussels. Why has the father not returned home? As the evening wears on, we glimpse the issues ... More »
92. The Book of Promethea
By Helene Cixous | Used Price: 80% Off
In writing Le Livre de Promethea Hélène Cixous set for herself the task of bridging the immeasurable distance between love and language. She describes a love between two women in its totality, experienced as both a physical presence and a sense of infinity. The result is a stunning example ... More »
93. Tristana
By Benito Perez Galdos | Used Price: 70% Off
An NYRB Classics OriginalDon Lope is a Don Juan, an aging but still effective predator on the opposite sex. He is also charming and generous, unhesitatingly contributing the better part of his fortune to pay off a friend’s debts, kindly assuming responsibility for the friend’s orphaned daughter, lovely ... More »
94. The Meursault Investigation
By Kamel Daoud | Used Price: 80% Off
A New York Times Notable Book of 2015 — Michiko Kakutani, The Top Books of 2015, New York Times — TIME Magazine Top Ten Books of 2015 — Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year — Financial Times Best Books of the Year“A tour-de-force reimagining of Camus’s The Stranger, from the point of view of the mute Arab victims.” —The New Yorker He ... More »
95. Live and Remember
By Valentin Rasputin | Used Price: 90% Off
First published in Russian in 1974, Live and Remember was immediately hailed by Soviet critics as a superb if atypical example of war literature and a moving depiction of the degradation and ultimate damnation of a frontline deserter. The novel tells the story of a Siberian peasant who ... More »
96. Sphinx
By Anne Garreta
Sphinx is the remarkable debut novel, originally published in 1986, by the incredibly talented and inventive French author Anne Garréta, one of the few female members of Oulipo, the influential and exclusive French experimental literary group whose mission is to create literature based on mathematical and linguistic restraints, ... More »
97. Bonjour Tristesse
By Francoise Sagan | Used Price: 70% Off
Endearing, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old Cécile is the very essence of untroubled amorality. Freed from the stifling constraints of boarding school, she joins her father—a handsome, still-young widower with a wandering eye—for a carefree, two-month summer vacation in a beautiful villa outside of Paris with his latest mistress, Elsa. Cécile ... More »
98. Seize the Day
By Saul Bellow | Used Price: 80% Off
“What makes all of this so remarkable is not merely Bellow’s eye and ear for vital detail. Nor is it his talent for exposing the innards of character in a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase. It is Bellow’s vision, his uncanny ability to seize the moment and to ... More »
99. Chess Story
By Stefan Zweig | Used Price: 70% Off
Chess Story, also known as The Royal Game, is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig's final achievement, completed in Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942. It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does ... More »
100. Madonna in a Fur Coat
By Sabahattin Ali | Used Price: 60% Off
Available in English for the first time, this best-selling Turkish classic of love and alienation in a changing world captures the vibrancy of interwar Berlin. A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade and discover life in 1920s Berlin. There, amidst ... More »
 |
 |
 |