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My Dog Tulip
J. R. Ackerley
James Mustich
When first published in England in 1956, Tulip was considered shocking because of what one reviewer called its “scatological and gynaecological detail.” But while the messy details are certainly present in abundance (chapter 2, for example, is entitled “Liquids and Solids”), to be put off by them is...show more
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Little Women
Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, the second of four daughters of a noted proponent of Transcendentalism, Bronson Alcott. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a friend of the family, as were Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Despite her transcendentalist pedigree, Louisa May Alcott ...show more
Voices from Chernobyl
Svetlana Alexievich
This book is an oral history of the nuclear reactor accident at Chernobyl in 1986, and of the suffering, death, and contamination—biological, environmental, psychological, existential—left in its wake. It is constructed from the testimony of dozens of people whose lives were transformed by the disas...show more
Beowulf
Surviving in one manuscript dating from around AD 1000, and believed to have been composed some two or three hundred years earlier, Beowulf is a poem composed in Old English, also known as Anglo-Saxon, a language worlds apart from even Chaucer’s Middle English. Although written in England, the poem’...show more
Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
Guy Montag is a fireman. But, in the dystopian future of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 classic, a fireman’s duty is not to put out fires, but to start them. His job, in fact, is to burn books, a task that requires the temperature of 451° Fahrenheit. It’s natural to see Fahrenheit 451 as an allegory about cens...show more
The Good Earth
Pearl S. Buck
Published in 1931, while Modernism was turning fiction artfully on its ear, Buck’s simple, plot-driven tale of the shifting fortunes of Chinese peasants Wang Lung and O-Lan was innovative in its own way, marking the introduction of Asian characters into mainstream Western literature. In its pages, r...show more
The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
One Soviet writer has no shortage of admirers today: Mikhail Bulgakov, whose novel The Master and Margarita has become both a Russian phenomenon and cult classic in the West. At once a love story, a supernatural adventure, and a vicious satire of the USSR under Stalin, it bursts with a creative ener...show more
The Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank
Anne Frank’s intimate two-year record of her family’s hiding from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic is one of the most famous, powerful, and beloved books of the twentieth century. Encapsulating the terror of the Holocaust in the domestic drama of the Franks’ anxious existence and the private yearning...show more
Lord of the Flies
William Golding
Assigned at least once to nearly every student in the English-speaking world, Golding’s chilling depiction of the descent into savagery of schoolboys stranded on a deserted island stirs to menacing life as we turn the pages; terror coils behind the words like a patient predator stalking its prey. Wr...show more
The Silence of the Lambs
Thomas Harris
Hannibal Lecter is one of the most chillingly drawn villains in the annals of modern fiction. He is perverse, polite, charming, brilliant, and brutal, and the FBI would like to lure him into helping with an ongoing investigation of a string of savage killings of young women that have left them baffl...show more
Catch-22
Joseph Heller
The title of Joseph Heller’s first novel has become—aptly enough—a catchphrase, common parlance for the kind of double bind that bureaucracies breed with astonishing fecundity. Captain John Yossarian, the protagonist of Heller’s pioneering and influential satire, is “moved very deeply by the absolut...show more
A Wrinkle in Time
Madeleine L'Engle
Troubled, feisty, and, as we shall discover, remarkably resourceful, thirteen-year-old Meg is one of the most unforgettable heroines in twentieth-century young adult fiction. Her family is rather memorable, too. There are her sympathetic parents, both of whom are scientists and one of whom, her fath...show more
Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” That’s the famous opening sentence of Rebecca, a suspenseful romantic tale that has cast its irresistible spell over millions of readers since it was published in 1938. The “I” is the novel’s unnamed narrator. She is a timid and inexperienced young wo...show more
Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell
History may be written by the winners, but fiction often finds its truths in the experience of the losers. Such is certainly the case with Gone With the Wind, which brings America’s bloodiest war—and the Southern privileges it vanquished—to life with irresistible power (albeit with a blinkered sense...show more
Anne of Green Gables
L. M. Montgomery
The story is simple: Aging siblings Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, who together live in Avonlea on Prince Edward Island, seek to adopt an orphan to help them with the endless chores on their farm, Green Gables. But the child who arrives from the orphanage in Nova Scotia is not a boy, as they expected...show more
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
J. K. Rowling
“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.”
So, modestly, J. K. Rowling opens t...show more
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
The best introduction to Austen’s work is surely the second of the six novels she wrote before her death at only forty-one, Pride and Prejudice, in which she introduces us to Elizabeth Bennet, the wittiest and most vivacious of five sisters on the hunt—if their mother has her way, at least—for husba...show more
The Little Prince
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was an intrepid pilot, a pioneer in the early days of commercial aviation who flew mail routes and, later, military reconnaissance missions for the Allies until his plane disappeared in 1944 off the coast of Marseille. During his lifetime, Saint-Exupéry also earned an intern...show more
The Catcher in the Rye
J. D. Salinger
It’s been considerably more than a half century since the first angst-ridden teenager cracked the spine of The Catcher in the Rye and felt he’d found a book—or more specifically, a character—that spoke for him. In the intervening years, millions of other self-anointed outsiders have felt the same wa...show more