Introduction: Notes of a common reader
Agostino / Alberto Moravia
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story / George Orwell
Another Brooklyn / Jacqueline Woodson
The Awakening / Kate Chopin
Ballad of the Sad Café / Carson McCullers
Big Boy Leaves Home / Richard Wright
Bonjour Tristesse / Françoise Sagan
Candide, or Optimism / Voltaire
Charlotte's Web / E. B. White
A Clockwork Orange / Anthony Burgess
The Country Girls / Edna O'Brien
Death in Venice / Thomas Mann
Dept. of Speculation / Jenny Offill
The Dry Heart / Natalia Ginzburg
Ethan Frome / Edith Wharton
Evil Under the Sun / Agatha Christie
The Fifth Child / Doris Lessing
The Ghost Writer / Philip Roth
The Great Gatsby / F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Hour of the Star / Clarice Lispector
The House on Mango Street / Sandra Cisneros
If Beale Street Could Talk / James Baldwin
If This Is a Man [Survival in Auschwitz] / Primo Levi
July's People / Nadine Gordimer
The Lathe of Heaven / Ursula K. Le Guin
Lord of the Flies / William Golding
The Lost Daughter / Elena Ferrante
The Lover / Marguerite Duras
Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History / Art Spiegelman
Middle Passage / Charles Johnson
Mrs. Dalloway / Virginia Woolf
The Hours / Michael Cunningham
The Nickel Boys / Colson Whitehead
No One Writes to the Colonel / Gabriel García Márquez
The Old Man and the Sea / Ernest Hemingway
On Chesil Beach / Ian McEwan
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich / Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit / Jeanette Winterson
Pale Horse, Pale Rider / Katherine Anne Porter
A Pale View of Hills / Kazuo Ishiguro
The Perfect Nanny / Leïla Slimani
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man / James Joyce
The Postman Always Rings Twice / James M. Cain
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie / Muriel Spark
The Red Badge of Courage / Stephen Crane
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption / Stephen King
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea / Yukio Mishima
The Stranger / Albert Camus
Surfacing / Margaret Atwood
Their Eyes Were Watching God / Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart / Chinua Achebe
Tokyo Ueno Station / Yu Miri
Waiting for the Barbarians / J. M. Coetzee
We Have Always Lived in the Castle / Shirley Jackson
Wide Sargasso Sea / Jean Rhys
Afterword: What's not here
My favorite fifteen great short books
Index of entries by date of publication
Index of entries by author's last name
Nobel Prize in Literature Laureates in this book.
