| Title | Author | FirstPub | Description | Image | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1984 | George Orwell | 1949 | The story follows the life of one seemingly insignificant man, Winston Smith, a civil servant assigned the task of perpetuating the regime's propaganda by falsifying records and political literature so that it appears that the government is always correct in what it says. Smith grows disillusioned with his meager existence and so begins a rebellion against the system that leads to his arrest, torture, and conversion. - Wikipedia | 1984.jpg | 6 |
| Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy | 1877 | Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and family happiness. While previous versions have softened the robust, and sometimes shocking, quality of Tolstoy's writing, Pevear and Volokhonsky have produced a translation true to his powerful voice. This award-winning team's authoritative edition also includes an illuminating introduction and explanatory notes. Beautiful, vigorous, and eminently readable, this Anna Karenina will be the definitive text for generations to come. - Publisher | AnnaK.jpg | 9 |
| Don Quixote | Miguel de Cervantes | 1605 | Alonso Quixano, a retired country gentleman in his fifties, lives in an unnamed section of La Mancha with his niece and a housekeeper. He has become obsessed with books of chivalry, and believes their every word to be true, despite the fact that many of the events in them are clearly impossible. Quixano eventually appears to other people to have lost his mind from little sleep and food and because of so much reading. - Wikipedia | DonQuixote.jpg | 1 |
| In Search of Lost Time | Marcel Proust | 1913 | Swann's Way, the first part of A la recherche de temps perdu, Marcel Proust's seven-part cycle, was published in 1913. In it, Proust introduces the themes that run through the entire work. The narrator recalls his childhood, aided by the famous madeleine; and describes M. Swann's passion for Odette. The work is incomparable. Edmund Wilson said '[Proust] has supplied for the first time in literature an equivalent in the full scale for the new theory of modern physics.' - Publisher | Swann.jpg | 8 |
| Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert | 1857 | For daring to peer into the heart of an adulteress and enumerate its contents with profound dispassion, the author of Madame Bovary was tried for 'offenses against morality and religion.' What shocks us today about Flaubert's devastatingly realized tale of a young woman destroyed by the reckless pursuit of her romantic dreams is its pure artistry: the poise of its narrative structure, the opulence of its prose (marvelously captured in the English translation of Francis Steegmuller), and its creation of a world whose minor figures are as vital as its doomed heroine. In reading Madame Bovary, one experiences a work that remains genuinely revolutionary almost a century and a half after its creation. - Publisher | MBovary.jpg | 10 |
| The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain | 1884 | Revered by all of the town's children and dreaded by all of its mothers, Huckleberry Finn is indisputably the most appealing child-hero in American literature. Unlike the tall-tale, idyllic world of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is firmly grounded in early reality. From the abusive drunkard who serves as Huckleberry's father, to Huck's first tentative grappling with issues of personal liberty and the unknown, Huckleberry Finn endeavors to delve quite a bit deeper into the complexities -- both joyful and tragic of life. - Publisher | HuckFinn.jpg | 4 |
| The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald | 1925 | The novel chronicles an era that Fitzgerald himself dubbed the 'Jazz Age'. Following the shock and chaos of World War I, American society enjoyed unprecedented levels of prosperity during the 'roaring' 1920s as the economy soared. At the same time, Prohibition, the ban on the sale and manufacture of alcohol as mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment, made millionaires out of bootleggers and led to an increase in organized crime, for example the Jewish mafia. Although Fitzgerald, like Nick Carraway in his novel, idolized the riches and glamor of the age, he was uncomfortable with the unrestrained materialism and the lack of morality that went with it, a kind of decadence. - Wikipedia | GreatGatsby.jpg | 5 |
| Ulysses | James Joyce | 1922 | Ulysses chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary day, June 16, 1904. The title parallels and alludes to Odysseus (Latinised into Ulysses), the hero of Homer's Odyssey (e.g., the correspondences between Leopold Bloom and Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus). Joyce fans worldwide now celebrate June 16 as Bloomsday. - Wikipedia | Ulysses.jpg | 2 |
| War and Peace | Leo Tolstot | 1869 | Epic in scale, War and Peace delineates in graphic detail events leading up to Napoleon's invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of five Russian aristocraticfamilies. - Wikipedia | WarPeace.jpg | 7 |