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World Literature Essentials

Books from across the globe that changed how we see the world. A reading map across cultures and centuries.

By @marginnotes · 14 nodes · 35 views · Tags: literature, world-literature, classics, reading, books

Contents

  • book One Hundred Years of Solitude

    García Márquez invented magical realism. A family saga where the extraordinary is ordinary. Reading

  • book Crime and Punishment

    Dostoevsky dissects a mind justifying murder. 150 years old and still the most psychologically inten

  • book Norwegian Wood

    Murakami's most accessible novel. Loss, memory, and loneliness in 1960s Tokyo. Simple prose that som

  • note Magical realism: the ordinary made extraordinary. García ...
  • note East meets West in Murakami's dreamlike prose — lonelines...
  • book Kafka on the Shore

    Murakami at his most surreal. Talking cats, fish falling from the sky, and a 15-year-old running awa

  • book The Alchemist

    Paulo Coelho's fable about following your 'Personal Legend'. Simple, sometimes too simple — but 150

  • book Things Fall Apart

    Achebe wrote the African novel that the world needed. Shows colonialism from the inside — not as his

  • book The Stranger

    Camus in 100 pages: a man who doesn't cry at his mother's funeral and kills someone for no reason. A

  • book Beloved

    Toni Morrison's ghost story about slavery's aftermath. The past literally haunts the present. Won th

  • book My Name Is Red

    Orhan Pamuk's murder mystery set in 16th-century Istanbul. Art, religion, and identity told from mul

  • book Blindness

    Saramago imagines a city where everyone goes blind. No character names, no paragraph breaks. A parab

  • podcast The New Yorker Fiction Podcast

    Authors reading and discussing short stories by other authors. The best way to discover writers you'

Connections

  • existentialism
  • same author
  • post-colonial voices
  • defines
  • narrative innovation