ENRICHMENT

World Literature Essentials playlist

Picking a small list of essential texts from world literature is not easy, and this list is certainly imperfect — there will be texts that some people feel really ought to be on the list that are missing. But that’s the nature of any subjective, aesthetic list. In our opinion, these texts are all significant and worthy of being on any list of leading world literature. But what even is ‘world literature’? Well, for us it’s literature not written by British writers (they’re featured on the general lists) or American writers (they’re featured on the American Literature lists). Many of these texts were written in a language other than English, too, so you’ll need to read them in translation.

World Literature Essentials

  1. Don Quixote by Cervantes (1615)

  2. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (1846)

  3. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1856)

  4. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)

  5. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1878)

  6. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

  7. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (1929) - recommended read

  8. The poetry of W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) [He Wishes For The Cloths of Heaven, The Second Coming, Easter 1916, etc.]

  9. The Outsider by Albert Camus (1942) - recommended read

  10. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)

  11. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967)

  12. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)

  13. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margret Atwood (1985) - recommended read

  14. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1997)

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English Literature Deep Cuts