How to be well-read in no time: 100 short novels


slaughterhouse 5 cover image


How to be well-read in no time: 100 short novels is a list of books that provides a varied glimpse of the written style of many of the great authors. A concise selection, the titles can be worked through over a very short period, or, alternatively, they can be sandwiched between larger classics in an even more ambitious reading program. For further reading suggestions see our Top 100 Novels of All Time.

1. Slaughterhouse-Five

By Kurt Vonnegut | Used Price: 80% Off

Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world's great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most. More »

Slaughterhouse-Five
The Trial

2. The Trial

By Franz Kafka | Used Price: 70% Off

Written in 1914, The Trial is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century: the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read ... More »

3. Animal Farm

By George Orwell | Used Price: 60% Off

This is a classic tale of humanity awash in totalitarianism. A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. First published during the epoch of Stalinist Russia, ... More »

Animal Farm
Of Mice And Men

4. Of Mice And Men

By John Steinbeck | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

A controversial tale of friendship and tragedy during the Great Depression   They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have ... More »

5. The Waves

By Virginia Woolf

'I, who would wish to feel close over me the protective waves of the ordinary, catch with the tail of my eye some far horizon.' Intensely visionary yet absorbed with the everyday; experimental, daring and challenging, The Waves is regarded by many as Virginia Woolf's greatest achievement. ... More »

The Waves
The Old Man and the Sea

6. The Old Man and the Sea

By Ernest Hemingway | Used Price: 60% Off

The last novel Ernest Hemingway saw published, The Old Man and the Sea has proved itself to be one of the enduring works of American fiction. It is the story of an old Cuban fisherman and his supreme ordeal: a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far ... More »

7. Waiting for the Barbarians

By J. M. Coetzee | Used Price: 70% Off

A modern classic, this early novel by Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee centers on the crisis of conscience and morality of the Magistrate-a loyal servant of the Empire working in a tiny frontier town, doing his best to ignore an inevitable war with the "barbarians." More »

Waiting for the Barbarians
A Christmas Carol

8. A Christmas Carol

By Charles Dickens | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

This new selection of Dickens's Christmas writings confirms his lasting influence upon our idea of the Christmas spirit: that Christmas is a time for celebration, charity, and memory. In addition to the beloved A Christmas Carol, this volume includes such festive works as ... More »

9. Things Fall Apart

By Chinua Achebe | Under $1.00

Things Fall Apart tells two intertwining stories, both centering on Okonkwo, a “strong manâ€Â of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first, a powerful fable of the immemorial conflict between the individual and society, traces Okonkwo’s fall from grace with the tribal world. The second, as modern as ... More »

Things Fall Apart
Home

10. Home

By Toni Morrison | Used Price: 80% Off

A New York Times Notable BookA Washington Post Notable Work of FictionA Best Book of the Year: NPR, AV Club, St. Louis DispatchWhen Frank Money joined the army to escape his too-small world, he left behind his cherished and fragile little sister, Cee. After the war, his shattered ... More »

11. The Stranger

By Albert Camus | Used Price: 70% Off

Albert Camus's spare, laconic masterpiece about a Frenchman who murders an Arab in Algeria is famous for having diagnosed, with a clarity almost scientific, that condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life. Possessing both the force of a parable and the ... More »

The Stranger
Notes from the Underground

12. Notes from the Underground

By Fyodor Dostoevsky | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

In 1864, just prior to the years in which he wrote his greatest novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) penned the darkly fascinating Notes from the Underground. Its nameless hero is a profoundly alienated individual in whose brooding self-analysis ... More »

13. Invisible Cities

By Italo Calvino | Used Price: 70% Off

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.â€Â — from Invisible Cities In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo — Mongol ... More »

Invisible Cities
Heart of Darkness

14. Heart of Darkness

By Joseph Conrad | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

Although Polish by birth, Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) is regarded as one of the greatest writers in English, and Heart of Darkness, first published in 1902, is considered by many his "most famous, finest, and most enigmatic story." — Encyclopaedia Britannica. The tale concerns the journey of the narrator ... More »

15. The Day of the Owl

By Leonardo Sciascia | Used Price: 80% Off

A man is shot dead as he runs to catch the bus in the piazza of a small Sicilian town. Captain Bellodi, the detective on the case, is new to his job and determined to prove himself. Bellodi suspects the Mafia, and his suspicions grow when he finds ... More »

The Day of the Owl
The Quiet American

16. The Quiet American

By Graham Greene | Used Price: 80% Off

Graham Greene's classic exploration of love, innocence, and morality in Vietnam"I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused," Graham Greene's narrator Fowler remarks of Alden Pyle, the eponymous "Quiet American" of what is perhaps the most controversial novel of his career. ... More »

17. The Death of Ivan Ilyich

By Leo Tolstoy | Used Price: 60% Off

Tolstoy’s most famous novella is an intense and moving examination of death and the possibilities of redemption, here in a powerful translation by the award-winning Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.Ivan Ilyich is a middle-aged man who has spent his life focused on his career as a bureaucrat and ... More »

The Death of Ivan Ilyich
The Time Machine

18. The Time Machine

By H. G. Wells | Used Price: 70% Off

Wells's genre-defining novel of time travelWhen a Victorian scientist propels himself into the year a.d. 802,701, he is initially delighted to find that suffering has been replaced by beauty, contentment, and peace. Entranced at first by the Eloi, an elfin species descended from man, he soon realizes that ... More »

19. The Bookshop

By Penelope Fitzgerald | Used Price: 80% Off

In 1959 Florence Green a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance risks everything to open a bookshop the only bookshop in the seaside town of Hardborough By making a success of a business so impractical she invites the hostility of the town s less prosperous shopkeepers By daring ... More »

The Bookshop
We

20. We

By Yevgeny Zamyatin | Used Price: 60% Off

A superb new translation of the classic dystopian novel Set in the twenty-sixth century AD, Zamyatin's masterpiece describes life under the regimented totalitarian society of OneState, ruled over by the all-powerful 'Benefactor'. Recognized as the inspiration for George ... More »

21. The Great Gatsby

By F. Scott Fitzgerald | Used Price: 80% Off

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. This exemplary novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers.The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. This exemplary novel ... More »

The Great Gatsby
Darkness at Noon

22. Darkness at Noon

By Arthur Koestler | Used Price: 80% Off

Originally published in 1941, Arthur Koestler's modern masterpiece, Darkness At Noon, is a powerful and haunting portrait of a Communist revolutionary caught in the vicious fray of the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s. During Stalin's purges, Nicholas Rubashov, an aging revolutionary, is imprisoned and ... More »

23. The Picture of Dorian Gray

By Oscar Wilde | Under $1.00

Since its first publication in 1890, Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, has remained the subject of critical controversy. Acclaimed by some as an instructive moral tale, it has been denounced by others for its implicit immorality. After having his ... More »

The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Red Badge of Courage

24. The Red Badge of Courage

By Stephen Crane | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

Enriched Classics offer readers accessible editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and commentary. Each book includes educational tools alongside the text, enabling students and readers alike to gain a deeper and more developed understanding of the writer and their work.The Red Badge of Courage ... More »

25. The Catcher in the Rye

By J. D. Salinger | Under $1.00

Anyone who has read J.D. Salinger's New Yorker stories--particularly A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, The Laughing Man, and For Esme With Love and Squalor--will not be surprised by the fact that his first novel is full of children. The hero-narrator of The Catcher in ... More »

The Catcher in the Rye
Fathers and Sons

26. Fathers and Sons

By Ivan Turgenev | Used Price: 70% Off

When a young graduate returns home he is accompanied, much to his father and uncle's discomfort, by a strange friend "who doesn't acknowledge any authorities, who doesn't accept a single principle on faith." Turgenev's masterpiece of generational conflict shocked Russian society when ... More »

27. Siddhartha

By Herman Hesse | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

This classic novel of self-discovery has inspired generations of seekers. With parallels to the enlightenment of the Buddha, Hesse's Siddhartha is the story of a young Brahmin's quest for the ultimate reality. His quest takes him from the extremes of indulgent sensuality to the rigors of ascetism and ... More »

Siddhartha
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

28. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

By Robert Louis Stevenson | 60% Off

Robert Louis Stevenson's short novel, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, first published in 1886, became an instant classic, a Gothic horror originating in a feverish nightmare whose hallucinatory setting in the back streets of London gripped a nation mesmerized by crime and violence. Its revelatory ending ... More »

29. The Turn of the Screw

By Henry James | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition brings together one of literature's most famous ghost stories and one of Henry James's most unusual novellas. In The Turn of the Screw, a governess is haunted by ghosts from her young charges past; Virginia Woolf said of this masterpiece of psychological ... More »

The Turn of the Screw
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

30. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

By Lewis Carroll

Since childhood, Kusama has been afflicted with a condition that makes her see spots, which means she sees the world in a surreal, almost hallucinogenic way that sits very well with the Wonderland of Alice. She is fascinated by childhood and the way adults have the ability, at ... More »

31. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

By Mark Twain | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

Referring to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, H. L. Mencken noted that his discovery of this classic American novel was "the most stupendous event of my whole life"; Ernest Hemingway declared that "all modern American literature stems from this one book," while T. S. Eliot called Huck "one of ... More »

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Northanger Abbey

32. Northanger Abbey

By Jane Austen | Used Price: 60% Off

Northanger Abbey depicts the misadventures of Catherine Morland, young, ingenuous, and mettlesome, and an indefatigable reader of gothic novels. Their romantic excess and dark overstatement feed her imagination, as tyrannical fathers and diabolical villains work their evil on forlorn heroines in isolated ... More »

33. Ethan Frome

By Edith Wharton | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

Set against the frozen waste of a harsh New England winter, Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome is a tale of despair, forbidden emotions, and sexual tensions, published with an introduction and notes by Elizabeth Ammons in Penguin Classics. Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to ... More »

Ethan Frome
The Abbess of Crewe: A Modern Morality Tale

34. The Abbess of Crewe: A Modern Morality Tale

By Muriel Spark | Used Price: 60% Off

An election is held at the abbey of Crewe and the new lady abbess takes up her high office with implacable serenity. "The short dirk in the hands of Muriel Spark has always been a deadly weapon," said The New York Times, and "never more so than in The Abbess ... More »

35. Candide

By Voltaire | Used Price: 70% Off

Candide is the most famous of Voltaire's "philosophical tales," in which he combined witty improbabilities with the sanest of good sense. First published in 1759, it was an instant bestseller and has come to be regarded as one of the key texts of the Enlightenment. ... More »

Candide
Pedro Paramo

36. Pedro Paramo

By Juan Rulfo

Swearing to his dying mother that he'll find the father he has never met, a certain Pedro Paramo, Juan Preciado sets out across the barren plains of Mexico for Comala, the hallucinatory ghost town his father presided over like a feudal lord. Between the realms of the living ... More »

37. Silas Marner

By George Eliot | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

Falsely accused, cut off from his past, Silas the weaver is reduced to a spider-like existence, endlessly weaving his web and hoarding his gold. Meanwhile, Godfrey Cass, son of the squire, contracts a secret marriage. While the village celebrates Christmas and New Year, two apparently inexplicable events occur. ... More »

Silas Marner
The Immoralist

38. The Immoralist

By Andre Gide | Used Price: 90% Off

'To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom' - Andre Gide. Michel had been a blindfold scholar until, newly married, he contracted tuberculosis. His will to recover brings self-discovery and the growing desire to rebel against ... More »

39. Therese Raquin

By Emile Zola | Used Price: 80% Off

In a dingy apartment on the Passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, Thérèse Raquin is trapped in a loveless marriage to her sickly cousin, Camille. The numbing tedium of her life is suddenly shattered when she embarks on a turbulent affair with her husband’s earthy friend Laurent, but their ... More »

Therese Raquin
Cain

40. Cain

By Jose Saramago | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

“Suitably disturbing—and a pleasure to read.â€Â — The ScotsmanIn this, his last novel, José Saramago daringly reimagines the characters and narratives of the Old Testament, recalling his provocative The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. His tale runs from the Garden of Eden, when God realizes he has forgotten ... More »

41. Jamilia

By Chinghiz Aitmatov | Under $1.00

“The most beautiful love story in the world.â€Ââ€”Louis AragonThe Second World War is raging, and Jamilia’s husband is off fighting at the front. Accompanied by Daniyar, a sullen newcomer who was wounded on the battlefield, Jamilia spends her days hauling sacks of grain from the threshing floor to ... More »

Jamilia
The Bridge of San Luis Rey

42. The Bridge of San Luis Rey

By Thornton Wilder | Used Price: 80% Off

An ancient bridge collapses over a gorge in Peru, hurling five people into the abyss. It seems a meaningless human tragedy. But one witness, a Franciscan monk, believes the deaths might not be as random as they appear. Convinced that the disaster is a punishment sent from Heaven, ... More »

43. The Sorrows of Young Werther

By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Under $1.00

Celebrated as a leading figure of the German literary movement known as Sturm und Drang ("storm and stress"), Goethe made his reputation with this short novel, originally published in 1774. Its tale of a sensitive young man's self-destructive passion for a lover who ultimately rejects him was based ... More »

The Sorrows of Young Werther
The Call of the Wild

44. The Call of the Wild

By Jack London | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

The Call of the Wild is a novella by American author Jack London published in 1903. The story takes place in the extreme conditions of the Yukon during the 19th-century Klondike Gold ... More »

45. Wide Sargasso Sea

By Jean Rhys | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

"A considerable tour de force by any standard."—?New York Times Book ReviewJean Rhys's reputation was made upon the publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of fiction's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Set ... More »

Wide Sargasso Sea
Snow Country

46. Snow Country

By Yasunari Kawabata | Used Price: 80% Off

Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country is widely considered to be the writer’s masterpiece: a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan.   At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante meets Komako, a ... More »

47. The Native Hurricane

By Chigozie John Obioma

While Onyenmuo is growing up in Umuozala, a village bound to Ozala and plagued by a murderous monster that attacks every forty years, he displays astonishing cunning and ability. For the residents of Umuozala, living in fear, he is their only hope of escape from the control of ... More »

The Native Hurricane
The House of Jasmine

48. The House of Jasmine

By Ibrahim Abdel Meguid | 60% Off

On June 13, 1974, Shagara, a low-level employee at the Alexandria shipyard, is charged with taking workers to cheer for the motorcade of Egyptian President Sadat and his guest President Nixon. Instructed to pay each worker half a pound at the end of NixonÂ’s visit, Shagara pays them ... More »

49. The Hour of the Star

By Clarice Lispector | Used Price: 50% Off

A new edition of Clarice Lispector's final masterpiece, now with a vivid introduction by Colm Tóibín. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor ... More »

The Hour of the Star
Death in Venice

50. Death in Venice

By Thomas Mann | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

Thomas Mann is widely acknowledged as the greatest German novelist of this century. His 1912 novella Death in Venice is the most frequently read example of Mann's early work. Clayton Koelb's masterful translation improves upon its predecessors in two ways: it renders Mann into American (not British) English, ... More »

51. The Ghost Writer

By Philip Roth | Used Price: 80% Off

The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the Great Books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff. At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a ... More »

The Ghost Writer
Rameau's Nephew

52. Rameau's Nephew

By Denis Diderot

In his brilliant and witty dialogue, Denis Diderot invents a chance encounter in a Paris café between two acquaintances. Their talk ranges broadly across art, music, education, and the contemporary scene, as the nephew of composer Rameau, amoral and bohemian, alternately shocks and amuses the moral, bourgeois figure ... More »

53. Surfacing

By Margaret Atwood | Used Price: 90% Off

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Handmaid's TalePart detective novel, part psychological thriller, Surfacing is the story of a talented woman artist who goes in search of her missing father on a remote island in northern Quebec.  Setting out with her lover and another young couple, she soon ... More »

Surfacing
Adolphe

54. Adolphe

By Benjamin Constant | Used Price: 80% Off

Adolphe is a privileged and refined young man, bored by the stupidity he perceives in the world around him. After a number of meaningless conquests, he at last encounters Ellenore, a beautiful and passionate older woman. Adolphe is enraptured and gradually wears down her resistance to his declarations ... More »

55. The Death of Napoleon

By Simon Leys | Used Price: 90% Off

As he bore a vague resemblance to the Emperor, the  sailors on board the Hermann-Augustus Stoeffer had nicknamed him Napoleon. And so, for convenience, that is what we shall call him.      Besides, he was Napoleon. . . . Napoleon has escaped from St. Helena, leaving a ... More »

The Death of Napoleon
No One Writes to the Colonel

56. No One Writes to the Colonel

By Gabriel Garcia Marquez | 80% Off

Written with compassionate realism and wit, the stories in this mesmerizing collection depict the disparities of town and village life in South America, of the frightfully poor and outrageously rich, of memories and illusions, and of lost opportunities and present joys. More »

57. A Very Easy Death

By Simone de Beauvoir | Used Price: 80% Off

A Very Easy Death has long been considered one of Simone de Beauvoir’s masterpieces. The profoundly moving, day-by-day recounting of her mother’s death “shows the power of compassion when it is allied with acute intelligence” (The Sunday Telegraph). Powerful, touching, and sometimes shocking, this is an end-of-life account that ... More »

A Very Easy Death
A Meal in Winter

58. A Meal in Winter

By Hubert Mingarelli | Used Price: 90% Off

One morning in the dead of winter, during the darkest years of World War II, three German soldiers head out into the frozen Polish countryside. They have been charged by their commanders with tracking down and bringing back for execution ?one of them”?a Jew. Having flushed out a ... More »

59. The Return Of The Soldier

By Rebecca West

The Return of the Soldier is the debut novel of English novelist Rebecca West, first published in 1918. The novel recounts the return of the shell shocked Captain Chris Baldry from the trenches of the First World War from the perspective of his cousin Jenny. The novel grapples ... More »

The Return Of The Soldier
Agnes Grey

60. Agnes Grey

By Anne Bronte | Used Price: 50% Off

The only one-volume hardcover edition of the two uncommonly powerful novels written by the youngest of the famous Brontë sisters. Anne Brontë wrote these two fantastically successful novels just before her tragically early death, both of them in a much more grittily realistic mode than the more romantic ones ... More »

61. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

By Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn | 80% Off

The first published novel of controversial Nobel Prize winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn- now in trade paperback. First published in 1962, this book is considered one of the most significant works ever to emerge from Soviet Russia. Illuminating a dark chapter in Russian history, it is at once a ... More »

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Breakfast at Tiffany's

62. Breakfast at Tiffany's

By Truman Capote | Used Price: 90% Off

In this seductive, wistful masterpiece, Truman Capote created a woman whose name has entered the American idiom and whose style is a part of the literary landscape. Holly Golightly knows that nothing bad can ever happen to you at Tiffany's; her poignancy, wit, and naïveté continue to charm.This ... More »

63. The Sound of Waves

By Yukio Mishima | Under $1.00

Set in a remote fishing village in Japan, The Sound of Waves is a timeless story of first love. A young fisherman is entranced at the sight of the beautiful daughter of the wealthiest man in the village. They fall in love, but must then endure the calumny ... More »

The Sound of Waves
Woman at Point Zero

64. Woman at Point Zero

By Nawal El Saadawi | Used Price: 80% Off

Nawal El Saadawi's highly acclaimed feminist novel, Woman at Point Zero, follows the life of Firdaus, an Egyptian peasant girl, from her childhood of incomprehensible cruelty and neglect to her end in a grimy Cairo prison cell. From her earliest memories, Firdaus suffered at the hands of men—first ... More »

65. The Breaking Jewel

By Makoto Oda | Used Price: 80% Off

Set on an island in the South Pacific during the final days of World War II, when the tide has turned against Japan and the war has unmistakably become one of attrition, The Breaking Jewel offers a rare depiction of the Pacific War from the Japanese side and ... More »

The Breaking Jewel
The Summer Book

66. The Summer Book

By Tove Jansson | Used Price: 80% Off

In The Summer Book Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer—its sunlight and storms—into twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia’s grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny ... More »

67. Frankenstein

By Mary Shelley | Under $1.00

The world's most famous work of horror fiction: a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity. Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American ReadMary Shelley's timeless gothic novel presents the epic battle between man and monster at its greatest literary pitch. In trying ... More »

Frankenstein
Giovanni's Room

68. Giovanni's Room

By James Baldwin

'Exquisite, a feat of fire-breathing, imaginative daring' Guardian David, a young American in 1950s Paris, is waiting for his fiancee to return from vacation in Spain. But when he meets Giovanni, a handsome Italian barman, the two men are drawn into an intense affair. After three months David's ... More »

69. Convenience Store Woman

By Sayaka Murata | Used Price: 50% Off

The English-language debut of one of Japan's most talented contemporary writers, selling over 650,000 copies there, Convenience Store Woman is the heartwarming and surprising story of thirty-six-year-old Tokyo resident Keiko Furukura. Keiko has never fit in, neither in her family, nor in school, but when at the age ... More »

Convenience Store Woman
First Love

70. First Love

By Samuel Beckett | Used Price: 80% Off

This new collection brings together First Love, The Calamative, The End and The Expelled; these four novellas are among the first major works of Beckett's decision to use French as his language of literary composition. Rich in verbal and situational humour, they offer a fascinating insight into many ... More »

71. A Rage in Harlem

By Chester Himes | Used Price: 70% Off

A Rage in Harlem is a ripping introduction to Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, patrolling New York City’s roughest streets in Chester Himes’s groundbreaking Harlem Detectives series.  For love of fine, wily Imabelle, hapless Jackson surrenders his life savings to a con man who knows the secret of turning ... More »

A Rage in Harlem
A Month in the Country

72. A Month in the Country

By J.L. Carr | Used Price: 80% Off

In J. L. Carr's deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the bell tower, surrounded ... More »

73. The Kingdom of This World

By Alejo Carpentier | Used Price: 70% Off

A few years after its liberation from the brutality of French colonial rule in 1803, Haiti endured a period of even greater brutality under the reign of King Henri-Christophe, who was born a slave in Grenada but rose to become the first black king in the Western Hemisphere. ... More »

The Kingdom of This World
The Fifth Child

74. The Fifth Child

By Doris Lessing | Under $1.00

Doris Lessing's contemporary gothic horror story—centered on the birth of a baby who seems less than human—probes society's unwillingness to recognize its own brutality.Harriet and David Lovatt, parents of four children, have created an idyll of domestic bliss in defiance of the social trends of late 1960s England. ... More »

75. The Devil in the Flesh

By Raymond Radiguet | Used Price: 50% Off

Hailed by Jean Cocteau as a "masterpiece," and by the Guardian as "Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, avant la lettre," this taut tale written by a teenager in the form of a frank "confession" is a gem of early twentieth century romanticism. Long unavailable in the U.S., ... More »

The Devil in the Flesh
Love in a Fallen City

76. Love in a Fallen City

By Eileen Chang | Used Price: 80% Off

A New York Review Books Original“[A] giant of modern Chinese literature” –The New York Times"With language as sharp as a knife edge, Eileen Chang cut open a huge divide in Chinese culture, between the classical patriarchy and our troubled modernity. She was one of the very few able ... More »

77. Where Angels Fear to Tread

By E. M. Forster | Used Price: 80% Off

A wonderful story of questioning, disillusionment, and conversion, Where Angels Fear to Tread tells the story of a prim English family's encounter with the foreign land of Italy. When attractive, impulsive English widow Lilia marries Gino, a dashing and highly unsuitable Italian twelve years her junior, her snobbish ... More »

Where Angels Fear to Tread
Passing

78. Passing

By Nella Larsen | Used Price: 80% Off

Nella Larsen's powerful, thrilling, and tragic tale about the fluidity of racial identity that continues to resonate today. A New York Times Editors’ Choice   Clare Kendry is living on the edge. Light-skinned, elegant, and ambitious, she is married to a racist white man unaware of her African ... More »

79. Change

By Mo Yan | Used Price: 70% Off

In Change, Mo Yan, the 2012 Nobel Laureate in Literature, personalizes the political and social changes in his country over the past few decades in this novella disguised as autobiography—or vice-versa. Unlike most historical narratives from China, which are pegged to political events, Change is a representative of ... More »

Change
A Cool Million

80. A Cool Million

By Nathanael West | Used Price: 80% Off

Library of America offers the most complete collection ever published of Nathanael West's writings. Along with the four novels for which he is famous, this authoritative collection gathers stories, poetry, essays and plays, film scripts and treatments, and letters.In the Dada-inspired The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), ... More »

81. The Awakening

By Kate Chopin | Under $1.00

When first published in 1899, The Awakening shocked readers with its honest treatment of female marital infidelity. Audiences accustomed to the pieties of late Victorian romantic fiction were taken aback by Chopin's daring portrayal of a woman trapped in a stifling marriage, who seeks and finds passionate physical ... More »

The Awakening
The White Castle

82. The White Castle

By Orhan Pamuk | Used Price: 90% Off

From a Turkish writer who has been compared with Borges, Nabokov, and DeLillo comes a dazzling novel that is at once a captivating work of historical fiction and a sinuous treatise on the enigma of identity and the relations between East and West. In the 17th century, a ... More »

83. A Clockwork Orange

By Anthony Burgess | Used Price: 50% Off

A newly revised text for A Clockwork Orange’s 50th anniversary brings the work closest to its author’s intentions.A Clockwork Orange is as brilliant, transgressive, and influential as when it was published fifty years ago. A nightmare vision of the future told in its own fantastically inventive lexicon, it ... More »

A Clockwork Orange
Sleepless Nights

84. Sleepless Nights

By Elizabeth Hardwick | Used Price: 60% Off

In Sleepless Nights a woman looks back on her life - the parade of people, the shifting background of place - and assembles a scrapbook of memories, reflections, portraits, letters, wishes, and dreams. An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not ... More »

85. Fatale

By Jean-Patrick Manchette | 70% Off

A New York Review Books OriginalWhether you call her a coldhearted grifter or the soul of modern capitalism, there’s no question that Aimée is a killer and a more than professional one. Now she’s set her eyes on a backwater burg—where, while posing as an innocent (albeit drop-dead ... More »

Fatale
Strange Weather in Tokyo

86. Strange Weather in Tokyo

By Hiromi Kawakami

Shortlisted for the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize, Strange Weather in Tokyo is a story of loneliness and love that defies age. Tsukiko, thirty-eight, works in an office and lives alone. One night, she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, "Sensei," in a local ... More »

87. The Book of Chameleons

By Jose Eduardo Agualusa | 70% Off

Félix Ventura trades in an unusual commodity; he is a dealer in memories, clandestinely selling new pasts to people whose futures are secure and who lack only a good lineage to complete their lives. In this completely original murder mystery, where people are not who they seem and ... More »

The Book of Chameleons
Missing Person

88. Missing Person

By Patrick Modiano

Winner of the Prix GoncourtIn this strange, elegant novel, winner of France's premier literary prize, Patrick Modiano portrays a man in pursuit of the identity he lost in the murky days of the Paris Occupation, the black hole of French memory.For ten years Guy Roland has lived without ... More »

89. The River Between

By Ngugi Wa Thiong'o | Used Price: 80% Off

Christian missionaries attempt to outlaw the female circumcision ritual and in the process create a terrible rift between the two Kikuyu communities on either side of the river. More »

The River Between
The Shell

90. The Shell

By Mustafa Khalifa

The work of a modern-day Sozhenitsyn that exposes acts of violence and brutality committed by the Syrian regime. This compelling first novel is the astonishing story of a Syrian political prisoner of conscience atheist mistaken for a radical Islamist who was locked up for 13 years without trial ... More »

91. The Mussel Feast

By Birgit Vanderbeke

The modern German classic that has shaped an entire generation. A mother and her two teenage children sit at the dinner table. In the middle stands a large pot of cooked mussels. Why has the father not returned home? As the evening wears on, we glimpse the issues ... More »

The Mussel Feast
The Book of Promethea

92. The Book of Promethea

By Helene Cixous | Used Price: 80% Off

In writing Le Livre de Promethea Hélène Cixous set for herself the task of bridging the immeasurable distance between love and language. She describes a love between two women in its totality, experienced as both a physical presence and a sense of infinity. The result is a stunning example ... More »

93. Tristana

By Benito Perez Galdos | Used Price: 70% Off

An NYRB Classics OriginalDon Lope is a Don Juan, an aging but still effective predator on the opposite sex. He is also charming and generous, unhesitatingly contributing the better part of his fortune to pay off a friend’s debts, kindly assuming responsibility for the friend’s orphaned daughter, lovely ... More »

Tristana
The Meursault Investigation

94. The Meursault Investigation

By Kamel Daoud | Used Price: 80% Off

A New York Times Notable Book of 2015 — Michiko Kakutani, The Top Books of 2015, New York Times — TIME Magazine Top Ten Books of 2015 — Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year — Financial Times Best Books of the Year“A tour-de-force reimagining of Camus’s The Stranger, from the point of view of the mute Arab victims.” —The New Yorker He ... More »

95. Live and Remember

By Valentin Rasputin | Used Price: 90% Off

First published in Russian in 1974, Live and Remember was immediately hailed by Soviet critics as a superb if atypical example of war literature and a moving depiction of the degradation and ultimate damnation of a frontline deserter. The novel tells the story of a Siberian peasant who ... More »

Live and Remember
Sphinx

96. Sphinx

By Anne Garreta

Sphinx is the remarkable debut novel, originally published in 1986, by the incredibly talented and inventive French author Anne Garréta, one of the few female members of Oulipo, the influential and exclusive French experimental literary group whose mission is to create literature based on mathematical and linguistic restraints, ... More »

97. Bonjour Tristesse

By Francoise Sagan | Used Price: 70% Off

Endearing, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old Cécile is the very essence of untroubled amorality. Freed from the stifling constraints of boarding school, she joins her father—a handsome, still-young widower with a wandering eye—for a carefree, two-month summer vacation in a beautiful villa outside of Paris with his latest mistress, Elsa. Cécile ... More »

Bonjour Tristesse
Seize the Day

98. Seize the Day

By Saul Bellow | Used Price: 80% Off

“What makes all of this so remarkable is not merely Bellow’s eye and ear for vital detail. Nor is it his talent for exposing the innards of character in a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase. It is Bellow’s vision, his uncanny ability to seize the moment and to ... More »

99. Chess Story

By Stefan Zweig | Used Price: 70% Off

Chess Story, also known as The Royal Game, is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig's final achievement, completed in Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942. It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does ... More »

Chess Story
Madonna in a Fur Coat

100. Madonna in a Fur Coat

By Sabahattin Ali | Used Price: 60% Off

Available in English for the first time, this best-selling Turkish classic of love and alienation in a changing world captures the vibrancy of interwar Berlin.   A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade and discover life in 1920s Berlin. There, amidst ... More »