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Ciarán Connaire
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The Confessions
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
James Mustich
Combining bravado with the invocation of a higher-order authenticity, the opening sentences of Rousseau’s Confessions perfectly capture the animating spirit of the protagonist whose bold ideas and volatile personality will fascinate the reader for the several hundred pages that follow. Through the v...show more
The Catcher in the Rye
J. D. Salinger
It’s been considerably more than a half century since the first angst-ridden teenager cracked the spine of The Catcher in the Rye and felt he’d found a book—or more specifically, a character—that spoke for him. In the intervening years, millions of other self-anointed outsiders have felt the same wa...show more
The Gulag Archipelago
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s detailed indictment of the state is drawn from his own bitter experience as well as from the reports, memoirs, and letters of 227 fellow zeks. With relentless realism and psychological acuity, he follows the course of arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, and oppression as su...show more
Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot was Samuel Beckett’s first performed play, written in French and then translated by the author into English. It is one of the signal accomplishments in twentieth-century theater and one of the touchstones of modern literature. It is also, as one contemporary critic said of its two ...show more
The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins
While the plot of The Moonstone is compelling, it is the play of its distinctive voices upon our understanding of events that makes the book truly absorbing. Clues are laid out carefully and, in retrospect at least, quite tellingly, but their meaning is obscured as we read by the shifting perspectiv...show more
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
A book of shimmering social surfaces and hauntingly evanescent private depths, The Great Gatsby imbues its fleet narrative with a formal elegance that has been readily apparent even to the generations of high school students to whom it has been assigned—generally long before they might understand th...show more
Tender Is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night—the last of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s four completed novels, and the author’s favorite—sprawls among dozens of characters and settings across Western Europe before and after World War I. Although its messy, heartbreaking story of mental illness, alcoholism, and the disintegration of ...show more
Four Quartets
T. S. Eliot
Written in the years before and during World War II, the Quartets consist of four long poems, each cohering around a season, one of the four natural elements (earth, air, water, fire), and a place: “Burnt Norton,” an English manor house and garden; “East Coker,” a village in Somerset, home to Eliot’...show more
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” So reads the famous first line of Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece of love and society. Its juxtaposition of universal verity with particular insight sets the tone for the eight hundred pages that follow. Anna Karenina is intima...show more
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
Published in March 1939, Steinbeck’s saga of the havoc wreaked by the Great Depression was soon the country’s number one bestseller, selling thousands of copies each week despite the difficult economic times. At the same time, communities from coast to coast found it obscene and banned (and even bur...show more
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
Vivid, unpredictable, insinuating, uncomfortably intimate, the voice that tells Invisible Man is one of the most supple and powerful instruments ever fashioned in American prose. His skin is black, his soul is blue, his mind is lit with both desperation and deep thought. Naturalistic and surreal, fa...show more
Travels with Charley
John Steinbeck
At age fifty-eight, suffering from a heart condition, John Steinbeck took to the road to say goodbye to the country he loved and to engage one more time with the American themes his imagination had brought to life in his fiction. Travels with Charley is his account of the trip, which took him from N...show more
Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson
On any list of the best adventure stories ever written, Treasure Island deserves a place at the top. Hewing to a taut narrative line that ripples with ominous vibrations, it pulls the reader headlong into a fantastic realm of pirates and buried treasure. Read the first few pages and see if you can s...show more
Kidnapped
Robert Louis Stevenson
Although the heroics of Kidnapped’s two protagonists, the narrator David Balfour and the dashing fugitive Alan Breck Stewart, are captivating regardless of one’s knowledge of Scottish history, it does help to know that their thrilling exploits are set in the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden, when...show more
The Complete Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi
Satrapi’s Persepolis, originally published in two volumes, is a memoir in pictures, a comic book that details its author’s coming-of-age during the Islamic Revolution. Beginning in 1980, when Marjane is ten years old, the narrative reflects—in the developing sophistication of its language and sensib...show more
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, the second of four daughters of a noted proponent of Transcendentalism, Bronson Alcott. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a friend of the family, as were Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Despite her transcendentalist pedigree, Louisa May Alcott ...show more
Matilda
Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl’s roster of youth-delighting tales is as rich as that of any twentieth-century children’s author. From The Gremlins (1943) to The Minpins (1991), Dahl created marvelous confections for young readers for nearly five decades. Standing out among his storytelling treats is Matilda, whose supe...show more
Purgatorio: The Divine Comedy, Book 2
Dante Alighieri
Although the stories in hell are better than those in purgatory, sin being a sexier subject than penance, Dante’s poetry never palls. Throughout, he infuses his narrative with a current of feeling that humanizes the austere theological arc of his pilgrim’s progress.
Paradiso: The Divine Comedy, Book 3
Dante Alighieri
As the Comedy ascends to a heaven of light, Dante completes the grand imaginative arc he began in the dark wood, having composed out of eschatological speculations an epic as thrilling as those of Homer, as filled with human sensibility as Virgil’s—one in which all the deadly sins, and all the longe...show more