TOP 100 WORKS IN WORLD LITERATURE

Source: Norwegian Book Clubs, with the Norwegian Nobel Institute, 2002.

The editors of the Norwegian Book Clubs, with the Norwegian Nobel Institute, polled a panel of 100 authors from 54 countries on what they considered the “best and most central works in world literature.” Among the authors polled were Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing, Seamus Heaney, Salman Rushdie, Wole Soyinka, John Irving, Nadine Gordimer, and Carlos Fuentes. The list of 100 works appears alphabetically by author. Although the books were not ranked, the editors revealed that Don Quixote received 50% more votes than any other book.

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Hans Christian Andersen, Fairy Tales and Stories
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Honore de Balzac, Old Father Goriot
Samuel Beckett, Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Albert Camus, The Stranger
Paul Celan, Poems
Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales
Anton Chekhov, Selected Stories; Thousand and One Nights
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
Alfred Doblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Possessed; The Brothers Karamazov
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Euripides, Medea
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom; The Sound and the Fury
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary; A Sentimental Education
Federico Garcia Lorca, Gypsy Ballads
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera
Anon, The Epic of Gilgamesh
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
Günter Grass, The Tin Drum
Joao Guimaraes Rosa, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
Knut Hamsun, Hunger
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Homer, The Iliad; The Odyssey
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House
Anon, The Book of Job
James Joyce, Ulysses
Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories; The Trial; The Castle
Kalidasa, The Recognition of Sakuntala
Yasunari Kawabata, The Sound of the Mountain
Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
Halldor K. Laxness, Independent People
Giacomo Leopardi, Complete Poems
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking
Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
Anon, Mahabharata
Naguib Mahfouz, Children of Gebelawi
Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks; The Magic Mountain
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Michel de Montaigne, Essays
Elsa Morante, History
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; Njal’s Saga
George Orwell, 1984
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo
Jalalu’l-Din Rumi, The Mathnawi
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
Sheikh Saadi of Shiraz, The Bostan of Saadi (The Orchard)
Tayeb Salih, A Season of Migration to the North
Jose Saramago, Blindness
William Shakespeare, Hamlet; King Lear; Othello
Sophocles, Oedipus the King
Stendhal, The Red and the Black
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace; Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Valmiki, Ramayana
Virgil, The Aeneid
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway; To the Lighthouse
Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

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