Best Classic Literature Books

A glamorous film star buys a grand house in St. Mary Mead, and at her welcome party a starstruck local woman is poisoned. The intended victim seems obvious — yet the truth lies in a frozen look on the actress's face and a single line of poetry that Miss Marple cannot forget.

When the universally disliked Colonel Protheroe is found shot dead in the vicarage study, the quiet English village of St. Mary Mead erupts with suspects, false confessions and gossip — and an elderly spinster proves the sharpest mind for miles around.

When Emily Inglethorp is found dead at Styles Court, her stepson calls in his Belgian refugee friend Hercule Poirot to investigate. Christie's debut novel introduces one of fiction's most beloved detectives and establishes the country-house mystery template.

Norman Mailer's monumental debut, drawn from his service in the Pacific. Following an army platoon during the invasion of a Japanese-held island, the novel renders the brutality, boredom, and power struggles of war while probing the authoritarian impulses lurking within the American character.

Nikolai Gogol's immortal short story, one of the most influential ever written. A poor, downtrodden St. Petersburg clerk scrapes together everything he has for a new overcoat — only to have it stolen, with devastating and uncanny consequences. A founding masterpiece of Russian fiction.

Wallace's unfinished posthumous novel follows IRS agents in a Midwest tax processing centre, examining boredom, attention, and the ethical weight of choosing to care about something the world deems worthless.

The mythological history of Middle-earth, from the creation of the world by the god-like Ainur through the ages of the Elves, the forging of the Silmarils, and the great wars of the First Age — assembled posthumously by Christopher Tolkien from his father's lifelong writings.

Joe Chip works for a psychic-shielding agency in a world of commercial telepaths, until a bomb blast sends his team into a reality that keeps regressing — a mind-bending exploration of reality, death, and consumerism.

Anton Chekhov's poignant drama of wasted lives. On a country estate, Vanya and his niece Sonya have sacrificed everything to support a pompous retired professor — until his arrival, and that of his beautiful young wife, brings buried resentments, hopeless loves, and the ache of a misspent life to the surface.

A plain, good-natured heiress in 1840s New York is courted by a charming fortune hunter — with her sardonic, brilliant father watching and diagnosing everything.

From the window of a parallel train, elderly Elspeth McGillicuddy watches a man strangle a woman — then the other train is gone and no body is ever found. Only her friend Miss Marple believes her, and only Miss Marple will prove it.

A wealthy financier dies of poisoning with a curious handful of rye in his jacket pocket. When two more deaths follow a pattern straight out of a nursery rhyme, Miss Marple arrives with a personal stake and a chilling theory about who is keeping the rhyme.

Julia Martin, who has been receiving a small weekly allowance from a former lover, confronts him when it stops, returns to London to see her dying mother, and drifts. Rhys's second novel is the most Chekhovian of her work — nothing is resolved, nothing is dramatized, and the sense of life passing without the protagonist being able to grasp it is achieved entirely through prose of minimal, devastating precision.

James Salter's final novel, published when he was eighty-seven. Returning from the Pacific war, Philip Bowman builds a life in the world of postwar New York book publishing, moving through love affairs, marriage, betrayal, and friendship in a luminous meditation on a single American life.

Kate Chopin's first short story collection captures life in the Louisiana Creole and Cajun communities of Natchitoches Parish, rendering race, desire, and social constraint with extraordinary sensitivity and precision.

Two copy-clerks who become friends retire to the countryside and systematically attempt to master every branch of human knowledge — agriculture, chemistry, medicine, archaeology, philosophy, religion — failing at each in turn. Flaubert's unfinished final novel, published posthumously, is his most radical satirical project.

Wallace's second story collection, including the title series of interview transcripts with monstrous men and pieces like 'The Depressed Person,' 'Adult World,' and 'Forever Overhead' — his most formally varied collection and his most direct engagement with the damage contemporary culture does to interiority.

Paul Atreides is gone. His twin children, Leto II and Ghanima, inherit both his bloodline and his terrifying prescience — while a crumbling empire and Alia's increasingly erratic regency threaten to consume everything Paul built and sacrificed.

Thomas Paine's incendiary 1776 pamphlet that helped spark the American Revolution. Written in plain, electrifying prose for ordinary readers, Common Sense made the radical case for American independence from Britain and for republican government, becoming one of the most influential political documents ever written.

Orphaned Rose Campbell comes to live with her seven aunts and eight boy cousins, and her unconventional guardian Uncle Alec sets about raising her according to his progressive ideas about health, fresh air, and genuine education.

Sophocles' searing tragedy of grief and revenge. Consumed by mourning for her murdered father Agamemnon and hatred for her mother Clytemnestra, Electra waits for her brother Orestes to return and exact vengeance — a relentless study of obsession, justice, and the cost of retribution.

DeLillo's 9/11 novel follows Keith Neudecker, who walks away from the World Trade Center on the morning of the attacks carrying a stranger's briefcase, and the weeks afterward as he and his wife Lianne try to rebuild — and the performance artist who falls from buildings in a harness, recreating the image of the falling man. DeLillo writes around the event rather than depicting it, which is the only honest formal strategy for something that defeated language.

In 1926 Harlem, a man shoots his young lover at her funeral while his wife grieves, attacks the dead girl's face, and attempts to understand what the city and their history have made of them all.

Carol Milford, idealistic and educated, marries a doctor and moves to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, where she attempts to bring culture and reform to a town that does not want them. Lewis's breakthrough novel is the first great satire of American small-town life — the conformity, the anti-intellectualism, the material comfort as a substitute for meaning — and it made Lewis famous overnight.