The 25 results of a poll conducted by the New York Times on the best book of the last 125 years have disappointed me so greatly that I decided to make my own list! (Really, have a look, did a high schooler just list everything they have read in their life?) This list represents what I - duh 😉 - believe to be the best pieces of world literature in the last 120 years (found nothing between 1896 and 1900). I included not only novels and short stories but also drama and poetry - because these genres matter - in alphabetical order. In the end, five of the works voted for by NYT readers have also made it into my list... Do think they were the best ones? What would you add and remove? Let's discuss!
1. Chinua Achebe, 'Things Fall Apart', 1958
2. Svetlana A. Alexievich, 'Chernobyl Prayer', 1997
3. Margaret Atwood, 'A Handmaid's Tale', 1985
4. Samuel Beckett, 'Waiting for Godot', 1952
5. Mikhail A. Bulgakov, 'The Master and Margarita', 1966
6. Albert Camus, 'The Stranger', 1942
7. Paul Celan, 'Death Fugue', 1945
8. Colette, 'The Vagabond', 1910
9. William Faulkner, 'The Sound and the Fury', 1929
10. Elena Ferrante, 'My Brilliant Friend', 2011
11. Ernest Hemingway, 'Fiesta / The Sun also Rises', 1926
12. Hermann Hesse, 'Steppenwolf', 1927
13. James Joyce, 'Ulysses', 1922
14. Franz Kafka, 'Metamorphosis', 1915
15. Thomas Mann, 'Buddenbrooks', 1901
16. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 'Hundred Years of Solitude', 1967
17. Haruki Murakami, 'Kafka at the Shore', 2002
18. Vladimir. V. Nabokov, 'Lolita', 1955
19. Pablo Neruda, 'Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair', 1924
20. George Orwell, '1984', 1949
21. Marcel Proust, 'In Search of Lost Time', 1913-27
22. Alexander I. Solzenyzin, 'The Gulag Archipelago', 1958-68
23. Salman Rushdie, 'The Satanic Verses', 1988
24. Rabindranath Tagore, 'Gitanjali', 1913
25. Virginia Woolf, 'Orlando', 1928
Talk to you soon,
J.
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