Top 100 Works in World Literature

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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 each considered the ten "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 the top 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.

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  1. 1.
    Things Fall Apart
    by Chinua Achebe

  2. 3.
    Pride and Prejudice (Vintage Classics)
    by Jane Austen

  3. 4.
    Pere Goriot (Norton Critical Editions)
    by Honoré de Balzac

  4. 5.
    Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
    by Samuel Beckett

  5. 6.
    The Decameron (Penguin Classics)
    by Giovanni Boccaccio

  6. 7.
    Collected Fictions
    by Jorge Luis Borges

  7. 8.
    Wuthering Heights (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Emily Brontë

  8. 9.
    The Stranger
    by Albert Camus

  9. 11.
    Journey to the End of the Night
    by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  10. 12.
    Don Quixote: Unabridged Edition (Signet Classics)
    by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

  11. 13.
    The Complete Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer
    by John H. Fisher

  12. 14.
    Anton Chekhov's Short Stories (Norton Critical Editions)
    by Anton Chekhov

  13. 15.
    Nostromo (Dover Thrift Editions)
    by Joseph Conrad

  14. 16.

  15. 17.
    Great Expectations (Penguin Classics)
    by Charles Dickens

  16. 18.
    Jacques the Fatalist (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Denis Diderot

  17. 20.
    Crime and Punishment (Enriched Classics)
    by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  18. 21.
    The Idiot (Penguin Classics)
    by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  19. 22.
    The Possessed (Barnes & Noble Classics)
    by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  20. 23.
    The Brothers Karamazov (Modern Library)
    by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  21. 24.
    Middlemarch (Signet Classics)
    by George Eliot

  22. 25.
    Invisible Man
    by Ralph Ellison

  23. 26.

  24. 27.
    The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text
    by William Faulkner

  25. 28.
    Absalom, Absalom! (Modern Library)
    by William Faulkner

  26. 29.
    Sentimental Education (Penguin Classics)
    by Gustave Flaubert

  27. 30.
    Madame Bovary (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Gustave Flaubert

  28. 31.
    The Gypsy Ballads of Garcia Lorca
    by Garcia Lorca

  29. 32.
    Love in the Time of Cholera
    by GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

  30. 33.
    One Hundred Years of Solitude (P.S.)
    by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  31. 35.
    Faust (Bantam Classics) (Part I) (English and German Edition)
    by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  32. 36.
    Dead Souls: A Novel
    by Nikolai Gogol

  33. 37.
    The Tin Drum (Everyman's Library (Cloth))
    by Gunter Grass

  34. 39.
    Hunger: A Novel
    by Knut Hamsun

  35. 40.
    Old Man And The Sea (Scribner Classics)
    by Ernest Hemingway

  36. 41.
    Illiad
    by Homer

  37. 42.
    The Odyssey
    by Homer

  38. 43.
    A Doll's House
    by Henrik, Ibsen

  39. 44.
    The BOOK OF JOB
    by Stephen Mitchell

  40. 45.
    Ulysses
    by James Joyce

  41. 46.
    Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories
    by Franz Kafka

  42. 47.
    The Trial: A New Translation Based on the Restored Text
    by Franz Kafka

  43. 48.
    The Castle
    by Franz Kafka

  44. 50.
    The Sound of the Mountain
    by Yasunari Kawabata

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Created by tknowlton on May 28, 2008.
 

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