Scribd
Upload
339 views2 pages

Top 100 Works in World Literature

The document summarizes a list compiled by the Norwegian Book Clubs and Nobel Institute of the 100 works considered the most important in world literature. A panel of 100 authors from 54 countries voted on the works. Don Quixote received more votes than any other work. The list includes authors such as Chinua Achebe, Jane Austen, Miguel de Cervantes, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ernest Hemingway, Homer, Franz Kafka, and Leo Tolstoy. The 100 works appear alphabetically by author without explicit ranking.

Uploaded by

Dondee Palma
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
339 views2 pages

Top 100 Works in World Literature

The document summarizes a list compiled by the Norwegian Book Clubs and Nobel Institute of the 100 works considered the most important in world literature. A panel of 100 authors from 54 countries voted on the works. Don Quixote received more votes than any other work. The list includes authors such as Chinua Achebe, Jane Austen, Miguel de Cervantes, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ernest Hemingway, Homer, Franz Kafka, and Leo Tolstoy. The 100 works appear alphabetically by author without explicit ranking.

Uploaded by

Dondee Palma
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

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  D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
 Hans Christian Andersen, Fairy Tales  Halldor K. Laxness, Independent People
and Stories  Giacomo Leopardi, Complete Poems
 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice  Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
 Honore de Balzac, Old Father Goriot  Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking
 Samuel Beckett, Trilogy: Molloy,  Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman and Other
Malone Dies, The Unnamable Stories
 Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron  Anon, Mahabharata
 Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions  Naguib Mahfouz, Children of Gebelawi
 Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights  Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks; The
 Albert Camus, The Stranger Magic Mountain
 Paul Celan, Poems  Herman Melville, Moby Dick
 Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the  Michel de Montaigne, Essays
End of the Night  Elsa Morante, History
 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote  Toni Morrison, Beloved
 Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales  Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
 Anton Chekhov, Selected Stories;  Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
Thousand and One Nights  Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; Njal's Saga
 Joseph Conrad, Nostromo  George Orwell, 1984
 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy  Ovid, Metamorphoses
 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations  Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
 Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and  Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales
His Master  Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things
 Alfred Doblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz Past
 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and  Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and
Punishment; The Idiot; The Possessed; Pantagruel
The Brothers Karamazov  Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo
 George Eliot, Middlemarch  Jalalu'l-Din Rumi, The Mathnawi
 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man  Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
 Euripides, Medea  Sheikh Saadi of Shiraz, The Bostan of
 William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom; Saadi (The Orchard)
The Sound and the Fury  Tayeb Salih, A Season of Migration to the
 Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary; A North
Sentimental Education  Jose Saramago, Blindness
 Federico Garcia Lorca, Gypsy Ballads  William Shakespeare, Hamlet; King
 Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred
Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Lear; Othello
Cholera  Sophocles, Oedipus the King
 Anon, The Epic of Gilgamesh  Stendhal, The Red and the Black
 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust  Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions
 Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls of Tristram Shandy
 Günter Grass, The Tin Drum  Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno
 Joao Guimaraes Rosa, The Devil to Pay  Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
in the Backlands  Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace; Anna
 Knut Hamsun, Hunger Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich and
 Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and Other Stories
the Sea  Mark Twain, The Adventures of
 Homer, The Iliad; The Odyssey Huckleberry Finn
 Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House  Valmiki, Ramayana
 Anon, The Book of Job  Virgil, The Aeneid
 James Joyce, Ulysses  Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
 Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories; The  Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway; To the
Trial; The Castle Lighthouse
 Kalidasa, The Recognition of Sakuntala  Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of
 Yasunari Kawabata, The Sound of the Hadrian
Mountain
 Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

You might also like