So let’s start of by saying that an MFA in creative writing is not the same as an MA in English Literature; and also, perhaps, that reading a bunch of famous books won’t necessary make you a better writer. Most of the books on these reading lists are famous because, at the time, they did or represented something new, that mirrored or highlighted a cultural or technological shift. These days, most commercial fiction or nonfiction follows a pretty standard pattern, and most successful books satisfy readers who are looking for entertainment or education.

It’s also worth noting that plenty of the authors on these lists were unknown, undiscovered, ignored or even actively reviled – these weren’t smash hits. Some didn’t get famous until later. We could also say, maybe, that a selection of books compiled by American Universities will of course have it’s own bias.

But if you ARE thinking about getting a Master’s in Literature, these lists are a good place to start figuring out what kind of material you might be reading. Generally, in a Bachelor’s degree, you’d read all the big, major books; in a Master’s degree you’d read more philosophy and critical theory so you understand how to approach or think about those texts. And in a PhD, you’d focus on one text and one mode of critique (so it’s actually the case you start off reading broadly and end up in a very minor subcategory).

This means you don’t actually have to read all of these books, but you should be vaguely familiar with what exists and why it exists, or how texts are divided and organized. And MFA in creative writing is somewhat of a different beast; you might read more modern or contemporary authors; you’ll probably focus more on the craft or style or construction; you’ll probably have workshops and writing assignments to develop your writing. Personally I don’t think those are very useful.

I hope to come back and organize this list much better and review all my favorites, at least with a short summary, so you know what each text is kind of about, a cheat-sheet maybe of all the best books in the history of literature. For now, these are reposted from major universities so you can see what a graduate degree in literature might look like.

Yale’s Reading List of Best Books

1. 1Q84 – Haruki Murakami
2. A Brief History of 7 Killings – Marlon James
3. A Chinese Life (Newly available!) – Li Kunwu
4. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America – Ronald Takaki
5. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
6. A Lesson Before Dying – Ernest J. Gaines
7. A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara
8. A Mercy – Toni Morrison
9. A Tempest: Based on Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest;’ Adaptation for a Black Theatre – Aimé Césaire
10. A Toast in the House of Friends – Akilah Oliver
11. African American Women Confront the West: 1600-2000 – Quintard Taylor, Shirley Ann Wilson Moore
12. All About Love – bell hooks
13. Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire – Adria Imada
14. Aloha Betrayed – Noenoe K. Silva
15. Altai – Wu Ming
16. Americanah – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
17. Amistad (movie) – Steven Spielberg
18. An unkindness of ghosts (Newly available!) – Rivers Solomon
19. Angela Davis: An Autobiography – Angela Davis
20. Another Brooklyn – Jacqueline Woodson
21. Another country – James Baldwin
22. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe – Benjamin Alire Sáenz (Not currently available)
23. Asante Identities: History and Modernity in an African Village, 1850-1950 – T. C. McCaskie
24. Bad feminist – Roxane Gay
25. Beauty is a wound – Eka Kurniawan
26. Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self – Danielle Evans
27. Bel Canto – Ann Patchett
28. Beloved – Toni Morrison
29. Between the world and me – Ta-Nehisi Coates
30. Big Machine – Victor LaValle
31. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux – Nicholas Black Elk
32. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment – Patricia Hill Collins
33. Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West – Cormac McCarthy
34. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants – Robin Wall Kimmerer
35. Cane River – Lalita Tademy
36. Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
37. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
38. Children of Blood and Bone – Tomi Adeyemi
39. Children of the Jacaranda Tree – Sahar Delijani
40. City of Thieves – David Benioff
41. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
42. Cloudsplitter – Russell Banks
43. Comfort Woman – Nora Okja Keller
44. Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
45. Companero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara – Jorge G. Castaneda
46. Confessions of a Mask – Yukio Mishima
47. Conquistadora – Esmeralda Santiago
48. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers – Kwame Anthony Appiah
49. Count Zero – William Gibson
50. Crazy Brave: A Memoir – Joy Harjo
51. Dawn – Octavia E. Butler
52. Dawn (Xenogenesis, Bk. 1) – Octavia E. Butler
53. Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority – Tim Wise
54. Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums – Amy Lonetree
55. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art – Julia Kristeva
56. Difficult Women – Roxane Gay
57. Do Not Say We Have Nothing – Madeleine Thien
58. Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
59. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
60. Down These Mean Streets – Piri Thomas
61. Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood – Fatima Mernissi
62. Dune – Frank Herbert
63. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil – Hannah Arendt
64. Einstein’s Dreams – Alan Lightman
65. Eleven Minutes – Paulo Coelho
66. Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History – S. C. Gwynne
67. Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother – Sonia Nazario
68. Essential Works of Lenin: “What Is to Be Done?” and Other Writings – Vladimir Lenin
69. Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
70. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City – Matthew Desmond
71. Exit West – Mohsin Hamid
72. Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
73. Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience During and After the World War II Internment – Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston
74. Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex – Oksana Zabuzhko
75. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf – Ntozake Shange
76. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
77. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
78. Free Cyntoia: My Search for Redemption in the American Prison System – Cyntoia Brown-Long
79. Freshwater – Akwaeke Emezi
80. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation – Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
81. From the Deep Woods to Civilization: Chapters in the Autobiography of an Indian – Charles A. Eastman
82. Fruit of the Drunken Tree – Ingrid Rojas Contreras
83. Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon – Chuck Palahniuk
84. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic – Alison Bechdel
85. Galapagos – Kurt Vonnegut
86. Germinal – Émile Zola
87. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination – Avery F. Gordon
88. Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
89. Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
90. God Help the Child – Toni Morrison
91. Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch – Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
92. Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations – Mira Jacob
93. Gorilla, My Love – Toni Cade Bambara
94. Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
95. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies – Jared Diamond
96. Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
97. Hamnet – Maggie O’Farrell
98. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World – Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
99. Heart Berries: A Memoir – Terese Marie Mailhot
100. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis – J.D. Vance
101. Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi
102. Homesick for Another World – Ottessa Moshfegh
103. Homeward Bound: The Life of Paul Simon – Peter Ames Carlin
104. House on Mango Street – Sandra Cisneros
105. How Tia Lola Came to Stay – Julia Alvarez
106. I Hotel – Karen Tei Yamashita
107. If Beale Street Could Talk – James Baldwin
108. Ikaw Yeng – Constantino (Not currently available)
109. In Praise of Shadows – Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
110. In The Time of Butterflies – Julia Alvarez
111. Interpreter of Maladies – Jhumpa Lahiri
112. Invisible Man – Ralph Waldo Ellison
113. Jazz – Toni Morrison
114. Jewish War Veterans Women in Military Life – Constance Cotton (Interviewer) (YouTube)
115. Just Mercy – Bryan Stevenson
116. Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
117. Kindred – Octavia E. Butler
118. Lead Belly (artist) – Lead Belly
119. Letras Afroperuanas: Creación e Identidad (NEW! Added 2021) – José Campos, José Respaldiza
120. Like one of the family; conversations from a domestic life – Alice Childress
121. Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel – George Saunders
122. Love – Keisha Cole (Not currently available)
123. Love medicine – Louise Erdrich
124. Maud Martha – Gwendolyn Brooks
125. Men We Reaped: A Memoir – Jesmyn Ward
126. Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World – Tracy Kidder
127. Ms. Marvel – G Willow Wilson
128. Murgu – Artan Fuga (Not currently available)
129. My Twisted World (NEW! Added 2021) – Elliot Rodger (Not currently available)
130. Native modernism: the art of George Morrison and Allan Houser – Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of the American Indian
131. Native Science: natural laws of interdependence – Gregory Cajete
132. Native Son – Richard Wright
133. Never Fall Down – Patricia McCormick
134. Nickel Boys (NEW! Added 2021) – Colson Whitehead
135. Night Sky with Exit Wounds – Ocean Vuong
136. Nisekoi (NEW! Added 2021) – Naoshi Komi
137. Nobody Knows My Name – James Baldwin
138. O espaço dividido – Marlon Santos (Individual title not available, try an author search for other titles.)
139. Of Love and Dust – Ernest J. Gaines
140. Of the Spirit – Douglas Cardinal
141. On Beauty – Zadie Smith
142. On The Battlefield: Overcoming Challenges Associated with the Aftermath of Military Experiences – Constance C. Cotton (Not currently available)
143. Oreo – Fran Ross
144. Our Voices: indignity and architecture – Rebecca Kiddle, Luugigyoo Patrick stewart, and Kevin O’Brien (editors)
145. Pachinko – Min Jin Lee
146. Parable of the sower – Octavia E. Butler
147. Passing – Nella Larsen
148. Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj (TV show) – Hasan Minhaj (Not currently available)
149. Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi
150. Pimp – Iceberg Slim
151. Please Look After Mom – Kyung-Sook Shin
152. Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (NEW! Added 2021) – Simone Schwarz-Bart
153. Prison Writings: My Life is My Sundance – Leonard Peltier
154. Purple Hibiscus – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
155. Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools (Newly available!) – Monique Morris
156. Race Matters – Cornel West
157. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in America – Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields
158. Reenactments: poems & translations (NEW! Added 2021) – Hai-Dang Phan
159. Regarding the Pain of Others – Susan Sontag
160. Reservation Blues – Sherman Alexie

Critical Theory and Comparative Literature Reading List

UWM’s comparative literature graduate level reading list.

• M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition
• Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
• Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
• Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literature
• Robert Alter, The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age
• Samir Amin, Eurocentrism
• Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism
• Aristotle, Poetics
• Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
• Augustine, De doctrina christiana
• Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
• Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism
• Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination or Rabelais and His World
• Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative
• Roland Barthes, S/Z; Image, Music, and Text; or Mythologies
• Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations”
• Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective
• Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
• Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter
• Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
• Michael Andre Bernstein, Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero
• Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture
• Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature
• Allan Bloom, Love and Friendship
• Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction
• Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Frames of War; or text of choice
• Aimé Cesaire, Discourse On Colonialism
• Partha Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories
• Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies; Primitive Passion; or Ethics after Idealism
• Stanley Corngold, The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory
• Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other or The Writing of History
• Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction
• Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1; Cinema 2
• Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism or Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust
• Jacques Derrida, Of grammatology or Writing and Difference
• Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
• Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish; The History of Sexuality, vol. I; Language, Counter-Memory, Practice; or text of choice
• Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams; Civilization and Its Discontents; or text of choice
• Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism
• Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method
• Henry Louis Gates, Figures In Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self
• Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures
• Gérard Genette, Figures III or Narrative Discourse
• Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic
• Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
• Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks
• Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World or Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare
• Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel
• Georg Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
• Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language
• Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
• Johannes Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture
• Roman Jakobson, The Framework of Language
• Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act; Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; or text of choice
• H.R. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception
• Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Aesthetical Judgment
• Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction
• Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
• Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language; Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection; or Revolution in Poetic Language
• Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection or “Seminar on the ‘Purloined Letter’”
• Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism
• Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind or Tristes tropiques
• Lydia He Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity-China, 1900-1937
• Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel
• Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud
• Karl Marx, Capital (selections); Communist Manifesto; or Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
• Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context
• Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism
• V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention Of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge
• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy; Untimely Meditations; or Genealogy of Morals
• Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature
• Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature
• Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy
• Georges Poulet, Studies in Human Time
• Plato, The Republic
• Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
• Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times
• Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations
• Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics
• Edward W. Said, Orientalism or The World, The Text, and The Critic
• Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in general linguistics
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire
• Steven Shaviro, Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society
• Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937
• Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity At The Margins
• Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory
• Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America
• Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics
• Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics or Critique of Postcolonial Reason
• Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression
• George Steiner, Language and Silence or After Babel
• Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing
• Tzvetan Todorov, Literature and Its Theorists or The Poetics of Prose
• Eugene Vance, Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages
• Giambattista Vico, The New Science
• Eric Voegelin, “Wisdom and Magic of the Extreme: A Meditation”
• Robert Young, Colonial Desire or White Mythologies
• Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel
• Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation
• Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
• René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature
• Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation
• Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature or text of choice
• Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject; Sublime Object of Ideology; or text of choice

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE + CRITICAL THEORY

Princeton undergrad reading list

1. Achebe, Chinua, Arrow of God or Things Fall Apart (English)
2. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah (English)
3. Agnon, Shmuel Yosef, “Agunot,” “The Lady and the Peddler,” “Ido and Enam,” “Forevermore,” or other stories (Hebrew)
4. Agnon, Shmuel Yosef. Only Yesterday (or any other novel) (Hebrew)
5. Aidoo, Ama Ata, Our Sister Killjoy (English)
6. Aitmatov, Chingiz, The Day Lasts More Than A Hundred Years, Jamila, and The Place of the Skull (Russian)
7. Aleichem, Sholem, Tevye the Milkman and The Railroad Stories (Yiddish)
8. Al-Jahiz, Kitab al-Bukhala (Book of Misers) or Risdlat al-qiydn (Epistle on the Singing Girls) (classical Arabic)
9. Allende, Isabel, La casa de los espíritus, La ciudad de las bestias (or any other novel) (Spanish)
10. Anand, Mulk Raj, Untouchable (English)
11. Apuleius, The Golden Ass (Latin)
12. Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale (English)
13. Austen, Jane (any novel) (English)
14. Bâ, Mariama, Une si longue lettre (French)
15. Babel, Isaac, Odessa Tales (Russian)
16. Baldwin, James, Go Tell It on the Mountain or any other fiction (English)
17. Balzac, Honoré de, Illusions perdues or Le Père Goriot or any other fiction (French)
18. Bankim, Chandra Chatterjee, Kapalkundala, Bishabriksha, or Anandamath (Bengali)
19. Barnes, Djuna, Nightwood (English)
20. Basho, Matsuo, Oku no Hosomichi (Japanese)
21. Behn, Aphra, Oroonoko (English)
22. Bernhard, Thomas, Korrektur or Wittgensteins Neffe (German)
23. Boccaccio, Giovanni, Decameron (Italian)
24. Bolaño, Roberto, Los detectives salvajes (Spanish)
25. Böll, Heinrich, Billard um halb zehn or Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum
26. Brontë, Emily, Wuthering Heights (English)
27. Bulgakov, Mikhail, The Master and Margarita (Russian)
28. Bunyan, John, Pilgrim’s Progress (English)
29. Burney, Frances, Evelina (English)
30. Butor, Michel, L’Emploi du temps or La Modification (French)
31. Calvino, Italo, any novel (including I sentieri dei nidi di ragno or Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore) (Italian)
32. Camus, Albert, La Peste or L’Etranger (French)
33. Canetti, Elias, Die Blendung (German)
34. Cao Xangin, Hónglóu mèng (Classical Chinese)
35. Carpentier, Alejo, Los pasos perdidos; El Reino de Este Mundo (Spanish)
36. Cather, Willa, O Pioneers! or My Antonia (or any other novel) (English)
37. Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote (Spanish)
38. Chaucer, Geoffrey, Canterbury Tales (Middle English)
39. Chekhov, Anton, “Duel” and “Dama s sobachkoi” (Lady with A Dog) (or any other short story) (Russian)
40. Cho, Se-hūi, Small Ball Launched By a Dwarf (1978) (Korean)
41. Choe, In-hun, The Square (1960) (Korean)
42. Chughtai, Ismat, Short Stories or The Crooked Line (Urdu)
43. Coetzee, J. M., Waiting for the Barbarians (English)
44. Cohen, Albert, Solal (French)
45. Condé, Maryse, Heremakhonon (French)
46. Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness (English)
47. Cooper, James Fenimore, The Last of the Mohicans, The Deerslayer, or The Pathfinder (English)
48. Dandin, Daśakumāracarita (What Ten Young Men Did) (Sanskrit)
49. Daneshvar, Simin, Suvashoon (Persian)
50. Dangarembga, Tsitsi, Nervous Conditions (English)
51. Danticat, Edwige, Breath, Eyes, Memory (English)
52. Dazai, Osamu, The Setting Sun (English)
53. de Staël, Germaine, Corinne (French)
54. Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe, Roxana, or Moll Flanders (English)
55. Desai, Anita, Baumgartner’s Bombay (English)
56. Desani, G. V., All about H. Hatterr (English)
57. Devi, Mahasweta, “Pterodactyl,” “Puran Sahay,” and “Pirtha” (Bengali)
58. di Lampedusa, Giuseppe, Il Gattopardo (Italian)
59. Dickens, Charles, Great Expectations (or any other novel) (English)
60. Diderot, Denis, La Religieuse or Le Neveu de Rameau (or any other novel) (French)
61. Djebar, Assia, L’Amour, la fantasia (French)
62. Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Besy, Brat’ya Karamazovy, or Prestuplenie i nakazanie (Russian)
63. Duras, Marguerite, L’Amant or Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (French)
64. Eco, Umberto, Il nome della rosa (Italian)
65. Eliot, George, Middlemarch (or any other novel) (English)
66. Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man (English)
67. Emecheta, Buchi, The Joys of Motherhood or The Rape of Shavi (English)
68. Farah, Nuruddin, Gifts or Maps (English)
69. Faulkner, William, Absalom, Absalom; Faulkner The Sound and the Fury; Light in August (English)
70. Fielding, Henry, Tom Jones (English)
71. Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby (or any other novel) (English)
72. Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary (or any other novel) (French)
73. Forster, E. M., A Passage to India (English)
74. Franklin, Miles, My Brilliant Career (English)
75. Frisch, Max, Stiller (German)
76. Fuentes, Carlos, La región más transparente (Spanish)
77. Galeano, Eduardo, Memoria del fuego or Las venas abiertas de América Latina (Spanish)
78. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, Cien años de soledad (Spanish)
79. Ghosh, Amitav, Shadow Lines (English)
80. Gide, André, Les Faux-monnayeurs (French)
81. Ginzberg, Natalia, Caro Michele or Le piccole virtù (Italian)
82. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Die Leiden des jungen Werther (German)
83. Gogol, Nikolai, Collected Tales (Russian)
84. Gordimer, Nadine, July’s People (English, South Africa)
85. Grass, Günter, Die Blechtrommel or Katz und Maus (German)
86. Grossman, David, See Under: Love or The Book of Intimate Grammar (Hebrew)
87. Grossman, Vasily, Life and Fate (Russian)
88. Gurnah, Abudlrazak, Paradise, Desertion, or By the Sea (English)
89. Kang, Han, The Vegetarian (Korean)
90. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Scarlet Letter or House of Seven Gables (English)
91. Haywood, Eliza, Love in Excess or Fantomina (English)
92. Head, Bessie, A Question of Power (English)
93. Hedayat, Sadegh, Boof-e Koor (Persian)
94. Heliodorus, Aethiopica (Greek)
95. Hemingway, Ernest, The Old Man and the Sea (or any other novel) (English)
96. Hoffmann, E.T.A., The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (novella) (German)
97. Hua, Yu Huozhe (Chinese)
98. Hugo, Victor, Les Misérables or Notre-Dame de Paris (French)
99. Hurston, Zora Neale, Their Eyes Were Watching God (English)
100. Hwang, Sōk-yōng, Guest (2002) (Korean)
101. Isaacs, Jorge, Maria (Spanish)
102. Ishiguro, Kazuo, Remains of the Day, The Buried Giant (or any other novel) (English)
103. James, Henry, Portrait of a Lady (or any other novel) (English)
104. Jelloun, Tahar Ben, L’Enfant de sable or Hospitalité française (French)
105. Johnson, Samuel, Rasselas (English)
106. Joyce, James, Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (English)
107. Kafka, Franz, Metamorphosis (German)
108. Kane, Cheikh Hamidou, L’aventure ambiguë (French)
109. Kawabata Yasunari, Snow Country (Japanese)
110. Kazantzakis, Nikos, Odyssey, a modern sequel (Modern Greek)
111. Kingston, Maxine Hong, The Woman Warrior (English)
112. Kyokutei Bakin, Nansō Satomi Hakkenden (Tale of the Eight Dogs) (Japanese)
113. La Fayette, Madame de, La Princesse de Clèves (French)
114. La Guma, Alex, In the Fog of the Season’s End (English)
115. Lamming, George, The Emigrants (English)
116. Laye, Camara, L’Enfant Noir (French)
117. Lee, Min Jin, Pachinko (English)
118. Lennox, Charlotte, The Female Quixote (English)
119. Lermontov, Mikhail, A Hero of Our Time (Russian)
120. Lessing, Doris, The Golden Notebook (English)
121. Levi, Primo, Se questo è un uomo (Italian)
122. Lispector, Clarice, A hora da estrela (or any other novel) (Portuguese)
123. Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria, Dom Casmurro (Portuguese)
124. Mahfouz, Naguib, Cairo Trilogy (any of the three) or Midaq Alley (Arabic)
125. Malraux, André, La Condition humaine (French)
126. Mann, Thomas, Der Zauberberg, Doktor Faustus, Tod in Venedig (German)
127. Manto, Sadaat Hasan, Short Stories (Urdu)
128. Manzoni, Alessandro, I promessi sposi (Italian)
129. Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick (English)
130. Mishima, Yukio, Confessions of a Mask (English)
131. Mofolo, Thomas, Chaka (Sesotho)
132. Morante, Elsa, La storia or L’isola di Arturo (Italian )
133. Morrison, Toni, Beloved (English)
134. Moyan, any fiction or poetry (Chinese)
135. Murakami, Haruki, Noruwei no mori (or any other novel) (Japanese)
136. Murasaki, Tale of Genji (Japanese) Murata, Sayaka, Konbini ningen (Convenience Store Woman) (Japanese)
137. Murayama, Milton. All I Asking for Is My Body (English)
138. Nabokov, Vladimir, Pale Fire or Lolita (English)
139. Naipaul, V. S., A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, or Mimic Men (English)
140. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. The Sympathizer (English)
141. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood or Caitaani mutharaba-Ini (English and Gikuyu)
142. Ōe, Kenzaburō, Warera no kyōki wo ikinobiru michi wo oshieyo (or any other novel) (Japanese)
143. Okri, Ben, The Famished Road (English)
144. Ondaatje, Michael, Coming Through Slaughter (or any other novel) (English)
145. Oyono, Ferdinand, Une vie de boy (French)
146. Oz, Amos, My Michael (or any other novel) (Hebrew)
147. Pak, Wan-sō, Mother’s Stake 1 and 2 (1980, 1981) (Korean)
148. Pavese, Cesare, Paesi tuoi (Italian)
149. Perec, Georges, any novel (including La Vie mode d’emploi) (French)
150. Petronius, Satyricon (Latin)
151. Pezeshkzad, Iraj, My Uncle Napoleon (Persian)
152. Proust, Marcel, Du côté de chez Swann (or any other novel) (French)
153. Puig, Manuel, La traición de Rita Hayworth or El beso de la mujer araña (Spanish)
154. Pushkin, Alexander, Eugene Onegin (Russian)
155. Pynchon, Thomas, Mason & Dixon or Gravity’s Rainbow (English)
156. Rabelais, François, La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel (any of five novels) (French)
157. Remarque, Erich Maria, All Quiet on the Western Front (German)
158. Rhys, Jean, Wide Sargasso Sea (English)
159. Richardson, Samuel, Pamela or Clarissa (English)
160. Roidis, Emmanuel, I Papissa Ioanna (Modern Greek)
161. Rojas, Fernando de La Celestina (Spanish)
162. Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children or Satanic Verses or Shame (English)
163. Ruswa, Mirza Hadi, Umrao Jaan Ada (Urdu)
164. Sabato, Ernesto El túnel (Spanish)
165. Salih, Al-Tayyib, Season of Migration to the North (Arabic)
166. Sand, George, Indiana (French)
167. Saro-Wiwa, Ken, Sozaboy (English)
168. Sartre, Jean Paul, La Nausée (French)
169. Sebald, W. G., Die Ausgewanderten or Austerlitz (German)
170. Sembene, Ousmane, Les bouts de bois de Dieu (French)
171. Shabtai, Yaakov, Past Continuous (Hebrew)
172. Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein (English)
173. Shohei Ooka, Fires on the Plain (English)
174. Sholokhov, Mikhail, Tikhii Don (Russian)
175. Singer, Isaac Bashevis, The Slave (Yiddish)
176. Soltanzadeh, Assef, Dar Guraiz Gum Mishavim (Persian)
177. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Russian)
178. Steinbeck, John, Grapes of Wrath (English)
179. Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir or La Chartreuse de Parme (French)
180. Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy (English)
181. Stoker, Bram, Dracula (English)
182. Svevo, Italo, La coscienza di Zeno or Senilità (Italian)
183. Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver’s Travels (English)
184. Tagore, Rabindranath, Gora (or any other novel) (Bengali)
185. Tanizaki, Jun’ichiro, Makioka Sisters (Japanese)
186. Tawada, Yōko, Inu mukoiri (The Bridegroom was a Dog) (Japanese)
187. Thackeray, William Makepeace, Vanity Fair (or any other novel) (English)
188. Tolstoy, Leo, Anna Karenina or Voyná i mir (Russian)
189. Toomer, Jane, Cane (English)
190. Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich, Otcy i Deti (Russian)
191. Tutuola, Amos, The Palm Wine Drinkard (English)
192. Twain, Mark, Huck Finn (or any other novel)
193. Vargas Llosa, Mario, La fiesta del chivo, La casa verde or La guerra del fin del mundo (or any other novel) (Spanish)
194. Verga, Giovanni, I Malavoglia (Italian)
195. Voltaire, Candide (French)
196. Wharton, Edith, Age of Innocence (English)
197. Wolf, Christa, Nachdenken über Christa T. (German)
198. Woolf, Virginia, Between the Acts or Mrs Dalloway (or any other novel) (English)
199. Yehoshua, Abraham B., Mar Mani or The Lover or A Journey to the End of the Millenium (Hebrew)
200. Yi, Kwang-su, Heartlessness (1917) (Korean)
201. Yōm, Sang-sōp, Three Generations (1931) (Korean)
202. Yourcenar, Marguerite, Mémoires d’Hadrien (French)
203. Zola, Emile, Germinal (or any other novel) (French)

POETRY Reading List (Select 12)

• Abani, Chris (English)
• Abū Nuwās (classical Arabic)
• Ahmed Faiz, Faiz Ghazaliyat (Ghazals by Faiz) (Urdu)
• Ahmed Faiz, Faiz Nazmain (Modern Urdu Poems by Faiz) (Urdu)
• Akhmatova, Anna (especially Requiem) (Russian)
• al-Mutanabbi (classical Arabic)
• Amichai, Yehuda (Hebrew)
• An Anthology of Modern Urdu Poetry (Urdu)
• Arnaut Daniel (Occitan)
• Auden, W. H. (English)
• Baudelaire, Charles (especially Les Fleurs du mal) (French)
• Behbahani, Simin (Persian)
• Bennet, Louise (Creole)
• Bernart de Ventadorn (Occitan)
• Bialik, Hayyim Nahman, “The Pool,” “City of Slaughter” or “Desert Dead” (Hebrew)
• Bishop, Elizabeth (English)
• Brodsky, Joseph (Russian)
• Brutus, Dennis (English)
• Catullus (Latin)
• Carson, Anne (English)
• Cavafy, Constantine (modern Greek)
• Césaire, Aimé (especially Cahier d’un retour au pays natal) (French)
• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (English)
• Crane, Hart (English)
• D’Annunzio, Gabriele (especially Il Trionfo della Morte) (Italian)
• Dario, Rubén (especially Azul) (Spanish)
• Darwesh, Mahmood (Modern Standard Arabic)
• Dickinson, Emily (English)
• Dryden, John (English)
• Du Fu (Chinese)
• Eliot, T. S. (English)
• Elytis, Odysseas (Modern Greek)
• Emerson, Ralph Waldo (English)
• Foscolo, Niccolò (especially I sepolcri and/or Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis) (Italian)
• Frost, Robert (English)
• Ghalib Ghazaliyat (Urdu and Persian)
• Ha-Levi, Judah and Shmuel ha-Nagid (Hebrew)
• Han, Yong-un, The Silence of Love (1926) (Korean)
• Herbert, George (English)
• The Hindi Classical Tradition (Snell’s edition) (Hindi)
• Hölderlin, Friedrich (German)
• Ibn Gabirol, Shlomo (Hebrew)
• Introduction to Japanese Court Poetry (ed. Earl Miner) (Japanese)
• Itō, Hiromi, Imi no gyakutai (The Maltreatment of Meaning) (Japanese)
• Jayadeva, Gita Govinda (Sanskrit)
• Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Spanish)
• Kabir (especially The Weaver’s Songs) (Hindi)
• Kalidasa (especially Meghaduta or Sakuntala) (Sanskrit)
• Kaminsky, Ilya, Deaf Republic (English)
• Keats, John (English)
• Kim, Su-yōng (Korean)
• Kokinshu poems (Japanese)
• Kunene, Mazisi (especially Emperor Shaka the Great) (Zulu)
• Laforgue, Jules (French)
• Leopardi, Giacomo (especially I canti) (Italian)
• LiPo and TuFu (from Arthur Cooper’s Penguin edition) (Chinese)
• Lorca, Federico Garcia (Spanish)
• Lucretius (Latin)
• Mallarmé, Stéphane (French)
• Muhammad, Allama Iqbal Bang e Dara (Urdu)
• Ovid, Metamorphoses (Latin)
• Michelangelo (especially Sonnets) (Italian)
• Milton, John (English)
• Montale, Eugenio (especially Ossi di seppia) (Italian)
• Moore, Marianne (English)
• Mu’allaqat (Hanging Poems) (classical Arabic)
• Neruda, Pablo (Spanish)
• Paz, Octavio (Spanish)
• Petrarca, Francesco (especially Il canzoniere) (Italian)
• Poe, Edgar Allen (English)
• Pope, Alexander (English)
• Pound, Ezra (English)
• Propertius (Latin)
• Pushkin, Alexander (especially The Bronze Horseman, Eugene Onegin, Mozart and Salieri) (Russian)
• Qabbani, Nizar (Arabic)
• Rilke, Rainer Maria (German)
• Rimbaud, Arthur (French)
• Ruiz, Juan (especially Libro del Buen Amor) (Spanish)
• Sa’di, Muslih ud Din Bostan, especially Golestan (Persian)
• Sappho (Greek)
• Seferis, Giorgios (Greek)
• Senghor, Léopold Sédar (French)
• Sepehri, Sohrab, Hasht Behesht (Persian)
• Shakespeare, William (English)
• Shelley, Percy Bisshe (English)
• Spenser, Edmund (especially The Fairie Queen) (English)
• Spicer, Jack After Lorca (English, and translations from Spanish)
• Stein, Gertrude (English)
• Stevens, Wallace (English)
• Tagore, Rabindranath (Bengali)
• Tchernikhovsky, Saul (Hebrew)
• Trakl, Georg (German)
• Treasury (Vidyakara’s edition) (Sanskrit)
• Vallejo, César (espeically Los Heraldos Negros) (Spanish)
• Vuong, Ocean. (English)
• Walcott, Derek (English)
• Whitman, Walt (English)
• Williams, William Carlos (English)
• Wordsworth, William (English)
• Yeats, William Butler (English)
• Yevtushenko, Yevgeny (Russian)

EPIC, SACRED TEXTS, FOLKTALES

• African Folktales (ed. Roger Abrahams) (various)
• New Testament (especially Matthew, Acts, and Epistle to the Romans) (Greek)
• The Thousand and One Nights (Arabic)
• Ariosto, Ludovico, L’Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando) (Italian)
• Beowulf (Old English)
• Qur’an (Arabic)
• Camões, Luís Vaz de, Os Lusíadas ( The Lusiads) (Portuguese)
• Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval or Lancelot or Cligès (French)
• Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy) (Italian)
• Ferdowsi, Abolqasem, Shahnameh (Persian)
• Gälawdewos, The Life of Walatta-Petros (Gəˁəz)
• Gilgamesh (Sumerian)
• Kalila wa-Dimna (Arabic, Persian, and Hindi)
• Hebrew Bible (especially Genesis and Exodus) (Hebrew)
• Heike Monogatari (The Tale of the Heike) (Japanese)
• Hesiod, Erga kaí Hēmérai (Works and Days) or Theogony (Greek)
• Homer, Iliad, Odyssey (Greek)
• Kim, Man-jung, Nine Cloud Dream (Late 17th century) (Korean)
• Milton, John, Paradise Lost (English)
• Kebra Nagast (The Glory of the Kings) (Ethiopic)
• La Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland) (French)
• Mahabharata (Sanskrit)
• Datta, Michael Madhusuda, Meghnad-badh kabya (The Slaying of Meghanada) (Bengali)
• Popol Vuh (Book of Counsel) (Maya)
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• Son-Jara or Sundiata (Maninka or Bamana)
• Strassburg, Gottfried von, Tristan und Isolde (Middle High German)
• Tasso, Torquato, Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) (Italian)
• Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley or The Tain) (Old Irish)
• Utendi wa Tambuka (The Story of Tambuka) (Swahili)
• Valmiki, Ramayana (Sanskrit)
• Vergil, Aeneid (Latin)
• Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival (German)

DRAMA

• Aeschylus, Oresteia (or any other drama) (Greek)
• Al-Hakim, Tawfiq, Fate of a Cockroach and Other Plays (Arabic)
• Aristophanes, Lysistrata (or any other drama) (Greek)
• Babel, Isaac, Sunset (Russian)
• Barca, Pedro Calderón de la, La vida es sueño (Spanish)
• Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot or Endgame (English)
• Brecht, Bertolt, Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage) (or any other drama) (German)
• Büchner, Georg, Woyzeck (German)
• Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, La Vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream) (Spanish)
• Chekhov, Anton, Vishniovy sad (The Cherry Orchard) (or any other drama) (Russian)
• Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Shinjūten no Amijima (Love Suicides of Amijima) (Japanese)
• Churchill, Caryl, Cloud Nine (English)
• De Filippo, Eduardo, Filumena Marturano (Italian)
• Dryden, John, All for Love (English)
• Dutt, Utpal, Three Plays (Bengali)
• Euripides, Bacchae (or any other drama) (Greek)
• Everyman (Old English)
• Fo, Dario, Mistero buffo (Comic Mysteries) or Morte accidentale di un anarchico (Accidental Death of an Anarchist) (Italian)
• Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust (German)
• Hwang, David Henry, M. Butterfly (English)
• Ibsen, Henrick, Hedda Gabler (Norwegian)
• Ionesco, Eugène, Le roi se meurt (Exit the King) (French)
• Fornés, María Irene, Fefu and Her Friends (English)
• Kushner, Tony, Angels in America (English)
• Lillo, George, London Merchant (English)
• Molière, Misanthrope (French)
• Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) (Gikuyu)
• Pirandello, Luigi, Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author) or Enrico IV (Italian)
• Racine, Jean, Phèdre (French)
• Schiller, Friedrich von, Maria Stuart or Der Geisterseher (The Ghost-Seer) (German)
• Shakespeare (any drama) (English)
• Shaw, George Bernard, Pygmalion (or any other drama) (English)
• Sheridan, R. B., School for Scandal (English)
• Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (or any other drama) (Greek)
• Soyinka, Wole, The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite or Death and the King’s Horseman (English)
• Stoppard, Tom, Arcadia or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
• Taj, Imtiaz, Ali Anarkali (Urdu)
• Tang Hsien-tsu, Mudan ting (Peony Pavilion) (Chinese)
• Wilde, Oscar, The Importance of Being Earnest (English)
• Wilson, August, The Piano Lesson (or any other drama) (English)
• Xun, Lu, Guoke (Chinese)
• Zeami, Hagoromo (The Feather Mantle ) or any Noh play (Japanese)

NONFICTION (ESSAYS, CRITICISM, MEMOIRS, TRAVELOGUES, AND SO ON) (Select 7)

• Adorno, Theodor, Aesthetic Theory (or any essay) (German)
• Ale Ahmad, Jalal, Gharb-zadegi (Persian)
• Anzaldúa, Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera (English and Spanish)
• Aristotle, Poetics (Greek)
• Auerbach, Eric, Mimesis or “Figura” (German)
• Augustine, Confessiones (Confessions) (Latin)
• Baldwin, James, Notes of a Native Son (English)
• Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, or S/Z, or The Pleasure of the Text, or Writing Degree Zero (French)
• Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator,” “The Storyteller,” or Theses on the Philosophy of History; On Some Motifs in Baudelaire; The Arcades Project (German)
• Best, Stephen and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction” (English)
• Borges, Jorge Luis, Ficciones (Spanish)
• Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble or Excitable Speech
• de Beauvoir, Simone, The Second Sex (French)
• de Man, Paul, any essay (French and English)
• de Pizan, Christine Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (The Book of the City of Ladies) (French)
• Derrida, Jacques, Voice and Phenomenon; Writing and Difference; Dissemination (French)
• Diderot, Denis, Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville or Lettre sur les Sourds et Muets (or any other text) (French)
• Eco, Umberto, La struttura assente, Kant e l’ornitorinco or other work (Italian)
• Equiano, Olaudah, The Interesting Narrative (English)
• Foucault, Michel, The Archeology of Knowledge, or The History of Sexuality, or Discipline and Punish, or Power/Knowledge (French)
• Fanon, Frantz, Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth) (French)
• Franklin, Benjamin, Autobiography (English)
• Freud, Sigmund, Moses and Monotheism, or Totem and Taboo, or The Interpretation of Dreams, or “The Uncanny”
• Gandhi, Mahatma, Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule) (Gujarati)
• Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales de los incas (Royal Commentaries of the Incas) (Spanish)
• Gorky, Maxim, Autobiographical Trilogy (Russian)
• Harman, Graham, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (English)
• Hegel, G. W. F., Phenomenology of Spirit (German)
• Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time (German)
• Hoffman, Eva, Lost in Translation
• Horace, Ars Poetica (Latin)
• Khosrow, Naser, Safarnameh (Persian)
• Lady Hyegyōng, Memoirs (Records Written in Silence) (1795-1805) (Korean)
• Lessing, Doris, Under My Skin, Walking in the Shade or other (English)
• Longinus, On Sublimity (Greek)
• Lorde, Audre, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (English)
• Lukacs, Gyorgy, Theory of the Novel (German)
• Machiavelli, Niccolò, La Mandragola or Il Principe (Italian)
• Mailer, Norman, The Naked and the Dead or The Armies of the Night (English)
• Mandela, Nelson, Long Walk to Freedom (English)
• Marcuse, Herbert, The Aesthetic Dimension (German)
• Marx, Karl, 1848 pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital (German)
• Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, Turkish Embassy Letters (English)
• Nietzsche, Friedrich, Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy (German)
• Oz, Amos, A Tale of Love and Darkness (Hebrew)
• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Emile or Confessions (French)
• Rowlandson, Mary, Captivity (English)
• Said, Edward. “Secular Criticsm,” “Representations of the Intellectual,” “Reflections on Exile,” Orientalism
• Sarraute, Nathalie, Tropismes or Enfance (French)
• Plato, Symposium, Phaedrus, or Republic (Greek)
• Sei Shōnagon, Pillow Book (Japanese)
• Sima Qian, Records of the Historian (Chinese)
• Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, Arkhipelag GULAG (1973) (Russian)
• Twain, Mark, The Innocents Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, A Tramp Abroad
• Weil, Simone, L’Enracinement, prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l’être humain (French)
• Wollstonecraft, Mary, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (English)
• Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own (English)
• Wordsworth, “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads (English)
• Xun, Lu, Nahan (Chinese)
• Zhuangzi, Chuang-tzǔ (Inner Chapters) (Chinese)

FILM AND OTHER VISUAL MEDIA (Optional; select 5)

• Akerman, Chantal, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (French)
• Almodóvar, Pedro, Todo sobre mi madre (or any other film) (Spanish)
• Antonioni, Michelangelo, L’avventura or L’eclisse (Italian)
• Axel, Gabriel, Babettes gaetebud (Danish)
• Bergman, Ingmar, Persona (or any other film) (English)
• Bertolucci, Bernardo, Ultimo tango a Parigi, Il conformista, or L’ultimo imperatore (or any other film) (Italian)
• Brakhage, Stan, Anticipation of the Night (English)
• Bresson, Robert, Pickpocket, Le journal d’un curé de compagne, or Au hasard Balthazar (or any other film) (French)
• Luis Buñuel, Viridiana, Los Olvidados, or Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (Spanish)
• Buñuel, Luis and Salvador Dalí, Un chien andalou or L’age d’or (French)
• Campion, Jane, The Piano (English)
• Cavani, Liliana, Il Portiere di notte (Italian)
• Chaplin, Charlie, Gold Rush, Modern Times, The Kid, or City Lights (English)
• Cisse, Souleymane, Yeelen (Bambara)
• Cocteau, Jean, La belle et la bete (Beauty and the Beast) (French)
• Coppola, Francis Ford, Apocalypse Now (English)
• Dash, Julie, Daughters of the Dust (English)
• De Sica, Vittorio, Ladri di biciclette (Italian)
• Deren, Maya, Meshes of the Afternoon or At Land (English)
• Dreyer, Carl Theodor, La passion de Jeanne d’arc, Vredens Dag, Ordet, or Vampyr (French, Danish)
• Dulac, Germaine, La coquille et le clergyman or La souriante Madame Beudet (French)
• Eisenstein, Sergei, October, Battleship Potemkin, or Ivan Grozniy (Russian)
• Epstein, Jean, La chute de la maison d’Usher (French)
• Farhadi, Asghar, A Separation (Persian)
• Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, Angst essen Seele auf (or any other film) (German)
• Fellini, Federico, La Dolce Vita or Amarcord (or any other film) (Italian)
• Frampton, Hollis, Hapax legomena (or any of the seven in this series) (English)
• Godard, Jean Luc, Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle or Pierrot le fou (French)
• Griffith, D. W., Intolerance (English)
• Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás, Memorias des subdesarrollo (Spanish)
• Hawks, Howard, Bringing Up Baby or His Girl Friday (English)
• Herzog, Werner, Nosferatu or Aguirre (or any other film) (German)
• Hitchcock, Alfred, Vertigo (or any other film) (English)
• Holland, Agnieszka, Europa Europa (German)
• Hou Hsiao-hsien, Xi meng ren sheng (Chinese)
• Itami, Juzo, Tampopo (Japanese)
• Jackson, Peter, The Lord of the Rings (English)
• Jennings, Humphrey, Listen to Britain (English)
• Joon-ho, Bong, 기생충 (Parasite) (Korean)
• Kaige, Chen, Huáng tǔdì (Chinese)
• Kassovitz, Mathieu La haine (French)
• Keaton, Buster, The General or Sherlock, Jr. (English)
• Kiarostami, Abbas, Where is the Friend’s House ( Persian)
• Kim, Ki-yōng, The Housemaid (1960) (Korean)
• Kinugasa, Teinosuke, Kurutta Ippeiji (Japanese)
• Kirsanoff, Dimitri, Ménilmontant (French / Russian)
• Kore-eda, Hirokazu, Manbiki kazoku (Shoplifters) (Japanese)
• Kurosawa, Akira, Rashomon or Ran (Japanese)
• L’Herbier, Marcel, L’Argent (French)
• Lang, Fritz, Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder or Metropolis (German)
• Lanzmann, Claude, Shoah (English, German, Hebrew)
• Lee, Ang, Xi yan (Chinese)
• Lee, Spike, Do the Right Thing (or any other film) (English)
• Lucas, George, Star Wars (original trilogy) (English)
• Lumière, Méliès, and Griffith, Selected Short Films
• Man Ray, L’Etoile de mer (French)
• Marker, Chris, La jetée (French)
• Mehrjui, Dariush, The Cow (Persian)
• Méliès, Georges, Voyage dans la lune or Voyage à travers l’impossible (French)
• Micheaux, Oscar, Body and Soul (or any other film) (English)
• Miyazaki, Hayao, Sen to chihiro no kamikakushi (Spirited Away) (Japanese)
• Mizoguchi, Kenji, Ugetsu Monogatari (Japanese)
• Murnau, F. W., Der Letze Mann or Nosferatu (German)
• Nolan, Christopher, The Dark Knight (English)
• Ozu, Yasujiro, Tōkyō Monogatari (Japanese)
• Park, Chan-wook, Oldboy (2003) (Korean)
• Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Uccellacci, uccellini or Teorema (Italian)
• Pontecorvo, Gillo, La battaglia di Algeri (French)
• Potter, Sally, Orlando (English)
• Ray, Satyajit, The Apu Trilogy (Bengali)
• Renoir, Jean, La règle du jeu or La grande illusion (French)
• Resnais, Alain, L’année dernière à Marienbad (French)
• Riefenstahl, Leni, Triumph des Willens (German)
• Riggs, Marlon, Tongues Untied (English)
• Rocha, Glauber, Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Portuguese)
• Rohmer, Eric, Ma nuit chez Maud (or any other film) (French)
• Rossellini, Roberto, Roma città aperta or Paisan (Italian)
• Ruttmann, Walter, Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (German)
• Sanjines, Jorge, Sangre de Condor (Spanish)
• Scorsese, Martin, Mean Streets or Raging Bull (English)
• Sembene, Ousmane, Ceddo, Faat Kiné, Moolaadé (French, Wolof, Bambara)
• Snow, Michael, Wavelength (English)
• Straub, Jean Marie, Nicht Versöhnt or Der Bräutigam, die Komödiantin und der Zuhälter (German)
• Stroheim, Erich von, Greed (English)
• Sturges, Preston, The Lady Eve (English)
• Tarkovsky, Andrei, Nostalghia (Russian)
• Tati, Jacques, Les vacances de M. Hulot (French)
• Truffaut, François, Jules et Jim (or any other film) (French)
• Varda, Agnès, Cléo de 5 à 7 or Sans toit ni loi (French)
• Vertov, Dziga, Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Russian)
• Visconti, Luchino, Il Gattopardo or Morte a Venezia (Italian)
• Welles, Orson, Citizen Kane (or any other film) (English)
• Wen, Jiang, Devils on the Doorstep (Chinese)
• Wertmuller, Lina, Pasqualino Settebellezze (Italian)
• Wiene, Robert, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (German)
• Wai, Wong Kar, Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love (or any film) (Chinese)

GVSU‘s reading list

Henry Abelove, et al. eds.: The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader
Bill Ashcroft, et al. eds.: The Post-Colonial Studies Reader
Catherine Belsey: Critical Practice
Tony Bennett: Formalism and Marxism
Stephen Greenblatt, Giles Gunn: Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies
Terence Hawkes: Structuralism and Semiotics
Angeline Mitchell: Within the Circle: An Anthology of African-American Literary Criticism From the Harlem Renaissance to the Present
Jane Tompkins, ed.: Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism
Lois Tyson: Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide
H. Aram Veeser: The New Historicism
Robyn Warhol, Diane Price Herndl: Feminism: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism
Elizabeth Wright: Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory to Practice

Homer, Iliad, Odyssey
Aeschylus, Oresteia (Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides), Prometheus Bound
Sophocles, Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Ajax Electra, Philoctetes, Women of Trachis
Euripides, Hippolytus, Medea, Trojan Women, Bacchae
Aristophanes, Lysistrata, Frogs, Persians, Suppliant Maidens
Plato, Apology, Symposium, Timaeus, Phaedo
Aristotle, Poetics, Metaphysics
Plautus, Menaechmi
Virgil, Eclogues, Aeneid, Georgics
Horace, Odes, Ars Poetica
Ovid, Metamorphoses, Amores
Augustine, Confessions
Hesiod,Theogony, Works and Days
Homeric Hymns (anonymous)
Lyric poets: Archilochus, Sappho, Anacreon, Simonides, Pindar
Historians: Herodotus, Thucydides
Lucretius, On The Nature of Things
Catullus
Seneca: Thyestes, Oedipus, Medea
Terence
Petronius: Satyricon
Juvenal

MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
British Medieval Literature

Beowulf
Doer’s Lament
The Wanderer
The Seafarer
The Dream of the Rood,
The Battle of Malden
Chaucer: Canterbury Tales, Troilus & Criseyde, Legend of Good Women, Parliament of Fowls,Complaint to His Purse, Gentilesse, To Adam His Scribe, Truth, To Rosemounde
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Everyman
Second Shepard’s Play
Piers Plowman
Thomas Mallory: Morte d’Arthur

Continental Medieval Literature

Nibelungenlied
Song of Roland
Dante: Comedia
Marie de France: Lais
Beroul or Gottfried von Strassburg: Tristan
Chretien de Troyes: Erec et Enide, Knight of the Cart, Yvain
Boccaccio: Decameron
Gottfried von Eschenbach: Parzival

BRITISH LITERATURE
British Renaissance Literature

Everyman
Sir Thomas More: Utopia
Castiglione: The Courtier
Machiavelli: The Prince
Kyd: Spanish Tragedy
Marlowe: Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus
Spenser: Faerie Queene
Sidney: Astrophil and Stella, Arcadia, Defense of Poesie
Shakespeare: Merchant of Venice, Henry IV, Henry V, Julius Caesar, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Troilus & Cressida, All’s Well That End’s Well, Measure for Measure, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest. Sonnets.
John Donne: Poems
Milton: L’Allegro, Il Penseroso, Lycidas, Paradise Lost
Herrick: Hesperides

British Literature of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century

Samuel Butler: “Hudibras”
John Dryden: “Absalom and Achitophel,” “MacFlecknoe,”
Alexander Pope: “The Dunciad,” “Rape of the Lock,” “An Essay on Criticism”
William Cowper: “The Task”

Drama:

William Congreve: Way Of The World
Oliver Goldsmith: She Stoops To Conquer, The Vicar of Wakefield
John Gay: The Beggar’s Opera

Novels:

John Bunyan: The Pilgrim’s Progress
Aphra Behn: Oroonoko, The Rover
Samuel Richardson: Pamela, Clarissa
Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders, Journal of the Plague Year, Roxana
Henry Fielding: Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, Shamela
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels, “A Modest Proposal”
Laurence Sterne: Tristam Shandy
Tobias Smollett: Humphrey Clinker
Frances (Fanny) Burney: Evelina
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility
Anne Radcliff: Mysteries of Udolpho

Journalists, Diarists, Essayists:

Samuel Pepys: Diary
James Boswell: Life of Johnson
Samuel Johnson: The Rambler, Raselas, “Vanity of Human Wishes,” Lives of the Poets
Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele: The Spectator, The Tatler
Mary Wollstonecraft: Vindication of the Rights of Women

British Romantic Literature

William Blake: Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience
William Wordsworth: “Tinturn Abbey,” “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” “Ode to Duty,” the Lucy poems, the sonnets, “Michael,” “The Prelude”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “The Eolian Harp,” “Kubla Khan,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,”Biographia Literaria
George Gordon, Lord Byron: “Darkness,” Don Juan, Manfred, Childe Harold
Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Ozymandias,” “England in 1819,” “Ode to the West Wind,” “To a Skylark,” “A Defense of Poetry,” Prometheus Unbound
John Keats: sonnets, odes, letters

Essays and Journals:

Dorothy Wordsworth: The Grasmere Journals
Charles Lamb: letters, essays
William Hazlitt: essays
Leigh Hunt: essays
Thomas De Quincey: essays, Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Journals

British Victorian Literature

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Sonnets From The Portuguese, “Aurora Leigh”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Poems, “The Lady of Shalott,” “The Lotus-Eaters,” “Ulysses,” “Locksley Hall,” “Break, Break, Break,” “In Memoriam,” The Idylls of the King
Robert Browning: “Porpyria’s Lover,” “My Last Duchess,” “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church,” “Andrea del Sarto,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “A Grammarian’s Funeral,” “Rabbi Ben Ezra”
Matthew Arnold: “To Marguerite–Continues,” “The Scholar Gypsy,” “Dover Beach,” “Thyrsis”
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: “The Blessed Damozel,” The House of Life
Christina Rossetti: “Goblin Market”
William Morris: “The Defense of Guenevere”
Gerard Manley Hopkins: “God’s Grandeur,” “The Windhover,” “Pied Beauty,” “Spring and Fall,” “Carrion Comfort,” “I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day”
Thomas Hardy: “Hap,” “Neutral Tones,” “The Darkling Thrush,” “The Ruined Maid,” “Channel Firing,” “The Convergence of the Twain,” “The Oxen,” “Afterwards”
A.E. Houseman: “To an Athlete Dying Young,” “When I Was One-and-Twenty”

Prose:

Thomas Carlyle: Characteristics, Sartor Resartus
John Stuart Mill: What is Poetry?, On Liberty, Autobiography
John Henry Newman: The Idea of a University, Apologia Pro Vita Sua
Charles Darwin: Origin of the Species
Matthew Arnold: “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” “Preface to the Poems,” Culture and Anarchy, “The Study of Poetry”
John Ruskin: Modern Painters, The Stones of Venice
William Pater: Studies in the History of the Renaissance
Sir Arthur Wing Pinero: The Second Mrs. Tanqueray
Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest
George Bernard Shaw: Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Arms and the Man, Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Pygmalion, Saint Joan

Novels:

Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Great Expectations
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair
Anthony Trollope: The Warden, Barchester Towers
George Eliot [Mary Anne Evans]: Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, Silas Marner
Thomas Hardy: Far From the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Ubervilles, Jude the Obscure
George Meredith: The Egoist
Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland

AMERICAN LITERATURE
American Literature to 1800

John Smith: General History of Virginia
William Bradford: Of Plymouth Plantation
John Winthrop: “Of Christian Charity”
Mary Rowlandson: A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
Samuel Sewall: The Diary of Samuel Sewall. “The Selling of Joseph” Cotton Mather: The Wonders of the Invisible World. Magnalia Christi Americana.
William Byrd III: The Secret Diary. The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina.
Jonathan Edwards: “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” “Personal Narrative”
Elizabeth Ashbridge: Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge. . . Written by Her Own Hand.
John Woolman: The Journal of John Woolman.
Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography
J. Hector St. John de Crevecouer: Letters From An American Farmer
Thomas Jefferson: “Declaration of Independence”
Thomas Paine: Common Sense
Olaudah Equiano: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equianao, or Gustavus Vassa, the African.
Samson Occom: A Short Narrative of My Life

Plays:

Royall Tyler: The Contrast
Hannah Webster Foster: The Coquette; or the History of Eliza Wharton
Susanna Haswell Rowson: Charlotte Temple
Charles Brockton Brown: Wieland
Ann Bradstreet; Michael Wigglesworth, “The Day of Doom”
Edward Taylor; Phillis Wheatley; Philip Freneau

Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Walt Whitman: “Song of Myself,” “Calamus,” “Sea-Drift,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Passage to India,” Drum-taps, “When Lilacs Last In The Door Yard Bloomed”
Emily Dickinson: Collected Poems
Novels, Sketches, Short Stories:
Washington Irving: The Sketch-Book of Geoffry Crayon, Gent.
James Fenimore Cooper: The Pioneers
Nathanial Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, short stories
Herman Melville: Moby-Dick, “Benito Cereno”
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn, Pudd’nhead Wilson
William Dean Howells: The Rise of Silas Lapham, A Modern Instance
Stephen Crane: Maggie: Girl of the Streets
Theodore Drieser: Sister Carrie
Frank Norris: McTeague
Stephan Crane: The Red Badge of Courage
Jack London: The Call of the Wild
Essayists and Autobiographers:
Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Nature,” “The American Scholar,” “Self-Reliance”
Henry David Thoreau: “Resistance to Civil Government,” Walden
Edgar Allen Poe: “The Philosophy of Composition”
Margaret Fuller: Woman in the Nineteenth Century
Richard Henry Adams: Two Years Before The Mast
Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Abraham Lincoln: “Gettysburg Address”
Louisa May Alcott: Hospital Sketches
Booker T. Washington: Up From Slavery
Henry Adams: The Education of Henry Adams
Thorsten Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class

Twentieth-Century American Literature

Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie
Henry James: The American, Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, short stories
Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth
Willa Cather: My Antonia
Sinclair Lewis: Main Street
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby, short stories
Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises, short stories
William Faulkner: The Sound and The Fury, short stories
Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God
John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
Jack Kerouac: On the Road
Joseph Heller: Catch-22
Saul Bellow: Mr. Sammler’s Planet
Tony Morrison: Beloved
Eugene O’Neill: Mourning Becomes Electra, Long Day’s Journey into Night
Clifford Odets: Awake and Sing
Thorton Wilder: Our Town
Lillian Hellman: The Little Foxes
Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman
Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire
Lorraine Hansberry: A Raisin in the Sun
Edward Albee: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Sam Shepard: True West
Marsha Norman: ‘night Mother
David Mamet: Glengarry Glen Ross
August Wilson: The Piano Lesson
Tony Kushner: Angels in America

Short Stories: Sherwood Anderson, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Bernard Malamud, John Cheever, Tillie Olsen, John Barth, Joyce Carol Oates, Donald Barthleme, Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Louise Erdrich

Poets: Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Olson, Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich

American Indian Literatures

Anthologies

Paula Gunn Allen: Spider Women’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women
John Bierhorst: The Red Swan: Myths and Tales of the American Indians
Joseph Bruchac: Songs From The Earth on Turtle’s Back: Contemporary Native American Poetry
Geary Hobson: The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of Contemporary Native American Literature
Karl Kroeber: Traditional American Indian Literatures
David Moses and Terry Goldie: An Anthology of Canadian Native Literatures In English
Bernd Peyer: The Elders Wrote: An Anthology of Early Prose by North American Indians
Frederick Turner III: The Portable North American Indian Reader
A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff: American Indian Literatures (Bibliographic Review)
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft: Algic Researches
Brian Swann: Coming to Light: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures of North America

Autobiography and Fiction

William Apes: A Son of The Forest
Black Elk: Black Elk Speaks
Black Hawk: Black Hawk: An Autobiography
Sam Blowsnake: The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian
Joseph Bruchac: Translator’s Son
George Copway: The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh
Lame Deer: Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions
Vine Deloria: Custer Died For Your Sins
Michael Dorris: Yellow Raft On Blue Water
Charles Eastman: From The Deep Woods To Civilization
Louise Erdrich: Tracks, Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, The Bingo Palace
Emily Johnson: The Moccasin Maker
Nancy Oestreich Lurie: Mountain Wolf Woman
William Least Heat Moon: Blue Highways
D’Arcy McNickle: Wind From Enemy Sky
N. Scott Momaday: The House Made of Dawn
Leslie Marmon Silko: Ceremony, Storyteller
Gerald Vizenor: Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives of Mixed Descent; The People Named the Chippewa
James Welch: Fool’s Crow
Zitkala-Sa: American Indian Stories
James Welch: Winter in the Blood, Fools Crow, The Indian Lawyer

Poetry:

Peter Blue Cloud: Elderberry Flute Song
Diane Glancy: Offering: Poetry and Prose
Joy Harjo: Secrets From the Center of the World
Linda Hogan: Seeing Through the Sun
Maurice Kenny: Between Two Rivers, Collected Poems
Duane Niatum: Ascending the Red Cedar Moon
Simon J. Ortiz: Going For Rain
Wendy Rose: Last Copper
Ray A. Youn