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The Great Gatsby

Original English text

F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925

One summer on Long Island, a man of mysterious fortune throws open his house to the world, hoping one guest will wander in.

Crime and Punishment

Translated from Russian

Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866

A starving former student in Petersburg kills an old pawnbroker to prove a theory, and then has to live inside what he has done.

Siddhartha

Translated from German

Hermann Hesse, 1922

A young Brahmin leaves home to find the self, meets the Buddha without following him, and learns at last from a river.

Demian

Translated from German

Hermann Hesse, 1919

A boy caught in a bully’s power is set free by a strange older schoolmate, and begins to follow the mark of Cain toward himself.

Pride and Prejudice

Original English text

Jane Austen, 1813

Five unmarried sisters, one rich newcomer, and a proud gentleman nobody likes: Austen’s comedy of first impressions.

Frankenstein

Original English text

Mary Shelley, 1818 · 1831

A young scientist gives life to a creature he cannot bear to look at, and the creature learns what that means.

Beneath the Wheel

Translated from German

Hermann Hesse, 1906

A gifted boy from a Black Forest town is driven through the state examination and the seminary until he breaks.

The Sorrows of Young Werther

New English translation

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774 · 1787

A young man writes to his friend from a village in spring, meets a woman already promised to another, and cannot stop loving her.

Wuthering Heights

Original English text

Emily Brontë, 1847

Two children raised together in a stone farmhouse on the Yorkshire moors call each other their own souls, and their love wrecks two families across two generations.

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Original English text

Herman Melville, 1851

A whaling captain who lost his leg to a white whale takes his ship and crew to the far side of the world to hunt it down.

The Brothers Karamazov

New English translation

Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1880

A dissolute father, three different sons, one woman, three thousand rubles, and the question: if there is no God, is everything permitted?

The Odyssey

Translated from Greek

Homer, c. 8th century BC

Ten years after Troy, one man is still trying to get home, while strangers eat his house bare and court his wife.

The Metamorphosis

Translated from German

Franz Kafka, 1915

One morning a traveling salesman wakes to find himself transformed into a monstrous vermin, and his family has to live with it.

On Liberty

Original English text

John Stuart Mill, 1859

Mill’s short, fierce case for freedom of thought and the limits of society’s power over the individual.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Translated from German

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1883–1885

After ten years alone on a mountain, a prophet comes down to teach the Übermensch, and the crowd in the marketplace laughs at him.

Meditations

Translated from Greek

Marcus Aurelius, 170s

The private notebook of a Roman emperor on campaign: how to work, bear with others, and face death, written to no one but himself.

The Prince

Translated from Italian

Niccolò Machiavelli, 1532

Machiavelli’s short, unsentimental handbook on how power is won, kept, and lost, translated afresh from the Italian.

Dialogues and On Clemency

Translated from Latin

Seneca, 1st century AD

On anger, grief, leisure, and the shortness of life: a Stoic who advised an emperor, talking to friends in plain words.

The Art of Worldly Wisdom

Translated from Spanish

Baltasar Gracián, 1647

Three hundred compressed maxims on prudence, reputation, and dealing with people, from a Spanish Jesuit of the seventeenth century.

The Art of War

Translated from Classical Chinese

Sun Tzu, c. 5th century BC

Thirteen short chapters on when to fight, how to win, and why the best victory is the one that needs no battle.

Walden

Original English text

Henry David Thoreau, 1854

Two years in a cabin he built himself by a pond in Concord, and what Thoreau learned about how much a life really needs.

Tao Te Ching

New English translation

Laozi, c. 4th century BC

Eighty-one short chapters on the Way: water that overcomes stone, the sage who does nothing, and the name that cannot be named.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Original English text

Adam Smith, 1759

Before The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith explained how sympathy and an impartial spectator shape our sense of right and wrong.

The Wealth of Nations

Original English text

Adam Smith, 1776

Adam Smith’s inquiry into what makes nations rich: the division of labour, markets, capital, trade, and the duties of the state.

History of the Peloponnesian War

Translated from Greek

Thucydides, 5th century BC

An Athenian general who lost a battle and was exiled wrote the history of the war that broke his city, and wrote it for all time.

On the Origin of Species

Original English text

Charles Darwin, 1859

The book of 1859 in which Darwin set out, as one long argument, how species arise by natural selection.