#
|
Author(Year)
|
Book Title
|
Language
|
1
|
Chinua Achebe(1958)
|
Things Fall Apart
|
English
|
2
|
Hans Christian Andersen(1835-37)
|
Fairy Tales
|
Danish
|
3
|
Dante Alighieri(1265–1321)
|
Divina Commedia
|
Italian
|
4
|
Anonymous(18th–17th century BCE)
|
Epic of Gilgamesh
|
Akkadian
|
5
|
Anonymous(6th – 4th century BCE)
|
Book of Job
|
Hebrew
|
6
|
Anonymous(700–1500)
|
One Thousand and One Nights
|
Arabic
|
7
|
Anonymous(13th century)
|
Njál's Saga
|
Old Norse
|
8
|
Jane Austen(1813)
|
Pride and Prejudice
|
English
|
9
|
Honoré de Balzac(1835)
|
Le Père Goriot
|
French
|
10*
|
Samuel Beckett(1951–53)
|
Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (a trilogy)
|
French, English
|
11
|
Giovanni Boccaccio(1349–53)
|
The Decameron
|
Italian
|
12
|
Jorge Luis Borges(1944–86)
|
Ficciones
|
Spanish
|
13
|
Emily Brontë(1847)
|
Wuthering Heights
|
English
|
14
|
Albert Camus(1942)
|
The Stranger
|
French
|
15
|
Paul Celan(1952)
|
Poems
|
German
|
16
|
Louis-Ferdinand Céline(1932)
|
Journey to the End of the Night
|
French
|
17
|
Miguel de Cervantes(1605, 1615)
|
Don Quixote
|
Spanish
|
18
|
Geoffrey Chaucer(14th century)
|
The Canterbury Tales
|
English
|
19
|
Anton Chekhov(1886)
|
Stories
|
Russian
|
20
|
Joseph Conrad(1904)
|
Nostromo
|
English
|
21
|
Charles Dickens(1861)
|
Great Expectations
|
English
|
22
|
Denis Diderot(1796)
|
Jacques the Fatalist
|
French
|
23
|
Alfred Döblin(1929)
|
Berlin Alexanderplatz
|
German
|
24
|
Fyodor Dostoevsky(1866)
|
Crime and Punishment
|
Russian
|
25
|
Fyodor Dostoevsky(1869)
|
The Idiot
|
Russian
|
26
|
Fyodor Dostoevsky(1872)
|
The Possessed
|
Russian
|
27
|
Fyodor Dostoevsky(1880)
|
The Brothers Karamazov
|
Russian
|
28
|
George Eliot(1781)
|
Middlemarch
|
English
|
29
|
Ralph Ellison(1952)
|
Invisible Man
|
English
|
30
|
Euripides(431 BCE)
|
Medea
|
Classical Greek
|
31
|
William Faulkner(1936)
|
Absalom, Absalom!
|
English
|
32
|
William Faulkner(1929)
|
The Sound and the Fury
|
English
|
33
|
Gustave Flaubert(1857)
|
Madame Bovary
|
French
|
34
|
Gustave Flaubert(1869)
|
Sentimental Education
|
French
|
35
|
Federico García Lorca(1928)
|
Gypsy Ballads
|
Spanish
|
36
|
Gabriel García Márquez(1967)
|
One Hundred Years of Solitude
|
Spanish
|
37
|
Gabriel García Márquez(1985)
|
Love in the Time of Cholera
|
Spanish
|
38
|
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe(1832)
|
Faust
|
German
|
39
|
Nikolai Gogol(1842)
|
Dead Souls
|
Russian
|
40
|
Günter Grass(1959)
|
The Tin Drum
|
German
|
41
|
João Guimarães Rosa(1956)
|
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
|
Portuguese
|
42
|
Knut Hamsun(1890)
|
Hunger
|
Norwegian
|
43
|
Ernest Hemingway(1952)
|
The Old Man and the Sea
|
English
|
44
|
Homer(850–750 BCE)
|
Iliad
|
Classical Greek
|
45
|
Homer(8th century BCE)
|
Odyssey
|
Classical Greek
|
46
|
Henrik Ibsen(1879)
|
A Doll's House
|
Norwegian
|
47
|
James Joyce(1922)
|
Ulysses
|
English
|
48
|
Franz Kafka(1924)
|
Stories
|
German
|
49
|
Franz Kafka(1925)
|
The Trial
|
German
|
50
|
Franz Kafka(1926)
|
The Castle
|
German
|
51
|
Kālidāsa(1st century BCE – 4th century CE)
|
Shakuntala
|
Sanskrit
|
52
|
Yasunari Kawabata(1954)
|
The Sound of the Mountain
|
Japanese
|
53
|
Nikos Kazantzakis(1946)
|
Zorba the Greek
|
Greek
|
54
|
D. H. Lawrence(1913)
|
Sons and Lovers
|
English
|
55
|
Halldór Laxness(1934–35)
|
Independent People
|
Icelandic
|
56
|
Giacomo Leopardi(1818)
|
Poems
|
Italian
|
57
|
Doris Lessing(1962)
|
The Golden Notebook
|
English
|
58
|
Astrid Lindgren(1945)
|
Pippi Longstocking
|
Swedish
|
59
|
Lu Xun(1918)
|
A Madman's Diary
|
Chinese
|
60
|
Naguib Mahfouz(1959)
|
Children of Gebelawi
|
Arabic
|
61
|
Thomas Mann(1901)
|
Buddenbrooks
|
German
|
62
|
Thomas Mann(1924)
|
The Magic Mountain
|
German
|
63
|
Herman Melville(1851)
|
Moby-Dick
|
English
|
64
|
Michel de Montaigne(1595)
|
Essays
|
French
|
65
|
Elsa Morante(1974)
|
History
|
Italian
|
66
|
Toni Morrison(1987)
|
Beloved
|
English
|
67
|
Murasaki Shikibu(11th century)
|
The Tale of Genji
|
Japanese
|
68
|
Robert Musil(1930–32)
|
The Man Without Qualities
|
German
|
69
|
Vladimir Nabokov(1955)
|
Lolita
|
English
|
70
|
George Orwell(1949)
|
Nineteen Eighty-Four
|
English
|
71
|
Ovid(1st century CE)
|
Metamorphoses
|
Classical Latin
|
72
|
Fernando Pessoa(1928)
|
The Book of Disquiet
|
Portuguese
|
73
|
Edgar Allan Poe(19th century)
|
Tales
|
English
|
74
|
Marcel Proust(1913–27)
|
In Search of Lost Time
|
French
|
75
|
François Rabelais(1532–34)
|
The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel
|
French
|
76
|
Juan Rulfo(1955)
|
Pedro Páramo
|
Spanish
|
77
|
Rumi(1258–73)
|
Masnavi
|
Persian
|
78
|
Salman Rushdie(1981)
|
Midnight's Children
|
English
|
79
|
Saadi(1257)
|
Bostan
|
Persian
|
80
|
Tayeb Salih(1966)
|
Season of Migration to the North
|
Arabic
|
81
|
José Saramago(1995)
|
Blindness
|
Portuguese
|
82
|
William Shakespeare(1603)
|
Hamlet
|
English
|
83
|
William Shakespeare(1608)
|
King Lear
|
English
|
84
|
William Shakespeare(1609)
|
Othello
|
English
|
85
|
Sophocles(430 BCE)
|
Oedipus the King
|
Classical Greek
|
86
|
Stendhal(1830)
|
The Red and the Black
|
French
|
87
|
Laurence Sterne(1760)
|
Tristram Shandy
|
English
|
88
|
Italo Svevo(1923)
|
Confessions of Zeno
|
Italian
|
89
|
Jonathan Swift(1726)
|
Gulliver's Travels
|
English
|
90
|
Leo Tolstoy(1865–69)
|
War and Peace
|
Russian
|
91
|
Leo Tolstoy(1877)
|
Anna Karenina
|
Russian
|
92
|
Leo Tolstoy(1886)
|
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
|
Russian
|
93
|
Mark Twain(1884)
|
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
|
English
|
94
|
Valmiki(3rd century BCE – 3rd century CE)
|
Ramayana
|
Sanskrit
|
95
|
Virgil(29–19 BCE)
|
Aeneid
|
Classical Latin
|
96
|
Vyasa(4th century BCE – 4th century CE)
|
Mahabharata
|
Sanskrit
|
97
|
Walt Whitman(1855)
|
Leaves of Grass
|
English
|
98
|
Virginia Woolf(1925)
|
Mrs Dalloway
|
English
|
99
|
Virginia Woolf(1927)
|
To the Lighthouse
|
English
|
100
|
Marguerite Yourcenar(1951)
|
Memoirs of Hadrian
|
French
|
If you can point out, I will add other type-ins suitably.
Thanks! I Added type-ins.
>>The World Library is a list of the 100 best books, as proposed by one hundred writers from fifty-four different countries, compiled and organized in 2002 by the Norwegian Book Club. This list endeavours to reflect world literature, with books from all countries, cultures, and time periods. Eleven of the books included on the list are written by women, eighty-five are written by men and four have an unknown author.
Each writer had to select his or her own list of ten books.
The books selected by this process and listed here are not ranked or categorized in any way; the organizers have stated that "they are all on an equal footing," with the exception of Don Quixote which was given the distinction "best literary work ever written." The following list organizes the works alphabetically by author.[1]
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Because of this select process, it is biased I guess...