From the Book - First Scribner hardcover edition.
Introduction : Notes of a common reader
Agostino / Alberto Moravia
Animal farm : a fairy story / George Orwell
Another Brooklyn / Jacqueline Woodson
The awakening / Kate Chopin
The ballad of the sad café / Carson McCullers
Big boy leaves home / Richard Wright
Bonjour tristesse / Françoise Sagan
Candide, or optimism / Voltaire
Charlotte's web / E. B. White
A clockwork orange / Anthony Burgess
The country girls / Edna O'Brien
Death in Venice / Thomas Mann
Dept. of speculation / Jenny Offill
The dry heart / Natalia Ginzburg
Ethan Frome / Edith Wharton
Evil under the sun / Agatha Christie
The fifth child / Doris Lessing
The ghost writer / Philip Roth
The great Gatsby / F. Scott Fitzgerald
The hour of the star / Clarice Lispector
The house on Mango Street / Sandra Cisneros
If Beale Street could talk / James Baldwin
If this is a man [survival in Auschwitz] / Primo Levi
July's people / Nadine Gordimer
The lathe of heaven / Ursula K. Le Guin
Lord of the flies / William Golding
The lost daughter / Elena Ferrante
The lover / Marguerite Duras
Maus I : a survivor's tale : my father bleeds history / Art Spiegelman
Middle passage / Charles Johnson
Mrs. Dalloway / Virginia Woolf
The hours / Michael Cunningham
The nickel boys / Colson Whitehead
No one writes to the colonel / Gabriel García Marquez
The old man and the sea / Ernest Hemingway
On Chesil Beach / Ian McEwan
One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich / Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Oranges are not the only fruit / Jeanette Winterson
Pale horse, pale rider / Katherine Anne Porter
A pale view of hills / Kazuo Ishiguro
The perfect nanny / Leïla Slimani
A portrait of the artist as a young man / James Joyce
The postman always rings twice / James M. Cain
The prime of Miss Jean Brodie / Muriel Spark
The red badge of courage / Stephen Crane
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank redemption / Stephen King
The sailor who fell from grace with the sea / Yukio Mishima
The stranger / Albert Camus
Surfacing / Margaret Atwood
Their eyes were watching God / Zora Neale Hurston
Things fall apart / Chinua Achebe
Tokyo Ueno station / Yu Miri
Waiting for the barbarians / J. M. Coetzee
We have always lived in the castle / Shirley Jackson
Wilde Sargasso sea / Jean Rhys
Afterword : What's not here
My favorite fifteen great short books.