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 cafe / 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

Lucy / Jamaica Kincaid

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

Passing / Nella Larsen

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

Sula / Toni Morrison

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

Index of entries by date of publication

Index of entries by author's last name

Nobel prize in literature laureates in this book

More great short books

Acknowledgments

Notes about the books.