Literature · 10 modules · 33 steps
World Literature
Thirty-three books that between them cover four thousand years and every inhabited continent. World here is meant literally: the Mesopotamian, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Persian, Arab, African, Latin American and European traditions in historical sequence, with about half the shelf written by women and no module set aside for them. India has its own pathway and is deliberately not compressed into a paragraph here. Every step pairs the book with someone who can talk about it well. The promise is that you will finish able to say how a book is made and why it moved you.
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How to Read
Three short books about the equipment. What a novel is doing sentence by sentence, what prose does to thought, and what a critic is actually for.
How Fiction Works
James WoodWood takes the novel apart: free indirect style, detail, character, dialogue. Under two hundred pages and it changes how you read the next thing you pick up.
Wood in conversation about why fiction matters and what criticism is for.
Open companionPolitics and the English Language
George OrwellTwelve pages on how bad prose and bad thinking hold each other up. Read it early and it will follow you through every book on this list.
Open the core textThe essay's rules taken seriously, and tested on writing that breaks them.
Open companionHow to Read Literature
Terry EagletonEagleton does close reading in public: openings, character, narrative, value. Funny, and the best short demonstration of what critics actually do with a page.
Eagleton lecturing on how literary theory changed what reading a text even means.
Open companionAncient Epics and Drama
The oldest literature we have, and the first writer in the tradition whose personal voice survives. Read her in sequence rather than in a category.
The Epic of Gilgamesh
AnonymousFour thousand years old, recovered from broken tablets, and still the first book about mortality and friendship. Short enough to read in an evening.
Open the core textA professor on what the poem says about death, and why it opens the Western literary tradition.
Open companionThe Odyssey
HomerThe founding voyage narrative. Read Emily Wilson's translation if you can, because it is the first into English by a woman and it moves.
Open the core textThe structure of the poem and the trouble with calling Odysseus a hero.
Open companionIf Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
Sappho, translated by Anne CarsonWhat survives of the greatest lyric poet of antiquity, printed with the gaps left visible. Carson's decision to show the holes is what makes the book.
A full seminar on the fragments, the transmission, and what the missing text does to a reader.
Open companionThe Oresteia
AeschylusThree plays that take a family blood feud and end with the invention of a law court. The moment revenge becomes justice, staged.
Open the core textThe trilogy walked through as one argument about how societies stop killing each other.
Open companionEast Asia
Two women writing at the Japanese court around the year 1000, one of them producing what is arguably the first novel, and the greatest of the Chinese novels seven centuries later.
The Pillow Book
Sei ShonagonLists, complaints, weather, court gossip and sudden beauty, written by a lady-in-waiting with a wicked eye. There is nothing else like it in any tradition.
Open the core textWhy the women of the Heian court, writing in Japanese while men wrote in Chinese, produced the classics.
Open companionThe Tale of Genji
Murasaki ShikibuA thousand pages about a prince, his loves and the passing of time, written around 1010. Read the Royall Tyler or Dennis Washburn translation and take it slowly.
Open the core textWhat the novel is about, why it is called the first novel, and what to expect before you start.
Open companionDream of the Red Chamber
Cao XueqinThe great Chinese novel: a declining aristocratic house, hundreds of characters, and a love story that everyone in China knows the ending of. Also called The Story of the Stone.
An orientation to the cast, the structure and the two competing English translations.
Open companionThe Persian and Arab World
An epic longer than the Iliad and Odyssey combined, the most famous story collection ever assembled, and the lyric poet whose book still sits in Iranian houses beside the Quran.
Shahnameh
FerdowsiThe Persian book of kings: sixty thousand couplets, written over thirty years, and the reason Persian survived as a literary language. Dick Davis's translation is the way in.
What the poem contains and why it matters so much to Iranian identity.
Open companionOne Thousand and One Nights
AnonymousScheherazade telling stories to stay alive, and stories inside stories inside those. Read the Husain Haddawy translation, which goes back to the earliest Arabic manuscript.
Open the core textThe frame story taken seriously, and what centuries of European editing did to the collection.
Open companionFaces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz
Hafez, translated by Dick DavisHafez, Jahan Malek Khatun and Obayd-e Zakani in one volume: the mystical, the courtly and the obscene, all writing in the same city in the same century.
A poet and translator on what happens to Hafez in English and what keeps being lost.
Open companionMedieval Europe and Shakespeare
One poem that organises the entire afterlife, one that puts a cross-section of England on a road, and one play that takes everything away from a man to see what is left.
The Divine Comedy
Dante AlighieriHell, Purgatory and Paradise, with Dante's political enemies distributed among them. Get an edition with real notes, because half the pleasure is the grudges.
Open the core textPractical advice on getting through the Inferno, including which translation and how much apparatus you need.
Open companionThe Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey ChaucerPilgrims telling each other stories, from the knight down to the miller. Try a facing-page edition so you can hear the Middle English while understanding it.
Open the core textA university seminar on five of the tales and what Chaucer is doing with the tellers.
Open companionKing Lear
William ShakespeareThe bleakest of the tragedies and, most people think, the greatest. An old man gives away his power and finds out what he was.
Open the core textAn actor who has played the part explaining what is happening inside the man, line by line.
Open companionThe European Novel
The century in which the novel became the form that could hold a whole society. Four books, four countries, and four different theories of what a person is.
Pride and Prejudice
Jane AustenRead for the sentences rather than the plot you already know. Austen's free indirect style is the technique James Wood spends a chapter on.
Open the core textA talk from Austen's own house on how the characters are built and where the irony sits.
Open companionMiddlemarch
George EliotVirginia Woolf called it one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. A whole town, several failed ambitions, and more moral intelligence than seems possible.
Open the core textHow to approach a very long Victorian novel without stalling in the first hundred pages.
Open companionMadame Bovary
Gustave FlaubertThe novel Flaubert wrote to prove that style could carry a book about nothing much. He was prosecuted for it, and the prose is still startling.
Open the core textWhat Emma wants, why she cannot have it, and what Flaubert is doing to the reader who judges her.
Open companionThe Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor DostoevskyA murder, three brothers and the hardest argument against God ever put in a novel. Read the Grand Inquisitor chapter twice.
Open the core textThe novel's central quarrel about faith and suffering, laid out without spoiling the plot.
Open companionModernism
What happens when writers decide that the nineteenth-century novel was lying about how consciousness works. One day in London, one impossible morning, and one poem written where it could not be written down.
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia WoolfA single June day, moving in and out of heads without warning. The technical achievement is enormous and it never feels like one.
Open the core textHow the stream of consciousness actually works on the page, with passages read out.
Open companionThe Metamorphosis
Franz KafkaA man wakes as an insect and the story's real subject turns out to be his family's reaction. Fifty pages, and nobody has improved on it.
Open the core textWhat Kafka is doing beyond the strangeness, and why the word Kafkaesque is usually misused.
Open companionRequiem
Anna AkhmatovaWritten during the Terror while she queued outside a Leningrad prison, memorised by friends because writing it down was too dangerous. Twenty pages of the highest possible stakes.
Her life, the censorship, and how the poem survived without existing on paper.
Open companionAfrica and the Arab World
Three novels about what colonialism did to the inside of a person, written from Nigeria, Sudan and Egypt by writers who were not explaining themselves to Europe.
Things Fall Apart
Chinua AchebeAchebe wrote it because he had read too many novels in which Africans were scenery. Okonkwo is a difficult man in a complete society, and then the missionaries arrive.
Open the core textWhat Achebe was answering, and why the tragedy is not the one you expect.
Open companionSeason of Migration to the North
Tayeb SalihA Sudanese novel that answers Heart of Darkness by sending its man in the other direction. Short, violent, and one of the best Arabic novels of the century.
Open the core textA full lecture on the novel's structure and its argument with the English literary canon.
Open companionWoman at Point Zero
Nawal El SaadawiBased on a woman El Saadawi met in prison while working as a psychiatrist. A hundred pages, told in the condemned woman's own voice, and it does not let you look away.
El Saadawi herself on why she wrote fiction as well as medicine and polemic.
Open companionLatin America
The boom and what came before and after it. One founding myth, one book of ghosts that made the boom possible, and one writer who was doing something else entirely.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia MarquezSeven generations of Buendias in a town that keeps forgetting itself. Keep the family tree open and let the repetition of names do its work.
Open the core textThe structure of the novel and what magical realism is actually claiming about how history feels.
Open companionPedro Paramo
Juan RulfoA hundred and twenty pages, told by the dead, and the book Garcia Marquez said he could recite from memory. Read it twice, the second time knowing what is going on.
The chronology untangled, which is what most first-time readers need afterwards.
Open companionThe Hour of the Star
Clarice LispectorA narrator who cannot bear to write about a poor girl from the northeast, writing about her anyway. Lispector is doing something no one else does with a sentence.
Open the core textThe only television interview she gave, months before she died, subtitled in English.
Open companionThe Contemporary World
Four living traditions, four different relationships to history, and the point at which world literature stops being a historical survey and becomes the books being argued about now.
Beloved
Toni MorrisonSlavery told as a haunting because Morrison judged that no realist account could carry it. The most demanding book on this list and the one most worth the demand.
Open the core textMorrison in 1987 on the real case behind the novel and why she wrote it as a ghost story.
Open companionHalf of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieThe Biafran war through five people who did not choose it. Adichie was born after it ended and reconstructed it from her parents' generation.
Open the core textAdichie on the research, the family history and what fiction can do with a war that is still contested.
Open companionThe Vegetarian
Han KangA woman stops eating meat and her family treats it as an emergency. Three parts, three narrators, and none of them is her.
Open the core textA Korean reader on the context most English reviews of the novel missed.
Open companionThe Remains of the Day
Kazuo IshiguroA butler drives across England and slowly reveals the life he did not have. The most controlled unreliable narrator in modern fiction.
Open the core textIshiguro on how the novel withholds, and on what Stevens cannot say.
Open companion