Best Classics Books

Italo Calvino's dazzling experimental novel about reading itself. Addressed to 'you,' the Reader, it offers the openings of ten different novels — each broken off at a moment of suspense — woven into a playful, profound meditation on books, readers, and the act of reading.

Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death for 'gnostical turpitude' — the crime of being opaque in a world where everyone is transparent. A surreal novel of imprisonment and execution that is also a meditation on consciousness, totalitarianism, and the artist's isolation.

Robert Louis Stevenson's classic adventure. After being cheated and kidnapped by a treacherous uncle, young David Balfour is shipwrecked and thrown together with the dashing Jacobite rebel Alan Breck Stewart, embarking on a perilous flight across the Scottish Highlands.

Rudyard Kipling's masterpiece, set in British India. Kim, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier, grows up on the streets of Lahore and is drawn into both a Tibetan lama's spiritual quest and the espionage of the 'Great Game' between empires, in a rich, vivid portrait of a vast and varied land.

Constance Chatterley, married to a paralysed, emotionally remote aristocrat, begins an affair with Mellors, the estate's gamekeeper. Lawrence's most notorious novel was banned for obscenity in Britain until 1960, but beneath the explicit content is a serious argument about industrialism, class, and the body's need for genuine tenderness.

In the fictional South American republic of Costaguana, revolution tears the country apart while the silver mine that funds both sides becomes the novel's true subject — the material interest that corrupts every idealism. Conrad's most ambitious novel is the first great political novel of the twentieth century.

A linen weaver falsely accused of theft retreats into misanthropy and the hoarding of gold — until his gold is stolen and a golden-haired foundling child appears at his hearth, drawing him slowly back into human life.

Ursula K. Le Guin's collection of five stories and an essay deepening the world of Earthsea. Ranging across the archipelago's history — from the founding of the wizards' school on Roke to the eve of the events of The Other Wind — these tales enrich one of fantasy's most beloved creations.

K. arrives in a village dominated by an enormous castle and attempts to gain access to the authorities who have apparently summoned him as a land surveyor — an attempt that proves endlessly deferred, interrupted, and obscured.

Arthur C. Clarke's visionary novel set a billion years in the future. In the enclosed, eternal city of Diaspar, where its immortal inhabitants have not ventured outside for aeons, a restless young man named Alvin sets out to discover what lies beyond — and uncovers the lost truth of humanity's past.

Dodie Smith's beloved children's classic, the basis for the Disney films. When their fifteen puppies are stolen by the fiendish Cruella de Vil, the Dalmatians Pongo and Missis set out across the English countryside to rescue them — and the ninety-seven others marked for her fur coats.

Norman Mailer's monumental debut, drawn from his service in the Pacific. Following an army platoon during the invasion of a Japanese-held island, the novel renders the brutality, boredom, and power struggles of war while probing the authoritarian impulses lurking within the American character.

Nikolai Gogol's immortal short story, one of the most influential ever written. A poor, downtrodden St. Petersburg clerk scrapes together everything he has for a new overcoat — only to have it stolen, with devastating and uncanny consequences. A founding masterpiece of Russian fiction.

The mythological history of Middle-earth, from the creation of the world by the god-like Ainur through the ages of the Elves, the forging of the Silmarils, and the great wars of the First Age — assembled posthumously by Christopher Tolkien from his father's lifelong writings.

Anton Chekhov's poignant drama of wasted lives. On a country estate, Vanya and his niece Sonya have sacrificed everything to support a pompous retired professor — until his arrival, and that of his beautiful young wife, brings buried resentments, hopeless loves, and the ache of a misspent life to the surface.

Julia Martin, who has been receiving a small weekly allowance from a former lover, confronts him when it stops, returns to London to see her dying mother, and drifts. Rhys's second novel is the most Chekhovian of her work — nothing is resolved, nothing is dramatized, and the sense of life passing without the protagonist being able to grasp it is achieved entirely through prose of minimal, devastating precision.

James Salter's final novel, published when he was eighty-seven. Returning from the Pacific war, Philip Bowman builds a life in the world of postwar New York book publishing, moving through love affairs, marriage, betrayal, and friendship in a luminous meditation on a single American life.

Two copy-clerks who become friends retire to the countryside and systematically attempt to master every branch of human knowledge — agriculture, chemistry, medicine, archaeology, philosophy, religion — failing at each in turn. Flaubert's unfinished final novel, published posthumously, is his most radical satirical project.

Paul Atreides is gone. His twin children, Leto II and Ghanima, inherit both his bloodline and his terrifying prescience — while a crumbling empire and Alia's increasingly erratic regency threaten to consume everything Paul built and sacrificed.

Thomas Paine's incendiary 1776 pamphlet that helped spark the American Revolution. Written in plain, electrifying prose for ordinary readers, Common Sense made the radical case for American independence from Britain and for republican government, becoming one of the most influential political documents ever written.

Orphaned Rose Campbell comes to live with her seven aunts and eight boy cousins, and her unconventional guardian Uncle Alec sets about raising her according to his progressive ideas about health, fresh air, and genuine education.

Sophocles' searing tragedy of grief and revenge. Consumed by mourning for her murdered father Agamemnon and hatred for her mother Clytemnestra, Electra waits for her brother Orestes to return and exact vengeance — a relentless study of obsession, justice, and the cost of retribution.

Carol Milford, idealistic and educated, marries a doctor and moves to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, where she attempts to bring culture and reform to a town that does not want them. Lewis's breakthrough novel is the first great satire of American small-town life — the conformity, the anti-intellectualism, the material comfort as a substitute for meaning — and it made Lewis famous overnight.

Muriel Spark's mordant, brilliant comedy of old age. A group of elderly Londoners begins receiving anonymous phone calls from a voice that says only, 'Remember you must die.' Spark turns this eerie premise into a sharp, witty meditation on mortality, vanity, and the secrets of a lifetime.