War and Peace
For more than a century, War and Peace has functioned as cultural shorthand for the impossibly long, the dutifully unread, the thing one always…
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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain set out to write a boy's adventure and ended up producing the book that most American novelists since have had to write their way…
Great Expectations
Pip's voice reaches us from the cold edge of a churchyard, a small boy frightened by a convict on the marshes, and somehow that opening…
The Mill on the Floss
Seven hundred pages of the most psychologically meticulous realism in Victorian fiction, and then a flood arrives and drowns the two characters…
Blood Meridian
Judge Holden carries a ledger into the desert and records birds, artifacts, and rock art before destroying the originals, so that nothing exists…
Pale Fire
Kinbote is the villain as reader: a man who steals a dead poet's manuscript and buries it under commentary, annexing another man's art to…
Lolita
Humbert Humbert is a scholar of French literature, and the novel's horror runs through his allusions - Poe's child bride, Merimee's…
Nineteen Eighty-Four
O'Brien is the rare villain who hands the hero a book - Goldstein's The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism - and the trap…
The Valley of Fear
Moriarty's menace is academic before it is criminal. He is the author of a treatise on the binomial theorem and The Dynamics of an Asteroid, a…
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The founding text of the corrupting-book tradition. Lord Henry gives Dorian a poisonous unnamed yellow novel - universally understood to be…
Reservoir 13
The same year's second indefensible omission. A girl disappears in the Peak District, and the novel then refuses every convention of the…
Solar Bones
A single unbroken sentence narrated by a dead engineer in County Mayo, returned to his kitchen table on All Souls' Day. It won the Goldsmiths…
