The Greatest Literary Fiction

It's maybe not the oldest story in the world, as The Epic of Gilgamesh is sometimes called. There had been other stories floating around the ancient world before the various versions of Gilgamesh, and who knows.... Critique • Quotes • Translations • Buy

Many notable literary figures have acclaimed the Iliad as a transporting work of art. I don't entirely get it. Even after having read several different translations of the epic poem. I suspect any.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Translations • Buy

Separately the plays in Aeschylus's house of Atreus trilogy are skimpy. Or they may seem so to the modern reader or theatre-goer. In each instalment the narrative turns on a single great dramatic incident. In Agamemnon.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It's the concluding instalment of Sophocles's so-called Theban trilogy about the tragedy of Oedipus and its ramifications. But Antigone was actually the first written and produced—more than a decade before the supposed.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

For a modern reader, the ancient drama of Oedipus Rex can be startlingly accessible. There is little of the struggle through the language that one experiences with even more recent plays, such as Shakespeare's.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

My first reaction to Ovid's Metamorphoses was mystification. This was one of the great books of Western culture. Ovid was said to be wickedly delightful to read compared to other ancients. And I was reading.... Critique • Quotes • Translations • Buy

It wasn't called Beowulf until 1805 and was not printed till 1815, more than a millennium after its appearance in manuscript. But to early Anglo-Saxons, the slaying of the monster Grendel and Grendel's.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Translations • At the movies • Buy

Sometimes The Tale of Genji is called the world's first novel, though it can feel more like the world's first soap opera. To begin with, it never ends. It's very, very long and the plot never comes to a resolution. Various.... Critique • Quotes • Translations • Buy

Possibly Shakespeare's best-known play. Everyone knows the story of star-crossed lovers who defied their families—the feuding Capulets and Montagues—and ended their lives tragically. Romeo and Juliet is a play with.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

I once read all Shakespeare's historical plays in chronological order. Not in the order he wrote them, but in the order of the historical events they supposedly relate. Like many before me, I discovered that (1) the historical.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

This play ought to be called Brutus, since the central theme concerns that character's decision to join an assassination conspiracy and the repercussions of his action. The titular figure, Julius Caesar, is dispensed with by the.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Hamlet is such a famous play—so much the great drama, the one that everyone in the world can quote at least six words from—that we usually can't see how strange it is that this should be so. Look at the.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Interesting thing about Othello is that it concerns a man of African heritage who is victimized in a white European society, and yet racism is never the central issue. Othello, the "Moor of Venice", is done in by Iago's.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

First, get refined ideas of "classic" out of your mind when you approach Don Quixote. For, as with many of the greatest works of prose literature, this is a lively, earthy story of flesh-and-blood people. Sure, the central.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

A straightforward play really, about a dysfunctional family. People thinks it's cosmic because of that annoying storm in the middle. That's not my opinion but the summary of Jonathan Miller, given in a television interview.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

A favourite play. Not exactly sure why. It doesn't present many of the elements generally admired in drama. No great tragedy. Not much scintillating wit. Little realism. A fantastic plot and several fantasy characters, which.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

There's so much to enjoy here, it's surprising this is not Molière's most popular play. After its initial run of twenty performances, it was hardly performed for several centuries until revived in the mid-1900s. And even now... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

Aphra Behn's most famous work might disappoint a reader who has heard it's a staunchly anti-slavery, anti-colonialist or feminist work. One may find Oroonoko is none of those things, at least by modern standards.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

The biggest mystery about Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe may be why it is so well known, so fondly remembered, so enshrined in our culture. As novels go, this is one dreadful piece of work. The writing is.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

It's often called the first modern novel. Or, worse, a post-modern novel written before the modern had been invented. Which ought to turn off anyone looking for a good read. So here's the story of Laurence Sterne's.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

The Vicar of Wakefield is supposed to be a satire, an ever gentle one in which the wide-eyed trust and peiety of the good pastor leave him at the mercy of larcenous rascals, until they have stripped him clean of everything.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Two things keep me from dismissing the drama She Stoops to Conquer as severely overrated. One: I don't recall seeing it performed. Live on stage it may be hilarious for all I know. And two: if it's overrated, it's been long.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Partway through The Sorrows of Young Werther you might wonder if this is actually a parody of romantic writing. Werther's attachment to his beloved Charlotte, Lotte for short, can come across as a ridiculously over-the-top.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

In the dichotomy suggested in the title, Jane Austen in her first published work comes down conclusively on the side of sense over sensibility. It's supposed to be a study of two marriageable sisters with the eldest.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Pride and Prejudice has one of the most skilful beginnings in literature. It opens of course with that famous "truth universally acknowledged" about single men and fortunes—and its equally delicious corollary.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

If you're a Jane Austen aficionado, particularly loving her headstrong heroines picking their plucky but principled way through the constricting marriage plots of the time, Mansfield Park may come as.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

If you're not a Jane Austen admirer, Emma could be her novel you most despise. But if you are a fan, Emma is likely the one you most think shows how adept a writer she was. Austen set out in the last of the works.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Oliver Twist may be the novel most publicly associated with Dickens, though it's not nearly his best nor his most admired. It may also be the first major novel to feature a child as the central character, which.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

Everyone knows the story of A Christmas Carol, if not from reading Charles Dickens, then from incessant showings of the many film versions, especially at the holiday season. And everyone thinks they know the moral.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

Charlotte Brontë's narrator and protagonist, like many a youthful Dickens protagonist, is the epitome of spunk. But Jane Eyre is also female, a young girl to begin with and a young woman for much of the novel.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

The first half of David Copperfield, concerning a young boy's struggles against repressive step-parents and draconian schoolmasters, is one of the greatest, most affecting novels ever written. The second half.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

Bleak House has its ardent admirers who declare it among Charles Dickens's masterpieces, as well as its detractors who call it one of his most grotesque potboilers. The author's strengths are here.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

You could make a case for every Charles Dickens novel being atypical in some way, but Little Dorrit really is a special case. It's been called his most political novel—the book George Bernard Shaw said converted him.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

It's the most political of Charles Dickens's novels, it's the least political—even anti-political—of Dickens's novels in some ways. But its positions on politics, revolution, mob rule, democracy and reformism has tended to.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

In the argument about whether The Woman in White or The Moonstone is Wilkie Collins's first great mystery novel—and thus arguably the first great mystery novel ever—a compromise is generally found.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

The greatest expectation to be quashed in Great Expectations may be our assumption that the innocent lad at the centre of the story will turn out to be another David Copperfield or Oliver.... Critique • Other views • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

After spending a good part of a summer living in and out of War and Peace, I was dismayed to learn Leo Tolstoy disdained the book in his latter years. The novel, whose title has become shorthand for monumentally.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

The Moonstone is sometimes presented as the first great mystery novel. It wasn't the first of its kind though. Wilkie Collins's own The Woman in White eight years earlier featured a mystery and a crime-solving detective.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

All fiction—all art or entertainment really—is either disturbing or comforting. Most works both disturb and comfort in varying measures. It's why we read: to experience ups and down of life outside our own. Some works.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

What's incredible about Middlemarch, George Eliot's masterwork, is how engrossing it is. I mean, this is a novel that deals with issues of art, education reform, scholarly research, medical science and provincial British politics.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

Far from the Madding Crowd was Hardy's first great novel and the one that made his reputation. It also might be the only real crowd-pleaser among his great works. For it not only has tragedy, intrigue, betrayal, obsession.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina are usually both among the books competing for the title of "greatest of all time". They often take turns at the top spot. A Tolstoy fan though may resent.... Critique • Quotes • Translations • At the movies • Buy

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of those modern classics you should re-read every ten years or so. Partly because, like most classics, it keeps giving, offering up more and different aspects each time. Read in youth.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

When Tess of the D'Urbervilles first came out in book form in late 1891, it was in equal parts hailed as Thomas Hardy's masterpiece and condemned as a moral outrage. The latter opinion was due mainly to the novel's.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Jude the Obscure is the novel whose reception, coming five years after the similar scandal of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, is famous for leading Hardy to quit writing novels. The book was widely denounced as "Jude the Obscene".... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Lord Jim is one of the Joseph Conrad novels that has me thinking at times "This may be the best writing I've ever read" and at other times "Come on, get on with it, would you?" Part of this ambivalence can be put down to... Critique • Quotes • Buy

If Rudyard Kipling were to publish his most acclaimed novel today, he would likely face more than the usual charges of colonialism and imperialism that have been levelled at him through much of the twentieth century.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

You think you know Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness even if you haven't read it in years, or ever. It's been widely taught in school, so its most famous lines ring with musty familiarity. Its plot has been adapted for.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It is difficult to separate The Forsyte Saga from the justly acclaimed films and television series based on it. The adaptations have enchanted everyone who followed them, most of whom have likely never read the books. But.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

At least one reprint edition of Under Western Eyes is decorated with nautical graphics, as someone must have thought befitting a Joseph Conrad yarn. Not realizing, of course, this is a Conrad story unlike almost any other.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Dubliners is a wonderful collection of stories you can go back to at different times in your life and appreciate on different levels each time. They were written and published before James Joyce got sidetracked by his.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

It doesn't sound promising. Like one of those dreary, early Canadian novels some of us had to read in school about settlers in rural North America. Immigrants set up house and farm in the new land, discover the country is harsh, the.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

I've read Ulysses five times. It's not that I love it so much. It may be because I've heard so often this is the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Or perhaps because it's so difficult, I figured I had to keep reading it until I got it.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

This novel hasn't a single character one is likely to care about. Normally this would be the death knell for a piece of fiction. But somehow To the Lighthouse won immediate acclaim upon publication in 1925 and has ever since.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Some writers are not really good novelists—don't seem to have the artistic talents to shape words, sentences and paragraphs into conventional novelistic form—and yet can recognize a great story and marshal the.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Anyone reading Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time may be surprised to find it is not entirely about racism. The trial of a black man, Tom Robinson, on a spurious charge of rape, for which the novel.... Critique • Quotes • Quotes • Buy

I can see how this novel's liberal use of crude, four-letter words—presented not with shocking effect but as mundane, even romantic, language—might have appealed in the striving-to-be-liberated 1960s and 1970s. But.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Sometimes it seems the English-speaking world spent the entire twentieth century trying to shake off the repressions of the Victorian era. The rebellious 1960s, for example, may have prided themselves on rejecting.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Write what you know, they tell beginning writers. And even veteran, successful authors tend to stick to this guideline. Which is why we get so many novels about people trying to write novels. It's also one of the reasons so.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

If you're well-versed in science fiction—or speculative fiction as it's often called—and you approach The Handmaid's Tale as an example of that genre, you may be disappointed. The world of Margaret.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

It may seem odd an acclaimed series of novels near the end of the twentieth century should feature characters from the period of the First World War. Or that issues from that war time should continue to resonate with.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Alias Grace may be Margaret Atwood's best novel. It may not be her most popular (guessing that's The Handmaid's Tale). Nor her most complex or elaborate (probably The Blind Assassin). Nor her most impressive.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy