Classics 1 min
Don Quixote (1605)
It was intended as a parody. Cervantes mocked the chivalric romances that Spain was reading, and invented an elderly hidalgo whose mind became clouded from this reading…
Classics
Classics 1 min
Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Austen wrote about what she knew: several families in a village, visits, balls, conversations over tea — and marriage as the only way available to a woman to decide her fate…
Classics 1 min
The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890)
Wilde's only novel — and, essentially, a terrifying tale about a contract that no one signed. A youth of rare beauty poses for an artist, jokingly wishes to grow old …
Classics 1 min
The Great Gatsby (1925)
A short novel in which almost nothing happens, yet it is remembered in its entirety. The narrator Nick Carraway rents a cottage next to a mansion where every Saturday thunder in…
Classics 1 min
The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
The main thing in this book is the voice. Teen Holden Caulfield, expelled from yet another school, wanders around New York for several days and recounts it in a way no one before age 19…
Classics 1 min
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
A novella proving that greatness can be written almost without words. Old Cuban fisherman Santiago hasn't caught a haul in a long time, goes out to sea alone — and hooks a fish that b…
Classics 1 min
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
Six generations of the Buendía family, the town of Macondo, which grew up in the middle of swamps, and time here behaves differently from ours: names repeat, destinies repeat, history and…
Classics 1 min
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
The narrator is an eight‑year‑old girl, and this decision defines the whole book. Scout lives in a sleepy 1930s Alabama town where adults are polite, neighbors are strange, and race…
Classics 1 min
Madame Bovary (1857)
Flaubert brought prose to a state where every word is in its place and cannot be replaced — he searched for the right phrase for weeks and rewrote it dozens of times. The plot, however…
