Amwoga Khalwale

Ulysses (1922) is the most celebrated, most debated, most imitated, and most frequently abandoned novel in the English language — a work of such radical ambition and such staggering technical innovation that it did not merely change the course of literature but effectively divided it into before and after. Published by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and … Read more

Don Quixote (Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615) is, by the consensus of literary history, the first modern novel and one of the greatest works of fiction ever produced by the human imagination. Written by Miguel de Cervantes, a Spanish soldier and writer who composed much of it while imprisoned, it is a book of … Read more

The Brothers Karamazov (1880) is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final novel, completed just two months before his death, and it is widely regarded as the greatest novel ever written — a work of such philosophical depth, psychological intensity, and spiritual urgency that it stands not merely as the pinnacle of Russian literature but as one of the … Read more

They Both Die at the End (2017) is a contemporary young adult novel that announces its ending in its title and then dares you to keep reading anyway — and you do, compulsively, because Adam Silvera has constructed something genuinely moving and emotionally intelligent out of what could easily have been a gimmick. It is … Read more

The Great Gatsby (1925) is the quintessential American novel — a slim, luminous, and devastating book that captures, with the precision of a perfectly cut diamond, both the dazzling surface and the moral rot of the American Dream. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it in his late twenties, drawing on his own complicated relationship with wealth, … Read more

To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) is one of the most celebrated and morally urgent novels in American literature — a book that arrived at a precise historical moment, during the gathering storm of the Civil Rights Movement, and spoke to the conscience of a nation with a clarity and emotional force that no political speech … Read more

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is one of the most important novels ever written — not merely as a work of literature, though it is a powerful one, but as a political and philosophical document that has permanently shaped the way humanity thinks about power, surveillance, truth, and freedom. Written by Eric Arthur Blair, publishing under the … Read more

Anna Karenina (1878) is, by the judgment of many of the greatest writers and critics who have ever lived, the finest novel ever written. Flaubert read it in awe. Dostoevsky considered it an incomparable work of art. William Faulkner called it the best novel ever written. Nabokov taught it with reverence. These are not casual … Read more

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) is one of the greatest and most demanding novels in the American literary tradition — a book of staggering ambition, oceanic scope, and almost terrifying intellectual energy. Herman Melville was thirty-two years old when he published it, and it was received, at the time, with confusion and disappointment, selling poorly … Read more

Dracula (1897) is one of the most influential novels in the history of English literature — a book that did not merely tell a story but created a myth, one so powerful and so deeply embedded in the cultural imagination that the character of Count Dracula has become, alongside Frankenstein’s Creature and Sherlock Holmes, one … Read more