EDUCATION

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

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) is one of the most remarkable literary achievements in the English language — a novel written by a nineteen-year-old woman that simultaneously founded the science fiction genre, reinvented the Gothic novel, and produced one of the most enduring and culturally resonant myths of the modern age. Born from a … Read more

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) is the only novel Oscar Wilde ever wrote, and it is one of those rare works that feels less like a book than like a perfectly executed act of provocation — gorgeous, dangerous, and morally serious beneath its glittering surface. First published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine and later revised … Read more

The War of the Worlds (1898) is one of the most influential works of science fiction ever written, a novel that essentially invented the alien invasion genre and whose shadow falls over virtually every extraterrestrial story told in the century and a quarter since its publication. Written by Herbert George Wells at the height of … Read more