We believe in the power of discovery. That's why we create books for everyone that explore ideas and nurture curiosity about the world we live in.From first words to the Big Bang, from the wonders of nature to city adventures, you will find expert knowledge, hours of fun and endless inspiration in the pages of our books.

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• 1: Introduction2: Heroes and legends 3000BCE – 1300CE1: Only the gods dwell forever in sunlight, The Epic of Gilgamesh2: To nourish oneself on ancient virtue induces perseverance, Book of Changes, attributed to King Wen of Zhou3: What is this crime I am planning, O Krishna? Mahabharata, attributed to Vyasa4: Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles, Iliad, attributed to Homer5: How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there’s no help in the truth! Oedipus the King, Sophocles6: The gates of hell are open night and day; smooth the descent, and easy is the way, Aeneid, Virgil7: Fate will unwind as it must, Beowulf8: So Scheherazade began… One Thousand and One Nights9: Since life is but a dream, why toil to no avail? Quan Tangshi10: Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams, The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu11: A man should suffer greatly for his Lord, The Song of Roland12: Tandaradei, sweetly sang the nightingale, “Under the Linden Tree”, Walther von der Vogelwelde13: He who dares not follow love’s command errs greatly, Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, Chretien de Troyes14: Let another’s wound be my warning, Njal’s Saga15: Further reading2: Renaissance to enlightenment 1300 - 18001: I found myself within a shadowed forest, The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri2: We three will swear brotherhood and unity of aims and sentiments, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Luo Guanzhong3: Turn over the leef and chese another tale, The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer4: Laughter’s the property of man. Live joyfully, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Francois Rabelais5: As it did to this flower, the doom of age will blight your beauty, Les Amours de Cassandre, Pierre de Ronsard6: He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall, Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe7: Every man is the child of his own deeds, Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes8: One man in his time plays many parts, First Folio, William Shakespeare9: To esteem everything is to esteem nothing, The Misanthrope, Moliere10: But at my back I always hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near, Miscellaneous Poems, Andrew Marvell11: Sadly, I part from you; like a clam torn from its shell, I go, and autumn too, The Narrow Road to the Interior, Matsuo Basho12: None will hinder and none be hindered on the journey to the mountain of death, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, Chikamatsu Monzaemon13: I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good family, Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe14: If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others? Candide, Voltaire15: I have courage enough to walk through hell barefoot, The Robbers, Friedrich Schiller16: There is nothing more difficult in love than expressing in writing what one does not feel, Les Liaisons dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos17: Further reading3: Romanticism and the rise of the novel 1800 - 18551: Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge, Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge2: Nothing is more wonderful, nothing more fantastic than real life, Nachtstucke, E T A Hoffmann3: Man errs, till he has ceased to strive, Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe4: Once upon a time… Children’s and Household Tales, Brothers Grimm5: For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn? Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen6: Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley7: All for one, one for all, The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas8: But happiness I never aimed for, it is a stranger to my soul, Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin9: Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes, Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman10: You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass11: I am no bird; and no net ensnares me, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte12: I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul! Wurthering Heights, Emily Bronte13: There is no folly of the beast of the Earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men, Moby-Dick, Herman Melville14: All partings foreshadow the great final one, Bleak House, Charles Dickens15: Further Reading4: Depicting real life 1855 – 19001: Boredom, quiet as the spider, was spinning its web in the shadowy places of her heart, Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert2: I too am a child of this land; I too grew up amid this scenery, The Guarani, Jose de Alencar3: The poet is a kinsman in the clouds, Les Fleurs du mal, Charles Baudelaire4: Not being heard is no reason for silence, Les Miserables, Victor Hugo5: Curiouser and curiouser! Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll6: Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart, Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky7: To describe directly the life of humanity or even of a single nation, appears impossible, War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy8: It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view, Middlemarch, George Eliot9: We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne10: In Sweden all we do is to celebrate jubilees, The Red Room, August Strindberg11: She is written in a foreign tongue, The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James12: Human beings can be awful cruel to one another, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain13: He simply wanted to go down the mine again, to suffer and to struggle, Germinal, Emile Zola14: The evening sun was now ugly to her, like a great inflamed wound in the sky, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy15: The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde16: There are things old and new which must not be contemplated by men’s eyes, Dracula, Bram Stoker17: One of the dark places of the earth, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad18: Further reading5: Breaking with tradition 1900 - 19451: The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle2: I am a cat. As yet I have no name. I’ve no idea where I was born, I am a Cat, Natsume Soseki3: Gregor Samsa found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin, Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka4: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, Poems, Wilfred Owen5: April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, The Waste Land, T S Eliot6: The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit, Ulysses, James Joyce7: When I was young I, too, had many dreams, Call to Arms, Lu Xun8: Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself, The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran9: Criticism marks the origin of progress and enlightenment, The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann10: Like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars, The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald11: The old world must crumble. Awake, wind of dawn! Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Doblin12: Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston13: Dead men are heavier than broken hearts, The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler14: It is such a secret place, the land of tears, The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery15: Further reading6: Post-war writing 1945 – 19701: Big Brother is watching you, Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell2: I’m seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I’m about thirteen, The Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger3: Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland, Poppy and Memory, Paul Celan4: I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me, Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison5: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov6: Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful! Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett7: It is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Yukio Mishima8: He was the beat – the root, the soul of beatific, On the Road, Jack Kerouac9: What is good among one people is an abomination with others, Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe10: Even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings, The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass11: I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks, To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee12: Nothing is lost if one has the courage to proclaim that all is lost and we must begin anew, Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar13: He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, Catch-22, Joseph Heller14: I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing, Death of a Naturalist, Seamus Heaney15: There’s got to be something wrong with us. To do what we did, In Cold Blood, Truman Capote16: Ending at every moment but never ending its ending, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez17: Further reading7: Contemporary literature 1970 – present1: Our history is an aggregate of last moments, Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon2: You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Italio Calvino3: To understand just one life you have to swallow the world, Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie4: Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another, Beloved, Toni Morrison5: Heaven and Earth were in turmoil, Red Sorghum, Mo Yan6: You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel, Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey7: Cherish our island for its green simplicities, Omeros, Derek Walcott8: I felt lethal, on the verge of frenzy, American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis9: Quietly they moved down the calm and sacred river, A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth10: It’s a very Greek idea, and a profound one. Beauty is terror, The Secret History, Donna Tartt11: What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami12: Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are, Blindness, Jose Saramago13: English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa, Disgrace, J M Coetzee14: Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories, White Teeth, Zadie Smith15: The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn’t one, The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood16: There was something his family wanted to forget, The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen17: It all stems from the same nightmare, the one we created together, The Guest, Hwang Sok-yong18: I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer19: Further reading8: Glossary9: Index10: Acknowledgments

We believe in the power of discovery. That's why we create books for everyone that explore ideas and nurture curiosity about the world we live in.From first words to the Big Bang, from the wonders of nature to city adventures, you will find expert knowledge, hours of fun and endless inspiration in the pages of our books.

Select Guide Rating

• 1: Introduction2: Heroes and legends 3000BCE – 1300CE1: Only the gods dwell forever in sunlight, The Epic of Gilgamesh2: To nourish oneself on ancient virtue induces perseverance, Book of Changes, attributed to King Wen of Zhou3: What is this crime I am planning, O Krishna? Mahabharata, attributed to Vyasa4: Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles, Iliad, attributed to Homer5: How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there’s no help in the truth! Oedipus the King, Sophocles6: The gates of hell are open night and day; smooth the descent, and easy is the way, Aeneid, Virgil7: Fate will unwind as it must, Beowulf8: So Scheherazade began… One Thousand and One Nights9: Since life is but a dream, why toil to no avail? Quan Tangshi10: Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams, The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu11: A man should suffer greatly for his Lord, The Song of Roland12: Tandaradei, sweetly sang the nightingale, “Under the Linden Tree”, Walther von der Vogelwelde13: He who dares not follow love’s command errs greatly, Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, Chretien de Troyes14: Let another’s wound be my warning, Njal’s Saga15: Further reading2: Renaissance to enlightenment 1300 - 18001: I found myself within a shadowed forest, The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri2: We three will swear brotherhood and unity of aims and sentiments, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Luo Guanzhong3: Turn over the leef and chese another tale, The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer4: Laughter’s the property of man. Live joyfully, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Francois Rabelais5: As it did to this flower, the doom of age will blight your beauty, Les Amours de Cassandre, Pierre de Ronsard6: He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall, Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe7: Every man is the child of his own deeds, Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes8: One man in his time plays many parts, First Folio, William Shakespeare9: To esteem everything is to esteem nothing, The Misanthrope, Moliere10: But at my back I always hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near, Miscellaneous Poems, Andrew Marvell11: Sadly, I part from you; like a clam torn from its shell, I go, and autumn too, The Narrow Road to the Interior, Matsuo Basho12: None will hinder and none be hindered on the journey to the mountain of death, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, Chikamatsu Monzaemon13: I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good family, Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe14: If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others? Candide, Voltaire15: I have courage enough to walk through hell barefoot, The Robbers, Friedrich Schiller16: There is nothing more difficult in love than expressing in writing what one does not feel, Les Liaisons dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos17: Further reading3: Romanticism and the rise of the novel 1800 - 18551: Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge, Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge2: Nothing is more wonderful, nothing more fantastic than real life, Nachtstucke, E T A Hoffmann3: Man errs, till he has ceased to strive, Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe4: Once upon a time… Children’s and Household Tales, Brothers Grimm5: For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn? Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen6: Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley7: All for one, one for all, The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas8: But happiness I never aimed for, it is a stranger to my soul, Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin9: Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes, Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman10: You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass11: I am no bird; and no net ensnares me, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte12: I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul! Wurthering Heights, Emily Bronte13: There is no folly of the beast of the Earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men, Moby-Dick, Herman Melville14: All partings foreshadow the great final one, Bleak House, Charles Dickens15: Further Reading4: Depicting real life 1855 – 19001: Boredom, quiet as the spider, was spinning its web in the shadowy places of her heart, Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert2: I too am a child of this land; I too grew up amid this scenery, The Guarani, Jose de Alencar3: The poet is a kinsman in the clouds, Les Fleurs du mal, Charles Baudelaire4: Not being heard is no reason for silence, Les Miserables, Victor Hugo5: Curiouser and curiouser! Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll6: Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart, Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky7: To describe directly the life of humanity or even of a single nation, appears impossible, War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy8: It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view, Middlemarch, George Eliot9: We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne10: In Sweden all we do is to celebrate jubilees, The Red Room, August Strindberg11: She is written in a foreign tongue, The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James12: Human beings can be awful cruel to one another, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain13: He simply wanted to go down the mine again, to suffer and to struggle, Germinal, Emile Zola14: The evening sun was now ugly to her, like a great inflamed wound in the sky, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy15: The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde16: There are things old and new which must not be contemplated by men’s eyes, Dracula, Bram Stoker17: One of the dark places of the earth, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad18: Further reading5: Breaking with tradition 1900 - 19451: The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle2: I am a cat. As yet I have no name. I’ve no idea where I was born, I am a Cat, Natsume Soseki3: Gregor Samsa found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin, Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka4: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, Poems, Wilfred Owen5: April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, The Waste Land, T S Eliot6: The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit, Ulysses, James Joyce7: When I was young I, too, had many dreams, Call to Arms, Lu Xun8: Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself, The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran9: Criticism marks the origin of progress and enlightenment, The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann10: Like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars, The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald11: The old world must crumble. Awake, wind of dawn! Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Doblin12: Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston13: Dead men are heavier than broken hearts, The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler14: It is such a secret place, the land of tears, The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery15: Further reading6: Post-war writing 1945 – 19701: Big Brother is watching you, Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell2: I’m seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I’m about thirteen, The Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger3: Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland, Poppy and Memory, Paul Celan4: I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me, Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison5: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov6: Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful! Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett7: It is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Yukio Mishima8: He was the beat – the root, the soul of beatific, On the Road, Jack Kerouac9: What is good among one people is an abomination with others, Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe10: Even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings, The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass11: I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks, To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee12: Nothing is lost if one has the courage to proclaim that all is lost and we must begin anew, Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar13: He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, Catch-22, Joseph Heller14: I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing, Death of a Naturalist, Seamus Heaney15: There’s got to be something wrong with us. To do what we did, In Cold Blood, Truman Capote16: Ending at every moment but never ending its ending, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez17: Further reading7: Contemporary literature 1970 – present1: Our history is an aggregate of last moments, Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon2: You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Italio Calvino3: To understand just one life you have to swallow the world, Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie4: Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another, Beloved, Toni Morrison5: Heaven and Earth were in turmoil, Red Sorghum, Mo Yan6: You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel, Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey7: Cherish our island for its green simplicities, Omeros, Derek Walcott8: I felt lethal, on the verge of frenzy, American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis9: Quietly they moved down the calm and sacred river, A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth10: It’s a very Greek idea, and a profound one. Beauty is terror, The Secret History, Donna Tartt11: What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami12: Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are, Blindness, Jose Saramago13: English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa, Disgrace, J M Coetzee14: Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories, White Teeth, Zadie Smith15: The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn’t one, The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood16: There was something his family wanted to forget, The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen17: It all stems from the same nightmare, the one we created together, The Guest, Hwang Sok-yong18: I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer19: Further reading8: Glossary9: Index10: Acknowledgments

We believe in the power of discovery. That's why we create books for everyone that explore ideas and nurture curiosity about the world we live in.From first words to the Big Bang, from the wonders of nature to city adventures, you will find expert knowledge, hours of fun and endless inspiration in the pages of our books.

Select Guide Rating

• 1: Introduction2: Heroes and legends 3000BCE – 1300CE1: Only the gods dwell forever in sunlight, The Epic of Gilgamesh2: To nourish oneself on ancient virtue induces perseverance, Book of Changes, attributed to King Wen of Zhou3: What is this crime I am planning, O Krishna? Mahabharata, attributed to Vyasa4: Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles, Iliad, attributed to Homer5: How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there’s no help in the truth! Oedipus the King, Sophocles6: The gates of hell are open night and day; smooth the descent, and easy is the way, Aeneid, Virgil7: Fate will unwind as it must, Beowulf8: So Scheherazade began… One Thousand and One Nights9: Since life is but a dream, why toil to no avail? Quan Tangshi10: Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams, The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu11: A man should suffer greatly for his Lord, The Song of Roland12: Tandaradei, sweetly sang the nightingale, “Under the Linden Tree”, Walther von der Vogelwelde13: He who dares not follow love’s command errs greatly, Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, Chretien de Troyes14: Let another’s wound be my warning, Njal’s Saga15: Further reading2: Renaissance to enlightenment 1300 - 18001: I found myself within a shadowed forest, The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri2: We three will swear brotherhood and unity of aims and sentiments, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Luo Guanzhong3: Turn over the leef and chese another tale, The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer4: Laughter’s the property of man. Live joyfully, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Francois Rabelais5: As it did to this flower, the doom of age will blight your beauty, Les Amours de Cassandre, Pierre de Ronsard6: He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall, Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe7: Every man is the child of his own deeds, Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes8: One man in his time plays many parts, First Folio, William Shakespeare9: To esteem everything is to esteem nothing, The Misanthrope, Moliere10: But at my back I always hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near, Miscellaneous Poems, Andrew Marvell11: Sadly, I part from you; like a clam torn from its shell, I go, and autumn too, The Narrow Road to the Interior, Matsuo Basho12: None will hinder and none be hindered on the journey to the mountain of death, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, Chikamatsu Monzaemon13: I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good family, Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe14: If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others? Candide, Voltaire15: I have courage enough to walk through hell barefoot, The Robbers, Friedrich Schiller16: There is nothing more difficult in love than expressing in writing what one does not feel, Les Liaisons dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos17: Further reading3: Romanticism and the rise of the novel 1800 - 18551: Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge, Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge2: Nothing is more wonderful, nothing more fantastic than real life, Nachtstucke, E T A Hoffmann3: Man errs, till he has ceased to strive, Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe4: Once upon a time… Children’s and Household Tales, Brothers Grimm5: For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn? Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen6: Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley7: All for one, one for all, The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas8: But happiness I never aimed for, it is a stranger to my soul, Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin9: Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes, Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman10: You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass11: I am no bird; and no net ensnares me, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte12: I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul! Wurthering Heights, Emily Bronte13: There is no folly of the beast of the Earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men, Moby-Dick, Herman Melville14: All partings foreshadow the great final one, Bleak House, Charles Dickens15: Further Reading4: Depicting real life 1855 – 19001: Boredom, quiet as the spider, was spinning its web in the shadowy places of her heart, Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert2: I too am a child of this land; I too grew up amid this scenery, The Guarani, Jose de Alencar3: The poet is a kinsman in the clouds, Les Fleurs du mal, Charles Baudelaire4: Not being heard is no reason for silence, Les Miserables, Victor Hugo5: Curiouser and curiouser! Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll6: Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart, Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky7: To describe directly the life of humanity or even of a single nation, appears impossible, War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy8: It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view, Middlemarch, George Eliot9: We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne10: In Sweden all we do is to celebrate jubilees, The Red Room, August Strindberg11: She is written in a foreign tongue, The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James12: Human beings can be awful cruel to one another, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain13: He simply wanted to go down the mine again, to suffer and to struggle, Germinal, Emile Zola14: The evening sun was now ugly to her, like a great inflamed wound in the sky, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy15: The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde16: There are things old and new which must not be contemplated by men’s eyes, Dracula, Bram Stoker17: One of the dark places of the earth, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad18: Further reading5: Breaking with tradition 1900 - 19451: The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle2: I am a cat. As yet I have no name. I’ve no idea where I was born, I am a Cat, Natsume Soseki3: Gregor Samsa found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin, Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka4: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, Poems, Wilfred Owen5: April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, The Waste Land, T S Eliot6: The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit, Ulysses, James Joyce7: When I was young I, too, had many dreams, Call to Arms, Lu Xun8: Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself, The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran9: Criticism marks the origin of progress and enlightenment, The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann10: Like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars, The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald11: The old world must crumble. Awake, wind of dawn! Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Doblin12: Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston13: Dead men are heavier than broken hearts, The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler14: It is such a secret place, the land of tears, The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery15: Further reading6: Post-war writing 1945 – 19701: Big Brother is watching you, Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell2: I’m seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I’m about thirteen, The Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger3: Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland, Poppy and Memory, Paul Celan4: I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me, Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison5: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov6: Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful! Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett7: It is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Yukio Mishima8: He was the beat – the root, the soul of beatific, On the Road, Jack Kerouac9: What is good among one people is an abomination with others, Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe10: Even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings, The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass11: I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks, To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee12: Nothing is lost if one has the courage to proclaim that all is lost and we must begin anew, Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar13: He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, Catch-22, Joseph Heller14: I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing, Death of a Naturalist, Seamus Heaney15: There’s got to be something wrong with us. To do what we did, In Cold Blood, Truman Capote16: Ending at every moment but never ending its ending, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez17: Further reading7: Contemporary literature 1970 – present1: Our history is an aggregate of last moments, Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon2: You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Italio Calvino3: To understand just one life you have to swallow the world, Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie4: Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another, Beloved, Toni Morrison5: Heaven and Earth were in turmoil, Red Sorghum, Mo Yan6: You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel, Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey7: Cherish our island for its green simplicities, Omeros, Derek Walcott8: I felt lethal, on the verge of frenzy, American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis9: Quietly they moved down the calm and sacred river, A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth10: It’s a very Greek idea, and a profound one. Beauty is terror, The Secret History, Donna Tartt11: What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami12: Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are, Blindness, Jose Saramago13: English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa, Disgrace, J M Coetzee14: Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories, White Teeth, Zadie Smith15: The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn’t one, The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood16: There was something his family wanted to forget, The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen17: It all stems from the same nightmare, the one we created together, The Guest, Hwang Sok-yong18: I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer19: Further reading8: Glossary9: Index10: Acknowledgments