MASTERPIECES OF

WORLD
LITERATURE
A MASTERPIECE REFERS TO A CREATION THAT
HAS BEEN GIVEN MUCH CRITICAL PRAISE,
ESPECIALLY ONE THAT IS CONSIDERED THE
GREATEST WORK OF A PERSON'S CAREER OR
TO A WORK OF OUTSTANDING CREATIVITY,
SKILL, OR WORKMANSHIP.
ON THE LITERATURE, IT IS THE HIGHEST
RECOGNITION THAT A LITERARY WORK CAN
RECEIVE.
100 PROMINENT AUTHORS FROM
MORE THAN 50 DIFFERENT
NATIONS :
"THE 100 BEST BOOKS IN THE HISTORY OF
LITERATURE"
This is the Library of World Literature. The authors are listed in alphabetical order.
 Chinua Achebe(b. 1930)
Things Fall Apart
Nigeria
 Hans Christian Andersen(1805-1875)
Fairy Tales and Stories
Eventyr og historier
Denmark
 Jane Austen(1775-1817)
Pride and Prejudice
England
 Honoré de Balzac(1799-1850)
Old Goriot
Le Père Goriot
France
 Samuel Beckett(1906-1989)
Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
Molloy, Malone meurt, L'innommable
Ireland
 Giovanni Boccaccio(1313-1375)
Decameron
Italy
 Jorge Luis Borges(1899-1986)
Collected Fictions
Ficciones
Argentina
 Emily Brontë(1818-1848)
Wuthering Heights
England
Albert Camus(1913-1960)
The Stranger
L'Etranger
France
Paul Celan(1920-1970)
Poems
Gedichte
Romania/France
Louis-Ferdinand Céline(1894-1961)
Journey to the End of the Night
Voyage au bout de la nuit
France
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616)
Don Quixote
El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha
Spain
Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400)
Canterbury Tales
England
 Joseph Conrad(1857-1924)
Nostromo
England
 Dante Alighieri(1265-1321)
The Divine Comedy
Divina Commedia
Italy
 Charles Dickens(1812-1870)
Great Expectations
England
 Denis Diderot(1713-1784)
Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
Jacques le fataliste et son maître
France
 Alfred Döblin(1878-1957)
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Germany
 Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky(1821-1881)
Crime and Punishment
Prestupleniye i nakazaniyne
The Idiot
Idiot
The Possesed
Besy
The Brothers Karamazov
Bratya Karamazovy
Russia
 George Eliot(1819-1880)
Middlemarch
England
 Ralph Ellison(1914-1994)
Invisible Man
USA
 Euripides
(ca. 480-406 BC)
Medea
Medeia
Greece
 William Faulkner(1897-1962)
Absalom, Absalom!
The Sound and the Fury
USA
 Gustave Flaubert(1821-1880)
Madame Bovary
A sentimental Education
L 'éducation sentimentale
France
 Federico García Lorca(1898-1936)
Gypsy Ballads
Romancero gitano
Spain
 Gabriel García Márquez (b. 1928)
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Cien anõs de soledad
Love in the Time of Cholera
El amor en los tiempos del cólera
Colombia
 Gilgamesh (ca. 1800 BC)
Mesopotamia
 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe(1749-1832)
Faust
Germany
 Nikolaj Gogol(1809-1852)
Dead Souls
Mertvye dushi
Russia
 Günter Grass(b. 1927)
The Tin Drum
Die Blechtrommel
Germany
 João Guimarães Rosa(1880-1967)
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
Grande sertão: Veredas
Brasil
 Knut Hamsun(1859-1952)
Hunger
Sult
Norway
 Ernest Hemingway(1899-1961)
The Old Man and the Sea
USA
 Homer(ca. 700 BC)
The Iliad
Ilias
The Odyssey
Odysseia
Greece
 Henrik Ibsen(1828-1906)
A Doll's House
Et dukkehjem
Norway
 The Book of Job(600-400 BC)
Ijob
Israel
 James Joyce(1882-1941)
Ulysses
Ireland
 Franz Kafka(1883-1924)
The Complete Stories
Die Verwandlung und andere Erzählungen
The Trial
Der Prozess
The Castle
Das Schloss
Bohemia
 Kalidasa(ca. 400)
The Recognition of Sakuntala
Abhijñana Sakuntala
India
 Yasunari Kawabata(1899-1972)
The Sound of the Mountain
Yama no oto
Japan
 Nikos Kazantzakis(1883-1957)
Zorba the Greek
Víos kai politía tou Aléxi Zormpá
Greece
 D.H. Lawrence(1885-1930)
Sons and Lovers
England
 Halldór K. Laxness(1902-1998)
Independent People
Sjálfstætt fólk
Iceland
 Giacomo Leopardi(1798-1837)
Complete Poems
Canti
Italy
 Doris Lessing(b. 1919)
The Golden Notebook
England
 Astrid Lindgren(1907-2002)
Pippi Longstocking
Pippi Långstrump
Sweden
 Lu Xun(1881-1936)
Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
K'uangjen jih -chi
China
 Mahabharata(ca. 500 BC)
India
 Naguib Mahfouz(b. 1911)
Children of Gebelawi
Awlad Haritna
Egypt
 Thomas Mann(1875-1955)
Buddenbrooks
The Magic Mountain
Der Zauberberg
Germany
 Herman Melville(1819-1891)
Moby Dick
USA
 Michel de Montaigne(1533-1592)
Essays
Les Essais
France
 Elsa Morante(1918-1985)
History
La Storia
Italy
 Toni Morrison(b. 1931)
Beloved
USA
 Shikibu Murasaki
The Tale of Genji
Genji monogatari
Japan
 Robert Musil(1880-1942)
The Man without Qualities
Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften
Austria
 Vladimir Nabokov(1899-1977)
Lolita
Russia/USA
 Njals saga(ca. 1300)
Brennu-Njáls saga
Iceland
 George Orwell(1903-1950)
1984
England
 Ovid(43 BC-17 e.Kr.)
Metamorfoses
Italy
 Fernando Pessoa(1888-1935)
The Book of Disquiet
Livro do desassossego
Portugal
 Edgar Allan Poe(1809-1849)
The Complete Tales
USA
 Marcel Proust(1871-1922)
Remembrance of Things Past
À la recherche du temps perdu
France
 François Rabelais(1495-1553)
Gargantua and Pantagruel
La Vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel
France
 Juan Rulfo(1918-1986)
Pedro Páramo
Mexico
 Jalal ad-din Rumi(1207-1273)
Mathnawi
Masnavi-ye Ma 'anavi
Iran
 Salman Rushdie(b. 1947)
Midnight's Children
India/England
 Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi(ca. 1200-1292)
The Orchard
Bustan
Iran
 Tayeb Salih(b. 1929)
Season of Migration to the North
Mawsim al-hijrah ilá al-Shamal
Sudan
 José Saramago(b. 1922)
Blindness
Ensaio sobre a Cegueira
Portugal
 William Shakespeare(1564-1616)
Hamlet
King Lear
Othello
England
 Sofokles(496-406 BC)
Oedipus the King
Oidipous tyrannos
Greece
 Stendhal(1783-1842)
The Red and the Black
Le Rouge et le Noir
France
 Laurence Sterne(1713-1768)
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Ireland
 Italo Svevo(1861-1928)
Confessions of Zeno
La coscienza di Zeno
 Jonathan Swift(1667-1745)
Gulliver's Travels
Ireland
 Lev Tolstoj(1828-1910)
War and Peace
Voina i mir
Anna Karenina
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
Smert Ivana Iljitsja
Russia
 Anton P. Tsjekhov(1860-1904)
Selected Stories
Izbrannye rasskazy
Russia
 Thousand and One Nights(700-1500)
Kitab Alf layla wa layla
India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt
 Mark Twain(1835-1910)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
USA
 Valmiki(ca. 300 BC)
Ramayana
India
 Vergil(70-19 BC)
The Aeneid
Aeneis
Italy
 Walt Whitman(1819-1892)
Leaves of Grass
USA
 Virginia Woolf(1882-1941)
Mrs. Dalloway
To the Lighthouse
England
 Marguerite Yourcenar(1903-1987)
Memoirs of Hadrian
Les memoires d 'Hadrien
France
The Top Ten Famous
Authors
1. William Shakespeare
 The Bard. This "Renaissance Man" was truly prolific (though if you believe some skeptics, he never existed at all, was the
pseudonym for someone else or was perhaps the moniker under which a group of authors published.)
2. George Orwell
 True, Orwell (whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair) isn't everyone's taste, especially those who do not share his views on
totalitarianism.
 But "Animal Farm" and "1984" are exemplary novels that truly get the reader to think more about politics, society and culture.
3. J.K. Rowling
 Rowling has a style of writing that has launched her into the annals of literary history. Her Harry Potter books have won awards not
only for their imagination but also for their strong prose.
4. Kurt Vonnegut
 Kurt Vonnegut, who passed away not long ago, penned both short stories and novels, inviting readers into his sci-fi realms with
modern-day undertones.
 "Slaughterhouse-Five" is one of his most internationally known books, though Vonnegut has many other works to offer the reader.
5. Virginia Woolf
 Virginia wolf had a unique passion for the written word and enjoyed literary success and accolades for her many works, including
"To the Lighthouse", "Mrs. Dalloway" and "A Room of One's Own."
 Some have heralded Woolf as a "feminist" before the invention of the word; certainly, her popularity among women and
academicians seemed to grow in direct correlation to the feminist movement of the late 1960s.
6. Ernest Hemingway
 Like so many of his contemporaries (including the aforementioned Woolf), Hemingway dealt daily with depression. Yet his
writings did not suffer as did his body and mind.
 Though he's been called somewhat of an acquired taste, if you're just beginning your Hemingway adventure, start with "The Sun
Also Rises" or "A Farewell to Arms. You may also be interested in his shorter pieces.
7. William Faulkner
 Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" and "As I Lay Dying" are two of the most read of his pieces. But please don't stop there.
 Your understanding of this Mississippi, United States born writer can only increase the more you get to know about him as well
as his southern-influenced literary style.
8. Ayn Rand
 Ayn Rand is proof that one person can make an enormous splash through the power of his or her written words. A Russian-born
writer who immigrated to America, Rand held back nothing and her writing clearly shows her passion.
9. James Joyce
 Plenty of students did, but most would do well to revisit Joyce's most renowned work. Time will not have changed the words,
but it makes all the difference in the interpretation.
10. J.D. Salinger
 "The Catcher in the Rye" is one of those novels that's unforgettable. For its time, it was a bit racy; however, chances are good
that unless you've been living under a rock, you'll find it tamer than those who read it in first-runs.
 Salinger manages to capture the essence of an era and weave it into a story that has stood the test of time.
7 ELEMENTS OF WORLD LITERATURE:
 Character. These are the beings who inhabit our stories. Sometimes they are
actual people but, just as often, they are animals, dragons, faeries (those
fantasy folks and their creative spellings!), or even inanimate objects (consider
the spoon, dish, and clock from Disney's Beauty and the Beast). Characters are
necessary because we need someone to invest in, to care about, and to root for
(or against). It doesn't matter where your story is set, what the point-of-view is,
or how exciting the plot--without characters, no one will care and the other six
elements quickly become irrelevant.
 Plot. Plot is what happens in the story, the series of events. This happened,
then this happened, then this happened. . .
 Setting. Setting is where your story takes place. But some settings are so powerful, they
almost seem like characters themselves Settings can be large and all-encompassing (A
hospital, a jungle, an inner city rec center, The Death Star) or more intimate (a kitchen, an
alley, a park bench). Setting also includes season and time of day (Summer, 5 p.m.),
climate (sultry, bucolic), and era (The 70s, post-Watergate, World War II, The Great
Depression). Instead of merely describing setting, though, smart writers impart setting
through the filter of their characters' feelings about that setting.
 Point-of-view. To figure out point-of-view, ask yourself "Whose story is it?" and then tell
the story from that character's perspective. Point-of-view includes first person ("I" and
"me"), second person ("you"--this is very rarely used in fiction) and third person ("He,"
"she," "Nick" and "Abby"). Third person is further split into omniscient (the reader
accesses all of the characters' heads and hearts, a conceit that's now considered somewhat
old-fashioned) and limited (where we see the entire story through a single character's
perspective).
 Style. Style is like a fingerprint, no two are alike. A function of diction,
syntax, and voice, style tends to emerge from how you write rather than from
a concerted effort to control it.
 Theme. Theme refers to "The Big Ideas" that bubble up from what you've
written. Is your story about Betrayal, Love, Friendship, Justice, Family,
Honor, Violence, Hypocrisy? You may have a theme in mind when you sit at
the keyboard but, like it or not, readers will carve their own idea of theme out
of what you write. And that's as it should be.
 Literary Devices. Like the hammer and nail mentioned earlier, literary
devices are the true tools of the writer. A partial list of literary devices include
simile, metaphor, personification, symbolism, alliteration, hyperbole,
figurative language, humor, onomatopoeia, and irony.
Common Features

Literature can be divided into three major types:

1. prose ("ordinary language")
2. poetry (aesthetically structured language)
3. drama (literature intended for performance;
drama may be composed in either prose or poetry).
STORY STRUCTURE

Exposition
The setting is fixed in a particular place and time, the mood is set, and characters
are introduced. A backstory may be alluded to. Exposition can be conveyed
through dialogues, flashbacks, characters' asides, background details, in-universe
media, or the narrator telling a back-story.
Rising action
An exciting force or inciting event begins immediately after the exposition
(introduction), building the rising action in one or several stages toward the point
of greatest interest. These events are generally the most important parts of the
story since the entire plot depends on them to set up the climax and ultimately the
satisfactory resolution of the story itself.
Climax
The climax is the turning point, which changes the protagonist's fate. If things were going well
for the protagonist, the plot will turn against them, often revealing the protagonist's hidden
weaknesses. If the story is a comedy, the opposite state of affairs will ensue, with things going
from bad to good for the protagonist, often requiring the protagonist to draw on hidden inner
strengths.
Falling action
During the falling action, the hostility of the counter-party beats upon the soul of the hero.
Freytag lays out two rules for this stage: the number of characters be limited as much as
possible, and the number of scenes through which the hero falls should be fewer than in the
rising movement. The falling action may contain a moment of final suspense: Although the
catastrophe must be foreshadowed so as not to appear as a non sequitur, there could be for the
doomed hero a prospect of relief, where the final outcome is in doubt.
Catastrophe
The catastrophe ("Katastrophe" in the original) is where the hero meets his logical destruction.
 More generally, the final result of a work's main plot has been known in English since 1705 as
the denouement (UK: /deɪˈnuːmɒ̃, dɪ-/, US: /ˌdeɪnuːˈmɒ̃/;[21]). It comprises events from the
end of the falling action to the actual ending scene of the drama or narrative. Conflicts are
resolved, creating normality for the characters and a sense of catharsis, or release of tension and
anxiety, for the reader. 
Etymologically, the French word dénouement (French: [denumɑ̃]) is derived from the
word dénouer, "to untie", from nodus, Latin for "knot." It is the unraveling or untying of the
complexities of a plot.
The comedy ends with a denouement (a conclusion), in which the protagonist is better off than
at the story's outset. The tragedy ends with a catastrophe, in which the protagonist is worse off
than at the beginning of the narrative.