Classics: 62 great books from the Iliad to Midnight’s Children
‘I think that if we lose a sense of the past, we’ve lost much more than we can ever calculate.’ Norman Mailer
‘As always with the greatest works, the novel is so many-sided that over time it mirrors back the shifting concerns of those who read it, and that is the definition of a classic.’ Carl F Hovde on Moby-Dick
Classics celebrates some of the western world’s greatest works of literature, from the founding epics of ancient Greece and Rome – Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid – to the first modern novel, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and the novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Classics includes chapters on Homer * Virgil * Cervantes * Stendhal * Austen * Balzac * Charlotte Bronte * Emily Bronte * George Eliot * Dickens * Hawthorne * Melville * Flaubert * Dostoyevsky * Tolstoy * Hardy * James * Kate Chopin * Conrad * Hamsun * Edith Wharton * Mann * Hesse * Forster * Woolf * Sigrid Undset * Joyce * Kafka * Lawrence * Katherine Mansfield * Jean Rhys * Mikhail Bulgakov * Djuna Barnes * Joseph Roth * Lampedusa * Fitzgerald * Faulkner * Nabokov * Hemingway * Patrick White * Camus * Elizabeth Smart * Ellison * McCullers * Salinger * Kerouac * Capote * Gunter Grass * Marquez * Christa Wolf * Marie Cardinal * Toni Morrison * Updike * Cormac McCarthy * DeLillo * Coetzee * Rushdie
