Solitude & Exile

1

Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway

Jake Barnes, a World War I veteran rendered impotent by his wound, travels with a group of expatriates from Paris to Pamplona for the running of the bulls. Hemingway's debut novel defined the "Lost Generation" of American writers in Europe.

United States 1926

2

Hunger

Knut Hamsun

An unnamed, starving writer wanders the streets of Kristiania (Oslo), refusing charity and descending into hunger-induced hallucinations. Hamsun's debut novel is a pioneering work of psychological modernism.

Norway 1890

3

Steppenwolf

Hermann Hesse

Harry Haller, a middle-aged intellectual who sees himself as half-man and half-wolf, encounters the enigmatic Hermine in a city's bars and dance halls and is drawn into a magic theatre of the mind. Hesse's most controversial and celebrated novel.

Germany 1927

4

The Castle

Franz Kafka

A surveyor known only as K. arrives in a village to take up a post at the Castle but is never able to gain admittance or clarify the terms of his employment. Kafka's third and unfinished novel, published posthumously.

Czech Republic 1926

5

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Haruki Murakami

Toru Okada searches for his missing cat and wife and descends into a surreal underworld of memory and violence. One of Murakami's most ambitious novels, weaving together Japan's wartime past and a surreal domestic present.

Japan 1994

6

Of Mice and Men

John Steinbeck

Two itinerant ranch workers in California — the sharp George and the simple, powerful Lennie — share a dream of owning their own land. A spare, tragic novella about friendship, loneliness, and the crushing of dreams.

United States 1937

7

Dubliners

James Joyce

Fifteen short stories of Dublin life, from childhood to public life, each ending in an epiphany of paralysis or failure. The final story, "The Dead," is among the most celebrated short stories in the English language.

Ireland 1914

8

Nausea

Jean-Paul Sartre

Antoine Roquentin, alone in a French port city, records a growing sense of disgust at the brute existence of things — people, objects, his own hands. Sartre's first novel and his most complete expression of existentialist philosophy in fiction.

France 1938

9

The Stranger

Albert Camus

Meursault, a French Algerian, kills an Arab on a beach and faces trial — less for the murder than for his failure to weep at his mother's funeral. Camus's most celebrated novel, it introduced absurdism to a wide readership.

France 1942

10

Notes from Underground

Fyodor Dostoevsky

A bitter, isolated civil servant in St. Petersburg delivers a monologue attacking rational egoism and utopian idealism. Considered one of the first existentialist works in world literature.

Russia 1864