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How many of these top 100 books have you read?

Do you agree with the selection of  world literature titles that were consolidated from ten titles submitted by  100 selected international  authors?  The authors were requested to each name and submit  ten titles of the best and most central works that left a mark on the cultural history of the world and also influenced their writing. The 100 titles that garnered the most votes were placed in The Library of World Literature located in Norway.

So just who are these 100 authors from over 50 different nations?  

The Norwegian Book Clubs editors selected the  authors to participate in this election of titles and presided over the survey.  Here is a sampling of the congress:  Carlos Fuertes, John Irving, Salman Rushdie, John le Carré, Yvonne Vera, Astrid Lindgren, Alain Robbe-Grillet,  Orhan Pamuk, Fay Weldon, Wole Soyinka, Bei Dao, Nawal El Saadawi, Milan Kundera, Christa Wolf, V.S. Naipaul, Paul Auster, A.S. Byatt, Ben Okri along with other international authors.

Which title is listed as the best? 

The following list is officially named the Library of World Literature.  None of these books are ranked, but are listed alphabetically by author.  However, it is noted that Don Quixote by Miquel de Cervantes is listed as “the best literary work ever written”  with more than 50 percent more votes than any other single title.

The Library of World Literature Top 100 International Books

Chinua Achebe,  Things Fall Apart; Nigeria (b. 1930)

Hans Christian Andersen, Fairy Tales and Stories; Denmark (1805-1875)

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice; England (1775-1817)

Honoré de Balzac, Old Goriot; France (1799-1850)

Samuel Beckett, Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable;  Ireland (1906-1989)

Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron; Italy (1313-1375)

Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions; Argentina (1899-1986)

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights; England (1818-1848)

Albert Camus, The Stranger; France (1913-1960)

Paul Celan, Gedichte; Romania/France (1920-1970)

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night; France (1894-1961)

* Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote; Spain (1547-1616)

**Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales; England (1340-1400)  (Chanticleer’s favorite)

Joseph Conrad,  Nostromo;  Italy (1857-1924)

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy; Italy (1265-1321)

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; England (1812-1870)

Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master; France (1713-1784)

Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz; Germany (1878-1957)

Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov; Russian (1821-1881)

George Eliot, Middlemarch; England (1819-1880)

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; USA (1914-1994)

Euripides, Medea; Greece (ca. 480-406 BC)

William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom, The Sound and the Fury; USA (1897-1962)

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, A Sentimental Education;  France (1821-1880)

Federico García Lorca, Gypsy Ballads; Spain (1898-1936)

Gabriel García Márquez,  One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera; Colombia (b. 1928)

Gilgamesh;  Mesopotamia (ca. 1800 BC)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,  Faust; Germany(1749-1832)

Nikolaj Gogol,   Dead Souls; Russia (1809-1852)

Günter Grass, The Tin Drum; Germany (b. 1927)

João Guimarães Rosa, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands; Brasil (1880-1967)

Knut Hamsun, Hunger; Norway (1859-1952)

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea; USA (1899-1961)

Homer,  The Iliad, The Odyssey; Greece (ca. 700 BC)

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House; Norway (1828-1906)

The Book of Job; Israel (600-400 BC)

James Joyce, Ulysses; Ireland (1882-1941)

Franz Kafka,  The Complete Stories, The Trial, The Castle; Bohemia (1883-1924)

Kalidasa, The Recognition of Sakuntala; India (ca. 400)

Yasunari Kawabata,  The Sound of the Mountain; Japan (1899-1972)

Nikos Kazantzakis,  Zorba the Greek; Greece (1883-1957)

D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers; England (1885-1930)

Halldór K. Laxness, Independent People; Iceland (1902-1998)

Giacomo Leopardi, Complete Poems; Italy (1798-1837)

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook; England (b. 1919)

Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking; Sweden (1907-2002)

Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman and Other Stories; China (1881-1936)

Mahabharata; India (ca. 500 BC)

Naguib Mahfouz, Children of Gebelawi; Egypt (b. 1911)

Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks,  The Magic Mountain; Germany (1875-1955)

Herman Melville, Moby Dick; USA (1819-1891)

Michel de Montaigne, Essays; France (1533-1592)

Elsa Morante, History; Italy (1918-1985)

Toni Morrison, Beloved; USA  (b. 1931)

Shikibu Murasaki, The Tale of Genji; Japan

Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities; Austria (1880-1942)

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; Russia/USA (1899-1977)

Njals saga, Iceland (ca. 1300)

George Orwell, 1984; England (1903-1950)

Ovid, Metamorphoses; Italy (43 BC-17 e.Kr.)

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet; Portugal (1888-1935)

Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales; USA (1809-1849)

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past; France (1871-1922)

François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel; France (1495-1553)

Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo; Mexico (1918-1986)

Jalal ad-din Rumi, Mathnawi; Iran (1207-1273)

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children; India/England (b. 1947)

Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi, The Orchard; Iran (ca. 1200-1292)

Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North; Sudan (b. 1929)

José Saramago, Blindness; Portugal (b. 1922)

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello; England (1564-1616)

Sophocles, Oedipus the King; Greece (496-406 BC)

Stendhal, The Red and the Black; France (1783-1842)

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy; Ireland (1713-1768)

Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno; Italy (1861-1928)

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels; Ireland (1667-1745)

Lev Tolstoj, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories; Russia (1828-1910)

Anton P. Tsjekhov, Selected Stories; Russia (1828-1910)

Thousand and One Nights; India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt (700-1500)

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; USA (1835-1910)

Valmiki, Ramayana; India (ca. 300 BC)

Virgil, The Aeneid; Italy (70-19 BC)

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass; USA (1819-1892)

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse; England (1882-1941)

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian; France (1903-1987)

There you have it: The Library of World Literature official list of the Top 100 International Works of Literature, listed alphabetically by author.  No rankings except for the overwhelming majority of votes for Don Quixote.