If you want to earn some bragging rights pick up one of these challenging titles. From content to form all the books on this list have unique hurdles for readers to overcome.
The Castle
Franz Kafka
Left unfinished by Kafka in 1922 and not published until 1926, two years after his death, The Castle is the haunting tale of K.'s relentless, unavailing struggle with an inscrutable authority in order to gain access to the Castle. Scrupulously following the fluidity and breathlessness of the sparsely punctuated original manuscript, Mark Harman's new translation reveals levels of comedy, energy, and visual power previously unknown to English language readers.
Read More View in CatalogThe Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer
Unfinished at the time of his death, The Canterbury Tales is widely regarded as Chaucer's masterpiece and one of the greatest and most influential works in English literature. A group of pilgrims recount chivalric romances, bawdy tales, fables, legends, and more. Noble, coarse, jolly, and pious, their stories are translated into modern English verse.
Read More View in CatalogHeart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
Marlowe sails down the Congo in search of Kurtz, a company agent who has, according to rumors, become insane in the jungle isolation
View in CatalogTo the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
An English family's complex lives are followed and picked up again after a 10 year hiatus in order to explore the effects of time.
View in CatalogParadise Lost and Paradise Regained
John Milton
Presents the complete texts of the seventeenth-century English poet's two great epic poems about creation, fall, and redemption of humankind and the moral and spiritual dilemmas of God's judgment.
View in CatalogUlysses
James Joyce
Ulysses, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, has had a profound influence on modern fiction. In a series of episodes covering the course of a single day, 16 June 1904, the novel traces the movements of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus through the streets of Dublin. Each episode has its own literary style, and the epic journey of Odysseus is only one of many correspondencies that add layers of meaning to the text.Ulysses has been the subject of controversy since copies of the first English edition were burned by the New York Post Office Authorities. Today critical interest centres on the authority of the text, and this edition, complete with an invaluable Introduction, notes, and appendices, republishes for the first time, without interference, the original 1922 text.
Read More View in CatalogWar and Peace
graf Leo Tolstoy
Epic in scale, War and Peace delineates in graphic detail events leading up to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of five Russian aristocratic families.
View in CatalogThe Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion
From one of America's iconic writers, a portrait of a marriage and a life – in good times and bad – that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. A stunning book of electric honesty and passion.
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