Eighteen short books for a long evening

18 books · original English texts · free to read online

The list

1. Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad, 1899. A hundred pages that changed how English fiction writes about certainty and distance.
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2. The Turn of the Screw — Henry James, 1898. The most perfectly ambiguous ghost story in English, and a masterclass in unreliable narration.
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3. Daisy Miller — Henry James, 1878. Short, sharp and still capable of starting an argument about who was actually at fault.
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4. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde — Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886. Short, controlled and much stranger than the phrase 'Jekyll and Hyde' now suggests.
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5. The Time Machine — H. G. Wells, 1895. Short enough for one sitting, and the origin of most time-travel fiction that followed.
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6. The Yellow Wallpaper — Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892. Twenty minutes long, and the most economical unreliable narrator in the language.
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7. The Awakening — Kate Chopin, 1899. The first great American novel about a woman's desire, and still one of the most radical.
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8. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets — Stephen Crane, 1893. The first American novel to treat the slums without sentiment, written by a twenty-one-year-old.
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9. The Castle of Otranto — Horace Walpole, 1764. The first Gothic novel, and the source of a whole genre's furniture.
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10. The Happy Prince and Other Tales — Oscar Wilde, 1888. Wilde's best prose, in five short tales that are sadder than they look.
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11. Riders to the Sea — John Millington Synge, 1904. A one-act tragedy with no wasted word, and the best introduction to Synge's ear for speech.
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12. The Well of the Saints — John Millington Synge, 1905. A comedy about the cost of a miracle, and Synge's most underrated play.
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13. Pygmalion — Bernard Shaw, 1913. A comedy that is also a blunt argument about accent, money and who gets to be believed.
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14. The Importance of Being Earnest — Oscar Wilde, 1895. The wittiest play in the language, and a complete demolition of Victorian earnestness.
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15. Hamlet — William Shakespeare, 1603. The most argued-about play in English, and still the best portrait of a mind talking itself out of action.
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16. Macbeth — William Shakespeare, 1623. Shakespeare's tightest tragedy, where the poetry deteriorates as the moral world collapses.
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17. Peter and Wendy — J. M. Barrie, 1911. A children's classic that is really about the fear of growing up, and much darker than its adaptations.
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18. The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925. The most perfectly constructed American novel of the twentieth century, and shorter than you remember.
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