Book Lists, Reviews, and Guides to World Literature

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The Faustian Bargain: How Goethe’s Scholar Became the Myth of Modern Ambition

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On Easter night an old scholar rewrites the first line of the Gospel, and the devil steps out of the smoke to help him act on it. From Marlowe and Goethe to Moscow, Brazil, Prague and Beijing, the Faustian bargain has been retold wherever ambition meets its price.

Figures from different centuries gathered in a candlelit scholar’s study, from an old doctor signing a contract to a composer, an actor and a scientist, evoking Faust books around the world.

Autobiography of Red and The Centaur: Two Monsters Wounded by Herakles

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A red, winged boy writes his autobiography; a schoolteacher in Pennsylvania limps out of class with an arrow in his ankle. Anne Carson and John Updike each retold a monster wounded by Herakles, and read together their books reveal two ways of living with a wound.

A marble relief in modern dress showing Chiron as a 1940s schoolteacher, Herakles in a leather jacket, and the winged Geryon holding a camera, the characters of The Centaur and Autobiography of Red.
/ French Literature
Prix Goncourt Winners: The Complete List and the Books to Read in English.
On the walls of many French studies hangs a ten-euro cheque that was never cashed. The Prix Goncourt pays almost nothing and changes everything; here is every winner since 1903, and the ones to read in English.
/ Book Lists
Nobel Prize Winning Books: The Best Book by Each Laureate.
Every October the Nobel names a writer, and readers everywhere ask the same question: where should I begin? The best book with which to start each of the great laureates, from Thomas Mann to Anne Carson.
/ English-Language Literature
Anne Carson’s Books: A Guide to the 2026 Nobel Laureate.
Where Sappho’s papyrus tore, Anne Carson leaves a square bracket standing open on the page, and in that small refusal lies her whole art. A guide to the books of the 2026 Nobel laureate, and where to begin.
/ World Literature
Greek Mythology Books: The Retellings Worth Reading.
Cassandra waits outside the gate at Mycenae, two fishermen quarrel over Helen on a beach in St Lucia, and two prisoners rehearse Antigone in a cell. A guide to the Greek mythology books that retell the old stories, from every literature.
/ Latin American Writing
The Best Spanish-Language Novels: From Don Quixote to Today.
Spanish is one of the great literary languages, and it holds two capitals at once. It gave the world the first modern novel and, four centuries later, the most influential novel of the twentieth century. To read across it is to travel between two continents that share a tongue but not a history.

Kafkaesque Books: 23 Nightmarish Novels of Absurd Systems and Dread

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One writer’s name became an adjective because he mapped a nightmare the whole modern world would come to share. The novels gathered here are the great inheritors of that vision, from a fort awaiting an enemy that never comes to a ministry that harvests a nation’s dreams. Each shows the kafkaesque wearing a different face,…

A lone figure in a long coat walks a lamplit cobbled street in Kafka's Prague at night, toward a glowing baroque church tower looming at the end of the lane.

The Quarrel That Divided Existentialism: Camus, Sartre, and the Break That Ended a Friendship

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They were the twin faces of a philosophy, inseparable in the cafés of occupied Paris, until a single book about revolution and murder turned them into enemies who never spoke again. The quarrel between Camus and Sartre was no mere literary feud; it was the moment existentialism split in two over the oldest question of…

Recalling the quarrel between Camus and Sartre, a man rises to leave a 1950s Paris café terrace while his companion in round glasses stays seated with his pipe and newspaper.

Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre: Summary, Meaning, and the Weight of Existence

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A man reaches for a stone on the beach and cannot bring himself to touch it. That small failure is the beginning of Roquentin’s nausea, the dawning horror at the sheer, unjustified thereness of everything that exists. Sartre’s first novel turns a metaphysical shudder into a story, and it remains the truest door into existentialism…

Echoing the chestnut tree scene in Sartre's Nausea, a man in a long grey overcoat walks away through a gap in an old park railing, leaving behind a huge chestnut tree with gnarled, twisting roots.