aListofBooks

Ultimate Best Books

Genre: Literary Fiction (94 books)

The best classic books from the Literary Fiction genre.

The Joke

The Joke

Milan Kundera

4.0 (2)

So here I was, home again after all those years. Standing in the main square (which I had crossed countless times as a child, as a boy, as a young man), I felt no emotion whatsoever; all I could think was that the flat space, with the spire of the town hall (like a soldier in an ancient helmet) rising above the rooftops, looked like a huge parade ground and that the military past of the Moravian town, once a bastion against Magyar and Turk invaders, had engraved an irrevocable ugliness on its face.

#460
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790
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The Golden Bowl

The Golden Bowl

Henry James

3.0 (1)

The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him; he was one of the modern Romans who find by the Thames a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber.

#462
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785
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The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum

Heinrich Böll

3.0 (3)

Für den folgenden Bericht gibt es einige Neben- und drei Hauptquellen, die hier am Anfang einmal genannt, dann aber nicht mehr erwähnt werden.

#463
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778
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The Black Sheep

The Black Sheep

Honoré de Balzac

4.0 (2)

In the year 1792 the townsfolk of Issoudun were fortunate enough to have a doctor of the name of Rouget, who had the reputation of being an extremely wily man.

#468
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747
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JR

JR

William Gaddis

3.5 (2)

#470
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745
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Money

Money

Martin Amis

3.0 (4)

As my cab pulled of FDR Drive, somewhere in the early Hundreds, a low-slung Tomohawk full of black guys came sharking out of lane and slopped in fast right across our bows.

#471
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730
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The Ginger Man

The Ginger Man

J. P. Donleavy

5.0 (1)

#479
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706
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The Bostonians

The Bostonians

Henry James

4.0 (1)

"Olive will come down in about ten minutes; she told me to tell you that."

#481
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688
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The Sot-Weed Factor

The Sot-Weed Factor

John Barth

5.0 (2)

In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and the fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talanted, and yet more talanted than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with <i>Joves</i> and <i>Jupiters</i>, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similies stretched to the snapping point.

#493
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647
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Under the Net

Under the Net

Iris Murdoch

3.0 (2)

When I saw Finn waiting for me at the corner of the street I knew at once that something had gone wrong. Finn usually waits for me in bed, or leaning up against the side of the door with his eyes closed.

#495
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627
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