Around the World in 80 Books

Are you interested in finding out the best books from around the world? Would you like to be guided in your quest by a longtime professor? I can't think of a better guide than David Damrosch and I can't think of a better book than Around the World in 80 Books.

Just for my own information, I'm including a list of the books here:

Chapter one. London : Inventing a City

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes
P. G. Wodehouse, Something Fresh
Arnold Bennet, Riceyman Steps

Chapter two. Paris : Writers' Paradise

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Marguerite Duras, The Lover
Julio Cortazar, The End of the Game
Georges Perec, W, or the Memory of Childhood

Chapter three. Krakow : After Auschwitz

Primo Levi, The Periodic Table
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories
Paul Celan, Poems
Czeslaw Milos, Selected and Last Poems, 1931-2004
Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

Chapter four. Venice-Florence : Invisible cities

Marco Polo, The Travels
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron
Donna Leon, By Its Cover
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Chapter five. Cairo-Istanbul-Muscat : Stories within stories

Love Songs of Ancient Egypt
The Thousand and One Nights
Naguib Mahfouz, Arabian Nights and Days
Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red
Jokha Alharthi, Celestial Bodies

Chapter six. The Congo-Nigeria : (Post)Colonial encounters

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Chinua Achelbe, Things Fall Apart
Wole Soyinka, Death and the King's Horseman
Georges Ngal, Giambarista Viko, or The Rape of African Discourse
Chimamanda Negozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

Chapter seven. Israel/Palestine : Strangers in a strange land

The Hebrew Bible
The New Testament
D. A. Mishani, The Missing File
Emile Habibi, The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist
Mahmoud Darwish, The Butterfly's Burden

Chapter eight. Tehran-Shiraz : A desertful of roses

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
Farid ud-Din Attar, The Confessions of the Birds
Faces of Love: Haze and the Poets of Shiraz
Ghalib, A Deceitful of Roses
Agha Shahid Ali, Call Me Ishmael Tonight

Chapter nine. Calcutta/Kolkata : Rewriting empire

Rudyard Kipling, Kim
Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World
Salman Rushdie, East, West
Jamyan Norbu, The Mandela of Sherlock Holmes
Jhampa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

Chapter ten. Shanghai-Beijing : Journeys to the west

Wu Cheng'en, Journey to the West
Lu Xun, The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Stories
Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City
Mo Yan, Life and Earth Are Wearing Me Out
Bei Dao, The Rose of Time

Chapter eleven. Tokyo-Kyoto : The west of the east

Higuchi Ichiyo, In the Shade of Spring Leaves — 231
Muraski Shikibu, The Tale of Genji — 235
Matsuo Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North — 240
Yukio Mishima, The Sea of Fertility — 245
James Merrill, “Prose of Departure” — 250

Chapter tweleve. Brazil-Columbia : Utopias, dystopias, heterotopias

Thomas More, Utopia
Voltaire, Candide, or Optimism
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Posthumours Memoirs of Brds Cubas
Clarice Lispector, Family Ties
Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude

Chapter thirteen. Mexico-Guatemala : The Pope's blowgun

Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs
Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Selected Works
Miguel Ángel Asturias, The President
Rosario Casstellanos, The Book of Lamentations

Chapter fourteen. The Antilles and beyond : Fragments of epic memory

Derek Walcott, Omeros — 309
James Joyce, Ulysses — 315
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea — 319
Margaret Atwood, The Penelopida — 324
Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands — 329
Chapter fifteen. Bar Harbor : the world on a desert island

Robert McCloskey, One Morning in Maine
Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs
Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
Hugh Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle
E. B. White, Stuart Little

Chapter sixteen. New York : Migrant metropolis

Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
Saul Steinberg, The Labyrinth
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Epilogue: the Eighty-first Book