Introduction

Heroes and legends, 3000 BCE-1300 CE : Only the gods dwell forever in sunlight : The epic of Gilgamesh ; To nourish oneself on ancient virtue induces perseverance : Book of changes, attributed to King Wen of Zhou ; What is this crime I am planning, O Krishna? : Mahabharata, attributed to Vyasa ; Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles : Iliad, attributed to Homer ; How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there's no help in truth! : Oedipus the King, Sophocles ; The gates of hell are open night and day; smooth the descent, and easy is the way : Aeneid, Virgil ; Fate will unwind as it must : Beowulf ; So Scheherazade began ... : One thousand and one nights ; Since life is but a dream, why toil to on avail? : Quan Tangshi ; Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams : The tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu ; A man should suffer greatly for his Lord : The song of Roland ; Tandaradei, sweetly sang the nightingale : "Under the Linden tree," Walther von der Vogelweide ; He who dares not follow love's command errs greatly : Lancelot, the knight of the cart, Chrétien de Troyes ; Let another's wound be my warning : Njal's saga

Renaissance to Enlightenment, 1300-1800 : I found myself within a shadowed forest : The divine comedy, Dante Alighieri ; We three will swear brotherhood and unity of aims and sentiments : Romance of the three kingdoms, Luo Guanzhong ; Turn over the leef and chese another tale : The Canterbury tales, Geoffrey Chaucer ; Laughter's the property of man; live joyfully: Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais ; As it did to this flower, the doom of age will blight your beauty: Les Amours de Cassandre, Pierre de Ronsard ; He that loves pleasure must for pleasure all : Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe ; Every man is the child of his own deeds : Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes ; One man in his time plays many parts : First folio, William Shakespeare ; To esteem everything is to esteem nothing : The misanthrope, Molière ; But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near : Miscellaneous poems, Andrew Marvell ; Sadly, I part from you; like a clam torn from its shell, I go, and autumn too : The narrow road to the interior, Matsuo Bashō ; None will hinder and none be hindered on the journey to the mountain of death : The love suicides at Sonezaki, Chikamatsu Monzaemon ; I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family : Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe ; If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others? : Candide, Voltaire ; I have courage enough to walk through heel barefoot : The robbers, Friedrich Schiller ; There is nothing more difficult in love than expressing in writing what one does not feel : Les Liaisons dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

Romanticism and the rise of the novel, 1800-1855 : Poetry is the breath and the finer spirit of all knowledge : Lyrical ballads, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge ; Nothing is more wonderful, nothing more fantastic than real life : Nachtstücke, E.T.A. Hoffmann ; Man errs, till he has ceased to strive : Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ; Once upon a time ... : Children's and household tales, Brothers Grimm ; For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn? : Pride and prejudice, Jane Austen ; Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil : Frankenstein, Mary Shelley ; All for one and one for all : The three musketeers, Alexandre Dumas ; But happiness I never aimed for, it is a stranger to my soul: Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin ; Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes : Leaves of grass, Walt Whitman ; You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man : Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass ; I am no bird; and no net ensnares me : Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë ; I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul! : Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë ; There is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men : Moby-Dick, Herman Melville ; All partings foreshadow the great final one : Bleak house, Charles Dickens

Depicting real life. 1855-1900 : Boredom, quiet as the spider, was spinning its web in the shadowy places of her heart : Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert ; I too am a child of this land; I too grew up amid this scenery : The Guarani, José de Alencar ; The poet is a kinsman in the clouds : Les fleurs du mal, Charles Baudelaire ; Not being heard is no reason for silence : Les misérables, Victor Hugo ; Curiouser and curiouser! : Alice's adventures in wonderland / Lewis Carroll ; Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart : Crime and punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky ; To describe directly the life of humanity or even of a single nation, appears impossible : War and peace, Leo Tolstoy ; It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view : Middlemarch, George Elliot ; We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones : Twenty thousand leagues under the sea, Jules Verne ; In Sweden all we do is to celebrate jubilees : The red room, August Strindberg ; She is written is a foreign tongue : The portrait of a lady, Henry James ; Human beings can be awful cruel to one another : The adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain ; He simple wanted to go down the mine again, to suffer and to struggle : Germinal, Émile Zola ; The evening sun was now ugly to her, like a great inflamed would in the sky : The picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde ; There are things old and new which must not be contemplated by men's eyes : Dracula, Bram Stoker ; One of the dark places of the earth : Heart of darkness, Joseph Conrad.

Breaking with tradition. 1900-1945 : The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes : The hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle ; I am a cat; as yet I have no name; I've no idea where I was born : I am a cat, Natsume Sōseki ; Gregor Samsa found himself, in his be, transformed into a monstrous vermin : Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka ; Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori : Poems, Wilfred Owen ; Ragtime literature which flouts traditional rhythms : The waste land, T.S. Elliot ; The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit : Ulysses, James Joyce ; When I was young I, too, had many dreams : Call to arms, Lu Xun ; Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself : The prophet, Kahlil Gibran ; Criticism marks the origin of progress and enlightenment : The magic mountain, Thomas Mann ; Like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars : The great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald ; The old world must crumble; awake, wind of dawn! : Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Döblin ; Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board : Their eyes were watching God, Zora Neale Hurston ; Dead men are heavier than broken hearts : The big sleep, Raymond Chandler ; It is such a secret place, the land of tears : The little prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Postwar writing. 1945-1970 : Big brother is watching you : Nineteen eighty-four, George Orwell ; I'm seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I'm about thirteen : The catcher in the rye, J.D. Salinger ; Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland : Poppy and memory, Paul Celan ; I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me : Invisible man, Ralph Ellison ; Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins; my sin, my soul / Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov ; He leaves no stone unturned, and no maggot lonely : Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett ; It is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other : The temple of the Golden Pavilion, Yukio Mishima ; He was beat, the root, the soul of beatific : On the road, Jack Kerouac ; What is good among one people is an abomination with others : Things fall apart, Chinua Achebe ; Even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings : The tin drum, Günter Grass ; I think there's just one kind of folks: folks : To kill a mockingbird, Harper Lee ; Nothing is lost if one has the courage to proclaim that all is lost and we must begin anew : Hopscotch, Julio Cortá́zar ; He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt : Catch-22, Joseph Heller ; Everyday miracles and the living past : Death of a naturalist, Seamus Heaney ; There's got to be something wrong with us; to do what we did : In cold blood, Truman Capote ; Ending at every moment but never ending its ending : One hundred years of solitude : Gabriel García Márquez

Contemporary literature. 1970-present : Our history is an aggregate of last moments : Gravity's rainbow, Thomas Pynchon ; You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel : If on a winter's night a traveler, Italo Calvino ; To understand just one life you have to swallow the world : Midnight's children, Salman Rushdie ; Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another : Beloved, Toni Morrison ; Heaven and earth were in turmoil : Red Sorghum, Mo Yan ; You could not tell a story like this; a story like this you could only feel : Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey ; A historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment : Omeros, Derek Walcott ; I felt lethal, on the verge of frenzy : American psycho, Bret Easton Ellis ; Quitely they moved down the calm and sacred river : A suitable boy, Vikram Seth ; It's a very Greek idea, and a profound one; beauty is terror : The secret history, Donna Tartt ; What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world : The wind-up bird chronicle, Haruki Murakami ; Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are : Blindness, José Saramago ; English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa : Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee ; Every moment happens twice: in side and outside, and they are two different histories : White teeth, Zadie Smith ; The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one : The blind assassin, Margaret Atwood ; There was something his family wanted to forget : The corrections, Jonathan Franzen ; It all stems from the same nightmare, the one we created together : The guest, Hwang Sok-yong ; I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live : Extremely loud and incredibly close, Jonathan Safran Foer.