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An AI Update To Bloom's Western Canon

I used Claude Fable 5 to update Harold Bloom's list of the world's greatest books

In 1994 Harold Bloom published "The Western Canon", with an appendix at the back listing his selection of the canonical books of the western world. Over 30 years have passed since then and Bloom is no longer with us, so here is my attempt to create an updated and expanded version of the list, including both newer works but also books that Bloom might have overlooked. Bloom excluded Chinese literature as "a sphere apart... rarely conveyed adequately in the translations available to us," and on the same grounds of translation left out the Japanese, Korean, Persian, and most of the Indian and Arabic traditions. The translations are now adequate, and those literatures are placed in the age to which they belong. A new final section, "The Global Age," extends the prophecy of his fourth age to the work of roughly the last three decades. Because Bloom's own reading effectively closed a few years before publication, the additions allow buffer room: strong work of the early 1990s is treated as eligible, not assumed excluded. Datings and selections draw on the official Nobel Prize register (1994-2025), the New York Times "100 Best Books of the 21st Century" (2024), World Literature Today, Britannica and standard scholarly surveys of the several traditions, and the major international prize records.

Research for additions to the list was performed by Claude Fable 5.

Table of Contents

A. The Theocratic Age

"Since the literary canon is at issue here, I include only those religious, philosophical, historical, and scientific writings that are themselves of great aesthetic interest. I would think that, of all the books that are in this first list, once the reader is conversant with the Bible, Homer, Plato, the Athenian dramatists, and Virgil, the crucial work is the Koran...

"I have included some Sanskrit works, scriptures and fundamental literary texts, because of their influence on the Western canon. The immense wealth of ancient Chinese literature is mostly a sphere apart from Western literary tradition and is rarely conveyed adequately in the translations available to us." (Bloom, p. 531)

The Ancient Near East

  • Gilgamesh
  • Egyptian Book of the Dead
  • Holy Bible (King James Version)
  • The Apocrypha
  • Sayings of the Fathers (Pirke Aboth)

Ancient India (Sanskrit)

  • Mahabharata
  • Bhagavad-Gita
  • Ramayana

The Ancient Greeks

  • Homer
    • Iliad
    • Odyssey
  • Hesiod
    • Works and Days
    • Theogony
  • Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman
  • Pindar
    • Odes
  • Aeschylus
    • Oresteia
    • Seven Against Thebes
    • Prometheus Bound
    • Persians
    • Suppliant Women
  • Sophocles
    • Oedipus the King
    • Oedipus at Colonus
    • Antigone
    • Electra
    • Ajax
    • Women of Trachis
    • Philoctetes
  • Euripides
    • Cyclops
    • Heracles
    • Alcestis
    • Hecuba
    • Bacchae
    • Orestes
    • Andromache
    • Medea
    • Ion
    • Hippolytus
    • Helen
    • Iphigenia at Aulis
  • Aristophanes
    • The Birds
    • The Clouds
    • The Frogs
    • Lysistrata
    • The Knights
    • The Wasps
    • The Assemblywomen
  • Herodotus
    • The Histories
  • Thucydides
    • The Peloponnesian Wars
  • The Pre-Socratics (Heraclitus, Empedocles)
  • Plato
    • Dialogues
  • Aristotle
    • Poetics
    • Ethics

Hellenistic Greeks

  • Menander
    • The Girl from Samos "Longinus"
    • On the Sublime
  • Callimachus
    • Hymns and Epigrams
  • Theocritus
    • Idylls
  • Plutarch
    • Lives
    • Moralia "Aesop"
    • Fables
  • Lucian
    • Satires

The Romans

  • Plautus
    • Pseudolus
    • The Braggart Soldier
    • The Rope
    • Amphitryon
  • Terence
    • The Girl from Andros
    • The Eunuch
    • The Mother-in-Law
  • Lucretius
    • The Way Things Are
  • Cicero
    • On the Gods
  • Horace
    • Odes
    • Epistles
    • Satires
  • Persius
    • Satires
  • Catullus
    • Attis and Other Poems
  • Virgil
    • Aeneid
    • Eclogues
    • Georgics
  • Lucan
    • Pharsalia
  • Ovid
    • Metamorphoses
    • The Art of Love
    • Heroides
  • Juvenal
    • Satires
  • Martial
    • Epigrams
  • Seneca
    • Tragedies, particularly Medea and Hercules Furens
  • Petronius
    • Satyricon
  • Apuleius
    • The Golden Ass
  • The Middle Ages: Latin, Arabic, and the Vernacular Before Dante
  • Saint Augustine
    • City of God
    • Confessions
  • The Koran (Al-Qur'an)
  • The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night
  • The Poetic Edda
  • Snorri Sturluson
    • The Prose Edda
  • The Nibelungen Lied
  • Wolfram von Eschenbach
    • Parzival
  • Chrétien de Troyes
    • Yvain: The Knight of the Lion
  • Beowulf
  • The Poem of the Cid
  • Christine de Pisan
    • The Book of the City of Ladies
  • Diego de San Pedro
    • Prison of Love

Additions beyond Bloom's survey (editorial, 2026)

Ancient China

  • The Book of Songs (Shijing)
  • The Songs of Chu (Chuci)
    • Qu Yuan, Encountering Sorrow (Li Sao)
  • Confucius
    • The Analects
  • Laozi
    • Tao Te Ching (Daodejing)
  • Zhuangzi
    • The Inner Chapters
  • Mencius
    • The Mencius
  • The Book of Changes (I Ching)
  • Sunzi
    • The Art of War
  • Sima Qian
    • Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji)
  • Classical Chinese Poetry (Tang and Song)
  • Tao Qian (Tao Yuanming)
    • Poems
  • Wang Wei
    • Poems
  • Li Bai (Li Po)
    • Poems
  • Du Fu (Tu Fu)
    • Poems
  • Bai Juyi (Po Chü-i)
    • Poems, including Song of Everlasting Sorrow
  • Han Yu
    • Essays and Poems
  • Li Shangyin
    • Poems
  • Su Shi (Su Tungpo)
    • Poems and Prose
  • Li Qingzhao
    • Ci Lyrics
  • The Three Hundred Tang Poems (anthology)

Classical Japan

  • The Kojiki
  • The Man'yoshu (anthology)
  • Ki no Tsurayuki
    • The Tosa Diary
    • Kokin Wakashu (anthology)
  • The Tales of Ise
  • Murasaki Shikibu
    • The Tale of Genji
  • Sei Shonagon
    • The Pillow Book
  • Saigyo
    • Poems
  • Kamo no Chomei
    • An Account of My Hut (Hojoki)
  • The Tale of the Heike
  • Yoshida Kenko
    • Essays in Idleness (Tsurezuregusa)

Classical Korea

  • Iryeon
    • Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms (Samguk Yusa)

Classical Persian (Iran)

  • Ferdowsi
    • Shahnameh (The Book of Kings)
  • Omar Khayyam
    • The Rubaiyat
  • Nezami Ganjavi
    • The Khamsa (Layla and Majnun; Khosrow and Shirin; The Seven Beauties)
  • Farid ud-Din Attar
    • The Conference of the Birds
  • Jalal al-Din Rumi
    • The Masnavi
    • The Divan of Shams of Tabriz
  • Saadi of Shiraz
    • The Gulistan (The Rose Garden)
    • The Bustan (The Orchard)

Ancient and Classical India (Sanskrit and Tamil)

  • The Principal Upanishads
  • The Panchatantra
  • Kalidasa
    • Shakuntala
    • Meghaduta (The Cloud Messenger)
    • Kumarasambhava
  • Sudraka
    • The Little Clay Cart
  • Bhartrhari
    • The Three Centuries (Shatakatraya)
  • Tiruvalluvar
    • The Tirukkural
  • The Sangam Anthologies (Tamil)
  • Jayadeva
    • Gita Govinda

Classical Arabic

  • The Hanged Odes (Mu'allaqat)
  • Abu Nuwas
    • Poems
  • Al-Mutanabbi
    • Poems
  • Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri
    • The Epistle of Forgiveness
    • Luzumiyat
  • Ibn Hazm
    • The Ring of the Dove
  • Ibn Tufayl
    • Hayy ibn Yaqzan
  • Ibn Arabi
    • The Translator of Desires (Tarjuman al-Ashwaq)

Turkey and Central Asia

  • Yunus Emre
    • Poems
  • The Epic of King Gesar (Tibet and Mongolia)

The European Middle Ages (omissions)

  • Boethius
    • The Consolation of Philosophy
  • The Mabinogion
  • The Saga of the Volsungs
  • Njal's Saga (The Story of Burnt Njal)
  • Egil's Saga
  • The Icelandic Family Sagas (Laxdaela Saga; Grettir's Saga)
  • Marie de France
    • Lais
  • The Troubadours (Arnaut Daniel, Bertran de Born, Bernart de Ventadorn)
  • Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun
    • The Romance of the Rose

B. The Aristocratic Age

"It is a span of five hundred years from Dante's Divine Comedy through Goethe's Faust, Part Two 1321-1832, an era that gives us a huge body of reading in five major literatures: Italian, Spanish, English, French, and German. In this and in the remaining lists, I sometimes do not mention individual works by a canonical master, and in other instances I attempt to call attention to authors and books that I consider canonical but rather neglected. From this list onward, many good writers who are not quite central are omitted...." (Bloom, p. 534)

Italy

  • Dante
    • The Divine Comedy
    • The New Life
  • Petrarch
    • Lyric Poems
    • Selections
  • Giovanni Boccaccio
    • The Decameron
  • Matteo Maria Boiardo
    • Orlando Innamorato
  • Ludovico Ariosto
    • Orlando Furioso
  • Michelangelo Buonarroti
    • Sonnets and Madrigals
  • Niccolò Machiavelli
    • The Prince
    • The Mandrake, a Comedy
  • Leonardo da Vinci
    • Notebooks
  • Baldassare Castiglione
    • The Book of the Courtier
  • Gaspara Stampa
    • Sonnets and Madrigals
  • Giorgio Vasari
    • Lives of the Painters
  • Benvenuto Cellini
    • Autobiography
  • Torquato Tasso
    • Jerusalem Delivered
  • Giordano Bruno
    • The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast
  • Tommaso Campanella
    • Poems
    • The City of the Sun
  • Giambattista Vico
    • Principles of a New Science
  • Carlo Goldoni
    • The Servant of Two Masters
  • Vittorio Alfieri
    • Saul

Portugal

  • Luis de Camoëns
    • The Lusiads
  • Antònio Ferreira
    • Poetry

Spain

  • Jorge Manrique
    • Coplas
  • Fernando de Rojas
    • La Celestina
  • Lazarillo de Tormes
  • Francisco de Quevedo
    • Visions
    • Satirical Letter of Censure
  • Fray Luis de León
    • Poems
  • St. John of the Cross
    • Poems
  • Luis de Góngora
    • Sonnets
    • Soledades
  • Miguel de Cervantes
    • Don Quixote
    • Exemplary Stories
  • Lope de Vega
    • La Dorotea
    • Fuente Ovejuna
    • Lost in a Mirror
    • The Knight of Olmedo
  • Tirso de Molina
    • The Trickster of Seville
  • Pedro Calderón de la Barca
    • Life is a Dream
    • The Mayor of Zalamea
    • The Mighty Magician
    • The Doctor of His Own Honor
  • Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
    • Poems

England and Scotland

  • Geoffrey Chaucer
    • The Canterbury Tales
    • Troilus and Criseyde
  • Sir Thomas Malory
    • Le Morte D'Arthur
  • William Dunbar
    • Poems
  • John Skelton
    • Poems
  • Sir Thomas More
    • Utopia
  • Sir Thomas Wyatt
    • Poems
  • Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
    • Poems
  • Sir Philip Sidney
    • The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia
    • Astrophel and Stella
    • An Apology for Poetry
  • Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke
    • Poems
  • Edmund Spenser
    • The Faerie Queene
    • The Minor Poems
  • Sir Walter Ralegh
    • Poems
  • Christopher Marlowe
    • Poems and Plays
  • Michael Drayton
    • Poems
  • Samuel Daniel
    • Poems
    • A Defence of Ryme
  • Thomas Nashe
    • The Unfortunate Traveller
  • Thomas Kyd
    • The Spanish Tragedy
  • William Shakespeare
    • Plays and Poems
  • Thomas Campion
    • Songs
  • John Donne
    • Poems
    • Sermons
  • Ben Jonson
    • Poems, Plays, and Masques
  • Francis Bacon
    • Essays
  • Robert Burton
    • The Anatomy of Melancholy
  • Sir Thomas Browne
    • Religio Medici
    • Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall
    • The Garden of Cyrus
  • Thomas Hobbes
    • Leviathan
  • Robert Herrick
    • Poems
  • Thomas Carew
    • Poems
  • Richard Lovelace
    • Poems
  • Andrew Marvell
    • Poems
  • George Herbert
    • The Temple
  • Thomas Traherne
    • Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings
  • Henry Vaughan
    • Poetry
  • John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
    • Poems
  • Richard Crashaw
    • Poems
  • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
    • Plays
  • George Chapman
    • Comedies, Tragedies, Poems
  • John Ford
    • 'Tis Pity She's a Whore
  • John Marston
    • The Malcontent
  • John Webster
    • The White Devil
    • The Duchess of Malfi
  • Thomas Middleton and William Rowley
    • The Changeling
  • Cyril Tourneur
    • The Revenger's Tragedy
  • Philip Massinger
    • A New Way to Pay Old Debts
  • John Bunyan
    • The Pilgrim's Progress
  • Izaak Walton
    • The Compleat Angler
  • John Milton
    • Paradise Lost
    • Paradise Regained
    • Lycidas, Comus, and the Minor Poems
    • Samson Agonistes
    • Areopagitica
  • John Aubrey
    • Brief Lives
  • Jeremy Taylor
    • Holy Dying
  • Samuel Butler
    • Hudibras
  • John Dryden
    • Poetry and Plays
    • Critical Essays
  • Thomas Otway
    • Venice Preserv'd
  • William Congreve
    • The Way of the World
    • Love for Love
  • Jonathan Swift
    • A Tale of a Tub
    • Gulliver's Travels
    • Shorter Prose Works
    • Poems
  • Sir George Etherege
    • The Man of Mode
  • Alexander Pope
    • Poems
  • John Gay
    • The Beggar's Opera
  • James Boswell
    • Life of Johnson
    • Journals
  • Samuel Johnson
    • Works
  • Edward Gibbon
    • The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
  • Edmund Burke
    • A Philosophical Enquiry into...the Sublime and Beautiful
    • Reflections on the Revolution in France
  • Maurice Morgann
    • An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff
  • William Collins
    • Poems
  • George Farquhar
    • The Beaux' Strategem
    • The Recruiting Officer
  • William Wycherley
    • The Country Wife
    • The Plain Dealer
  • Christopher Smart
    • Jubilate Agno
    • A Song to David
  • Oliver Goldsmith
    • The Vicar of Wakefield
    • She Stoops to Conquer
    • The Traveller
    • The Deserted Village
  • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
    • The School of Scandal
    • The Rivals
  • William Cowper
    • Poetical Works
  • George Crabbe
    • Poetical Works
  • Daniel Defoe
    • Moll Flanders
    • Robinson Crusoe
    • A Journal of the Plague Year
  • Samuel Richardson
    • Clarissa
    • Pamela
    • Sir Charles Grandison
  • Henry Fielding
    • Joseph Andrews
    • The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
  • Tobias Smollett
    • The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
    • The Adventures of Roderick Random
  • Laurence Sterne
    • The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
    • A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
  • Fanny Burney
    • Evelina
  • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
    • The Spectator

France

  • Jean Froissart
    • Chronicles
  • The Song of Roland
  • François Villon
    • Poems
  • Michel de Montaigne
    • Essays
  • François Rabelais
    • Gargantua and Pantagruel
  • Marguerite de Navarre
    • The Heptameron
  • Joachim Du Bellay
    • The Regrets
  • Maurice Scève
    • Délie
  • Pierre Ronsard
    • Odes, Elegies, Sonnets
  • Philippe de Commynes
    • Memoirs
  • Agrippa d'Aubigné
    • Les Tragiques
  • Robert Garnier
    • Mark Antony
    • The Jewesses
  • Pierre Corneille
    • The Cid
    • Polyeucte
    • Nicomède
    • Horace
    • Cinna
    • Rodogune
  • François de La Rochefoucauld
    • Maxims
  • Jean de La Fontaine
    • Fables
  • Molière
    • The Misanthrope
    • Tartuffe
    • The School for Wives
    • The Learned Ladies
    • Don Juan
    • School for Husbands
    • Ridiculous Precieuses
    • The Would-Be Gentleman
    • The Miser
    • The Imaginary Invalid
  • Blaise Pascal
    • Pensées
  • Jacques-Bénigne Bosuet
    • Funerary Orations
  • Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
    • The Art of Poetry
    • Lutrin
  • Jean Racine
    • Phaedra
    • Andromache
    • Britannicus
    • Athaliah
  • Pierre Carlet de Marivaux
    • Seven Comedies
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
    • The Confessions
    • Émile
    • La Nouvelle Héloïse
  • Voltaire
    • Zadig
    • Candide
    • Letters on England
    • The Lisbon Earthquake
  • Abbé Prévost
    • Manon Lescaut
  • Madame de La Fayette
    • The Princess of Cleves
  • Sébastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
    • Products of the Perfected Civilization
  • Denis Diderot
    • Rameau's Nephew
  • Choderlos de Laclos
    • Dangerous Liaisons

Germany

  • Erasmus
    • In Praise of Folly
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
    • Faust, Parts One and Two
    • Dichtung und Wahrheit
    • Egmont
    • Elective Affinities
    • The Sorrows of Young Werther
    • Poems
    • Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
    • Wilhelm Meister's Years of Wandering
    • Italian Journey
    • Verse Plays
    • Hermann and Dorothea
    • Roman Elegies
    • Venetian Epigrams
    • West-Eastern Divan
  • Friedrich Schiller
    • The Robbers
    • Mary Stuart
    • Wallenstein
    • Don Carlos
    • On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature
  • Gotthold Lessing
    • Laocoön
    • Nathan the Wise
  • Freidrich Hölderlin
    • Hymns and Fragments
    • Selected Poems
  • Heinrich von Kleist
    • Five Plays
    • Stories

Additions beyond Bloom's survey (editorial, 2026)

  • Imperial China: Drama and the Great Novels
  • Wang Shifu
    • The Story of the Western Wing (The Romance of the West Chamber)
  • Luo Guanzhong
    • Romance of the Three Kingdoms
  • Shi Nai'an
    • The Water Margin (Outlaws of the Marsh)
  • Wu Cheng'en
    • Journey to the West (Monkey)
  • Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng
    • The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei)
  • Tang Xianzu
    • The Peony Pavilion
  • Pu Songling
    • Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai)
  • Kong Shangren
    • The Peach Blossom Fan
  • Wu Jingzi
    • The Scholars
  • Cao Xueqin
    • Dream of the Red Chamber (The Story of the Stone)

Pre-Modern Japan (the Edo Era)

  • Zeami Motokiyo
    • Noh Plays and the Treatise on the Flower (Fushikaden)
  • Matsuo Basho
    • The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no Hosomichi)
    • Haiku
  • Ihara Saikaku
    • The Life of an Amorous Man
    • Five Women Who Loved Love
  • Chikamatsu Monzaemon
    • The Love Suicides at Amijima and Other Puppet Plays
  • Yosa Buson
    • Haiku
  • Ueda Akinari
    • Tales of Moonlight and Rain
  • Kobayashi Issa
    • Haiku; The Spring of My Life

Pre-Modern Korea

  • Sijo and Gasa Poetry (anthologies)
  • Heo Gyun
    • The Story of Hong Gildong
  • Kim Man-jung
    • The Nine Cloud Dream (Guunmong)
  • The Song of Chunhyang (pansori narrative)

Later Classical Persian

  • Hafez of Shiraz
    • The Divan (Ghazals)
  • Jami
    • Yusuf and Zulaikha

Indian Devotional (Bhakti) Poetry

  • Kabir
    • Poems
  • Mirabai
    • Devotional Songs
  • Tulsidas
    • Ramcharitmanas

Classical Arabic (continued)

  • Ibn Khaldun
    • The Muqaddimah

England and the Continent (omissions)

  • The Gawain Poet
    • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
    • Pearl
  • William Langland
    • Piers Plowman
  • Julian of Norwich
    • Revelations of Divine Love
  • Thomas a Kempis
    • The Imitation of Christ
  • Joanot Martorell (Catalonia)
    • Tirant lo Blanc

C. The Democratic Age

"I have located Vico's Democratic Age in the post-Goethean nineteenth century, when the literature of Italy and Spain ebbs, yielding eminence to England with its renaissance of the Renaissance in Romanticism, and to a lesser degree to France and Germany. This is also the era where the strength of both Russian and American literature begins." (Bloom, p. 540)

Italy

  • Ugo Foscolo
    • On Sepulchres
    • Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis
    • Odes and The Graces
  • Alessandro Manzoni
    • The Betrothed
    • On the Historical Novel
  • Giacomo Leopardi
    • Essays and Dialogues
    • Poems
    • The Moral Essays
  • Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli
    • Roman Sonnets
  • Giosué Carducci
    • Hymn to Satan
    • Barbarian Odes
    • Rhymes and Rhythms
  • Giovanni Verga
    • Little Novels of Sicily
    • Mastro-Don Gesualdo
    • The House by the Medlar Tree
    • The She-Wolf and Other Stories

Spain and Portugal

  • Gustavo Adolpho Bécquer
    • Poems
  • Benito Pérez Galdós
    • Fortunata and Jacinta
  • Leopoldo Alas (Clarín)
    • La Regenta
  • José Maria de Eça de Queirós
    • The Maias

France

  • Benjamin Constant
    • Adolphe
    • The Red Notebook
  • François-Auguste-René de Chateaubriand
    • Attala
    • René
    • The Genius of Christianity
  • Alphonse de Lamartine
    • Meditations
  • Alfred de Vigny
    • Chatterton
    • Poems
  • Victor Hugo
    • The Distance, the Shadows: Selected Poems
    • Les Misérables
    • Notre-Dame of Paris
    • William Shakespeare
    • The Toilers of the Sea
    • The End of Satan
    • God
  • Alfred de Musset
    • Poems
    • Lorenzaccio
  • Gérard de Nerval
    • The Chimeras
    • Sylvie
    • Aurelia
  • Théophile Gautier
    • Mademoiselle de Maupin
    • Enamels and Cameos
  • Honoré de Balzac
    • The Girl with the Golden Eyes
    • Louis Lambert
    • The Wild Ass's Skin
    • Old Goriot
    • Cousin Bette
    • A Harlot High and Low
    • Eugénie Grandet
    • Ursule Mirouet
  • Stendhal
    • On Love
    • The Red and the Black
    • The Charterhouse of Parma
  • Gustave Flaubert
    • Madame Bovary
    • Sentimental Education
    • Salammbô
    • A Simple Soul
  • George Sand
    • The Haunted Pool
  • Charles Baudelaire
    • Flowers of Evil
    • Paris Spleen
  • Stéphane Mallarmé
    • Selected Poetry and Prose
  • Paul Verlaine
    • Selected Poems
  • Arthur Rimbaud
    • Complete Works
  • Tristan Corbière
    • Les Armours Jaunes
  • Jules Laforgue
    • Selected Writings
  • Guy de Maupassant
    • Selected Short Stories
  • Émile Zola
    • Germinal
    • L'Assommoir
    • Nana

Scandinavia

  • Henrik Ibsen
    • Brand
    • Peer Gynt
    • Emperor and Galilean
    • Hedda Gabler
    • The Master Builder
    • The Lady from the Sea
    • When We Dead Awaken
  • August Strindberg
    • To Damascus
    • Miss Julie
    • The Father
    • The Dance of Death
    • The Ghost Sonata
    • A Dream Play

Great Britain

  • Robert Burns
    • Poems
  • William Blake
    • Complete Poetry and Prose
  • William Wordsworth
    • Poems
    • The Prelude
  • Sir Walter Scott
    • Waverley
    • The Heart of Midlothian
    • Redgauntlet
    • Old Mortality
  • Jane Austen
    • Pride and Prejudice
    • Emma
    • Mansfield Park
    • Persuasion
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
    • Poems and Prose
  • Dorothy Wordsworth
    • The Grasmere Journal
  • William Hazlitt
    • Essays and Criticism
  • Lord Byron
    • Don Juan
    • Poems
  • William Savage Landor
    • Poems
    • Imaginary Conversations
  • Thomas De Quincey
    • Confessions of an English Opium Eater
    • Selected Prose
  • Charles Lamb
    • Essays
  • Maria Edgeworth
    • Castle Rackrent
  • John Galt
    • The Entail
  • Elizabeth Gaskell
    • Cranford
    • Mary Barton
    • North and South
  • James Hogg
    • The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
  • Charles Maturin
    • Melmoth the Wanderer
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley
    • Poems
    • A Defence of Poetry
  • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
    • Frankenstein
  • John Clare
    • Poems
  • John Keats
    • Poems and Letters
  • Thomas Lovell Beddoes
    • Death's Jest-Book
    • Poems
  • George Darley
    • Nepenthe
    • Poems
  • Thomas Hood
    • Poems
  • Thomas Wade
    • Poems
  • Robert Browning
    • Poems
    • The Ring and the Book
  • Charles Dickens
    • The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
    • David Copperfield
    • The Adventures of Oliver Twist
    • A Tale of Two Cities
    • Bleak House
    • Hard Times
    • Nicholas Nickleby
    • Dombey and Son
    • Great Expectations
    • Martin Chuzzlewit
    • Christmas Stories
    • Little Dorrit
    • Our Mutual Friend
    • The Mystery of Edwin Drood
  • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
    • Poems
  • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
    • Poems and Translations
  • Matthew Arnold
    • Poems
    • Essays
  • Arthur Hugh Clough
    • Poems
  • Christina Rossetti
    • Poems
  • Thomas Love Peacock
    • Nightmare Abbey
    • Gryll Grange
  • Gerald Manley Hopkins
    • Poems and Prose
  • Thomas Carlyle
    • Selected Prose
    • Sartor Resartus
  • John Ruskin
    • Modern Painters
    • The Stones of Venice
    • Unto This Last
    • The Queen of the Air
  • Walter Pater
    • Studies in the History of the Renaissance
    • Appreciations
    • Imaginary Portraits
    • Marius the Epicurean
  • Edward FitzGerald
    • The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
  • John Stuart Mill
    • On Liberty
    • Autobiography
  • John Henry Newman
    • Apologia pro Vita Sua
    • A Grammar of Assent
    • The Idea of a University
  • Anthony Trollope
    • The Barsetshire Novels
    • The Palliser Novels
    • Orley Farm
    • The Way We Live Now
  • Lewis Carroll
    • Complete Works
  • Edward Lear
    • Complete Nonsense
  • George Gissing
    • New Grub Street
  • Algernon Charles Swinburne
    • Poems and Letters
  • Charlotte Brontë
    • Jane Eyre
    • Villette
  • Emily Brontë
    • Poems
    • Wuthering Heights
  • William Makepeace Thackeray
    • Vanity Fair
    • The History of Henry Esmond
  • George Meredith
    • Poems
    • The Egoist
  • Francis Thompson
    • Poems
  • Lionel Johnson
    • Poems
  • Robert Bridges
    • Poems
  • Gilbert Keith Chesterton
    • Collected Poems
    • The Man Who Was Thursday
  • Samuel Butler
    • Erewhon
    • The Way of All Flesh
  • W. S. Gilbert
    • Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan
    • Bab Ballads
  • Wilkie Collins
    • The Moonstone
    • The Woman in White
    • No Name
  • Coventry Patmore
    • Odes
  • James Thomson (Bysshe Vanolis)
    • The City of the Dreadful Night
  • Oscar Wilde
    • Plays
    • The Picture of Dorian Gray
    • The Artist as Critic
    • Letters
  • John Davidson
    • Ballads and Songs
  • Ernest Dowson
    • Complete Poems
  • George Eliot
    • Adam Bede
    • Silas Marner
    • The Mill on the Floss
    • Middlemarch
    • Daniel Deronda
  • Robert Louis Stevenson
    • Essays
    • Kidnapped
    • Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
    • Treasure Island
    • The New Arabian Nights
    • The Master of Ballantrae
    • Weir of Hermiston
  • William Morris
    • Early Romances
    • Poems
    • The Earthly Paradise
    • The Well at the World's End
    • News from Nowhere
  • Bram Stoker
    • Dracula
  • George Macdonald
    • Lilith
    • At the Back of the North Wind

Germany

  • Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenburg)
    • Hymns to the Night
    • Aphorisms
  • Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
    • Fairy Tales
  • Eduard Mörike
    • Selected Poems
    • Mozart on His Way to Prague
  • Theodor Storm
    • Immensee
    • Poems
  • Gottfried Keller
    • Green Henry
    • Tales
  • E. T. A. Hoffmann
    • The Devil's Elixir
    • Tales
  • Jeremias Gotthelf
    • The Black Spider
  • Adalbert Stifter
    • Indian Summer
    • Tales
  • Friedrich Schlegel
    • Criticism and Aphorisms
  • Georg Büchner
    • Danton's Death
    • Woyzeck
  • Heinrich Heine
    • Complete Poems
  • Richard Wagner
    • The Ring of the Nibelung
  • Friedrich Nietzsche
    • The Birth of Tragedy
    • Beyond Good and Evil
    • On the Genealogy of Morals
    • The Will to Power
  • Theodor Fontane
    • Effi Briest
  • Stefan George
    • Selected Poems

Russia

  • Aleksandr Pushkin
    • Complete Prose Tales
    • Complete Poetry
    • Eugene Onegin
    • Narrative Poems
    • Boris Godunov
  • Nikolay Gogol
    • The Complete Tales
    • Dead Souls
    • The Government Inspector
  • Mikhail Lermontov
    • Narrative Poems
    • A Hero of Our Time
  • Segey Aksakov
    • A Family Chronicle
  • Aleksandr Herzen
    • My Past and Thoughts
    • From the Other Shore
  • Ivan Goncharov
    • The Frigate Pallada
    • Oblomov
  • Ivan Turgenev
    • A Sportsman's Notebook
    • A Month in the Country
    • Fathers and Sons
    • On the Eve
    • First Love
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky
    • Notes from the Underground
    • Crime and Punishment
    • The Idiot
    • The Possessed (The Devils)
    • The Brothers Karamazov
    • Short Novels
  • Leo Tolstoy
    • The Cossacks
    • War and Peace
    • Anna Karenina
    • A Confession
    • The Power of Darkness
    • Short Novels
  • Nikolay Leskov
    • Tales
  • Aleksandr Ostrovsky
    • The Storm
  • Nikolay Chernyshevsky
    • What is to Be Done?
  • Aleksandr Blok
    • The Twelve and Other Poems
  • Anton Chekhov
    • The Tales
    • The Major Plays

The United States

  • Washington Irving
    • The Sketch Book
  • William Cullen Bryant
    • Collected Poems
  • James Fenimore Cooper
    • The Deerslayers
  • John Greenleaf Whittier
    • Collected Poems
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson
    • Nature
    • Essays, first and second series
    • Representative Men
    • The Conduct of Life
    • Journals
    • Poems
  • Emily Dickinson
    • Complete Poems
  • Walt Whitman
    • Leaves of Grass, first edition
    • Leaves of Grass, third edition
    • The Complete Poems
    • Specimen Days
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne
    • The Scarlet Letter
    • Tales and Sketches
    • The Marble Faun
    • Notebooks
  • Herman Melville
    • Moby-Dick
    • The Piazza Tales
    • Billy Budd
    • Collected Poems
    • Clarel
  • Edgar Allan Poe
    • Poetry and Tales
    • Essays and Reviews
    • The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
    • Eureka
  • Jones Very
    • Essays and Poems
  • Frederick Goddard Tuckerman
    • The Cricket and Other Poems
  • Henry David Thoreau
    • Walden
    • Poems
    • Essays
  • Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
    • Two Years Before the Mast
  • Frederick Douglass
    • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
    • Selected Poems
  • Sidney Lanier
    • Poems
  • Francis Parkman
    • France and England in North America
    • The California and Oregon Trail
  • Henry Adams
    • The Education of Henry Adams
    • Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres
  • Ambrose Bierce
    • Collected Writings
  • Louisa May Alcott
    • Little Women
  • Charles W. Chesnutt
    • The Short Fiction
  • Kate Chopin
    • The Awakening
  • William Dean Howells
    • The Rise of Silas Lapham
    • A Modern Instance
  • Stephen Crane
    • The Red Badge of Courage
    • Stories and Poems
  • Henry James
    • The Portrait of a Lady
    • The Bostonians
    • The Princess Casamassima
    • The Awkward Age
    • Short Novels and Tales
    • The Ambassadors
    • The Wings of the Dove
    • The Golden Bowl
  • Harold Frederic
    • The Damnation of Theron Ware
  • Mark Twain
    • Complete Short Stories
    • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    • The Devil's Racetrack
    • Number Forty-Four: The Mysterious Stranger
    • Pudd'nhead Wilson
    • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
  • William James
    • The Varieties of Religious Experience
    • Pragmatism
  • Frank Norris
    • The Octopus
  • Sarah Orne Jewett
    • The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories
  • Trumbull Stickney
    • Poems

Additions beyond Bloom's survey (editorial, 2026)

Modern Japan (the Meiji Awakening)

  • Higuchi Ichiyo
    • Takekurabe (Child's Play) and Stories
  • Mori Ogai
    • The Wild Geese
  • Natsume Soseki
    • Kokoro
    • I Am a Cat
    • Kusamakura

India

  • Mirza Ghalib
    • Urdu and Persian Ghazals

Vietnam

  • Nguyen Du
    • The Tale of Kieu

The European and American Nineteenth Century (omissions)

  • Elias Lonnrot (Finland)
    • The Kalevala
  • Aleksis Kivi (Finland)
    • Seven Brothers
  • Multatuli (Netherlands)
    • Max Havelaar
  • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (Brazil)
    • The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas
    • Quincas Borba
    • Dom Casmurro

D. The Chaotic Age: A Canonical Prophecy

"I am not as confident about this list as the first three. Cultural prophecy is always a mug's game. Not all of the works here can prove to be canonical; literary overpopulation is a hazard to many among them. But I have neither excluded nor included on the basis of cultural politics of any kind." (Bloom, p. 548)

Italy

  • Luigi Pirandello
    • Naked Masks: Five Plays
  • Gabriele D'Annunzio
    • Maia: In Praise of Life
  • Dino Campana
    • Orphic Songs
  • Umberto Saba
    • Stories and Recollections
    • Poems
  • Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
    • The Leopard
  • Giuseppe Ungaretti
    • Selected Poems
    • The Buried Harbour: Selected Poems
  • Eugenio Montale
    • The Storm and Other Things: Poems
    • The Occasions: Poems
    • Cuttlefish Bones: Poems
    • Otherwise: Last and First Poems
    • The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays
  • Salvatore Quasimodo
    • Selected Writings: Poems and Discourse on Poetry
  • Tommaso Landolfi
    • Gogol's Wife and Other Stories
  • Leonardo Sciascia
    • Day of the Owl
    • Equal Danger
    • The Wine-Dark Sea: Thirteen Stories
  • Pier Paolo Pasolini
    • Poems
  • Cesare Pavese
    • Hard Labor: Poems
    • Dialogues with Leucò
  • Primo Levi
    • If Not Now, When?
    • Collected Poems
    • The Periodic Table
  • Italo Svevo
    • The Confession of Zeno
    • As a Man Grows Older
  • Giorgio Bassani
    • The Heron
  • Natalia Ginzburg
    • Family
  • Elio Vittorini
    • Women of Messina
  • Alberto Moravia
    • 1934
  • Andrea Zanzotto
    • Selected Poetry
  • Italo Calvino
    • Invisible Cities
    • The Baron in the Trees
    • If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
    • t zero
  • Antonio Porta
    • Kisses from Another Dream: Poems

Spain

  • Miguel de Unamuno
    • Three Exemplary Novels
    • Our Lord Don Quixote
  • Antonio Machado
    • Selected Poems
  • Juan Ramón Jiménez
    • Invisible Reality: Poems
  • Pedro Salinas
    • My Voice Because of You: Poems
  • Jorge Guillén
    • Guillén on Guillén: The Poetry and the Poet
  • Vicente Aleixandre
    • A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems
  • Federico Garcia Lorca
    • Selected Poems
    • Three Tragedies: Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House of Bernardo Alba
  • Rafael Alberti
    • The Owl's Insomnia: Poems
  • Luis Cernuda
    • Selected Poems
  • Miguel Hernández
    • Selected Poems
  • Blas de Otero
    • Selected Poems
  • Camilo José Cela
    • The Hive
  • Juan Goytisolo
    • Space in Motion

Catalonia

  • Carles Ribá
    • Selected Poems
  • J. V. Foix
    • Selected Poems
  • Joan Perucho
    • Natural History
  • Merce Rodoreda
    • The Time of the Doves
  • Pere Gimferrer
    • Selected Poems
  • Salvador Espríu
    • La Pell de Brau: Poems

Portugal

  • Fernando Pessoa
    • The Keeper of Sheep
    • Poems
    • Selected Poems
    • Always Astonished: Selected Poems
    • The Book of Disquiet
  • Jorge de Sena
    • Selected Poems
  • José Saramago
    • Baltasar and Blimunda
  • José Cardoso Pires
    • Ballad of Dogs' Beach
  • Sophia de Mello Breyner
    • Selected Poems
  • Eugénio de Andrade
    • Selected Poems

France

  • Anatole France
    • Penguin Island
    • Thaïs
  • Alain-Fournier
    • Le Grand Meaulnes
  • Marcel Proust
    • Remembrance of Things Past (In Search of Lost Time)
  • Andre Gide
    • The Immoralist
    • Corydon
    • Lafcadio's Adventure (The Caves of the Vatican)
    • The Journals
  • Colette
    • Collected Stories
    • Retreat from Love
  • Georges Bataille
    • Blue of Noon
  • Louis-Ferdinand Céline
    • Journey to the End of Night
  • René Daumal
    • Mount Analogue
  • Jean Genet
    • Our Lady of the Flowers
    • The Thief's Journal
    • The Balcony
  • Jean Giraudoux
    • Four Plays
  • Alfred Jarry
    • Selected Works
  • Jean Cocteau
    • The Infernal Machine and Other Works
  • Guillaume Apollinaire
    • Selected Writings
  • André Breton
    • Poems
    • Manifestoes of Surrealism
  • Paul Valéry
    • The Art of Poetry
    • Selected Writings
  • René Char
    • Poems
  • Paul Éluard
    • Selected Poems
  • Louis Aragon
    • Selected Poems
  • Jean Giono
    • The Horseman on the Roof
  • Michel Leiris
    • Manhood
  • Raymond Radiguet
    • Count d'Orgel's Ball
  • Jean-Paul Sartre
    • No Exit
    • Nausea
    • Saint Genet
    • The Words
    • The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert
  • Simone de Beauvoir
    • The Second Sex
  • Albert Camus
    • The Stranger
    • The Plague
    • The Fall
    • The Rebel
  • Henri Michaux
    • Selected Writings
  • Edmond Jabès
    • The Book of Questions
    • Selected Poems
  • Saint-John Perse
    • Anabasis
    • Birds
    • Exile and Other Poems
  • Pierre Reverdy
    • Selected Poems
  • Tristan Tzara
    • Seven Dada Manifestoes
  • Max Jacob
    • Selected Poems
  • Pierre-Jean Jouve
    • Selected Poems
  • Francis Ponge
    • Things: Selected Writings
  • Jacques Prévert
    • Paroles
  • Philippe Jacottet
    • Selected Poems
  • Charles Péguy
    • The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc
  • Bejamin Péret
    • Selected Poems
  • Andé Malraux
    • The Conquerors
    • The Royal Way
    • Man's Fate
    • Man's Hope
    • The Voices of Silence
  • François Mauriac
    • Therese
    • The Desert of Love
    • The Woman of the Pharisees
  • Jean Anouilh
    • Becket
    • Antigone
    • Eurydice
    • The Rehearsal
  • Eugène Ionesco
    • The Bald Soprano
    • The Chairs
    • The Lesson
    • Amédée
    • Victims of Duty
    • Rhinoceros
  • Maurice Blanchot
    • Thomas the Obscure
  • Pierre Klossowski
    • The Laws of Hospitality
    • The Baphomet
  • Raymond Roussel
    • Locus Solus
  • Antonin Artaud
    • Selected Writings
  • Claude Lévi-Strauss
    • Tristes Tropiques
  • Alain Robbe-Grillet
    • The Voyeur
    • Jealousy
    • In the Labyrinth
    • The Erasers
    • Project for a Revolution in New York
    • For a New Novel
  • Nathalie Sarraute
    • The Use of Speech
    • The Planetarium
  • Claude Simon
    • The Grass
    • The Wind
    • The Flanders Road
  • Marguerite Duras
    • The Lover
    • Four Novels
  • Robert Pinget
    • Fable
    • The Libera Me Domine
    • That Voice
  • Michel Tournier
    • The Ogre
    • Friday
  • Marguerite Yourcenar
    • Coup de Grace
    • Memoirs of Hadrian
  • Jean Follain
    • Transparence of the World: Poems
  • Yves Bonnefoy
    • Words in Stone

Great Britain and Ireland

  • William Butler Yeats
    • The Collected Poems
    • Collected Plays
    • A Vision
    • Mythologies
  • George Bernard Shaw
    • Major Critical Essays
    • Heartbreak House
    • Pygmalion
    • Saint Joan
    • Major Barbara
    • Back to Methuselah
  • John Millington Synge
    • Collected Plays
  • Sean O'Casey
    • Juno and the Paycock
    • The Plough and the Stars
    • The Shadow of a Gunman
  • George Douglas Brown
    • House with the Green Shutters
  • Thomas Hardy
    • The Well-Beloved
    • The Woodlanders
    • The Return of the Native
    • The Mayor of Casterbridge
    • Far From the Madding Crowd
    • Tess of the D'Urbervilles
    • Jude the Obscure
    • Collected Poems
  • Rudyard Kipling
    • Kim
    • Collected Stories
    • Puck of Pook's Hill
    • Complete Verse
  • A. E. Housman
    • Collected Poems
  • Max Beerbohm
    • Zuleika Dobson
    • Seven Men and Two Others
  • Joseph Conrad
    • Lord Jim
    • The Secret Agent
    • Nostromo
    • Under Western Eyes
    • Victory
  • Ronald Firbank
    • Five Novels
  • Ford Madox Ford
    • Parade's End
    • The Good Soldier
  • W. Somerset Maugham
    • Collected Short Stories
    • The Moon and Sixpence
  • John Cowper Powys
    • Wolf Solent
    • A Glastonbury Romance
  • Saki (H. H. Munro)
    • The Short Stories
  • H. G. Wells
    • The Science Fiction Novels
  • David Lindsay
    • A Voyage to Arcturus
  • Arnold Bennett
    • The Old Wives' Tale
  • Walter De la Mare
    • Collected Poems
    • Memoirs of a Midget
  • Wilfred Owen
    • Collected Poems
  • Isaac Rosenberg
    • Collected Poems
  • Edward Thomas
    • Collected Poems
  • Robert Graves
    • Collected Poems
    • King Jesus
  • Edwin Muir
    • Collected Poems
  • David Jones
    • In Parenthesis
    • The Anathemata
  • John Galsworthy
    • The Forsyte Saga
  • E. M. Forster
    • Howards End
    • A Passage to India
  • Frank O'Connor
    • Collected Stories
  • D. H. Lawrence
    • Complete Poems
    • Studies in Classic American Literature
    • Complete Short Stories
    • Sons and Lovers
    • The Rainbow
    • Women in Love
  • Virginia Woolf
    • Mrs. Dalloway
    • To the Lighthouse
    • Orlando: A Biography
    • The Waves
    • Between the Acts
  • James Joyce
    • Dubliners
    • Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
    • Ulysses
    • Finnegans Wake
  • Samuel Beckett
    • Murphy
    • Watt
    • Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable
    • Waiting for Godot
    • Endgame
    • Krapp's Last Game
    • How It Is
  • Elizabeth Bowen
    • Collected Stories
  • J. G. Farrell
    • The Siege of Krishnapur
  • Henry Green
    • Nothing
    • Loving
    • Party Going
  • Evelyn Waugh
    • A Handful of Dust
    • Scoop
    • Vile Bodies
    • Put Out More Flags
  • Anthony Burgess
    • Nothing Like the Sun
  • G. B. Edwards
    • The Book of Ebenezer Le Page
  • Iris Murdoch
    • The Good Apprentice
    • Bruno's Dream
  • Graham Greene
    • Brighton Rock
    • The Heart of the Matter
    • The Power and the Glory
  • Christopher Isherwood
    • The Berlin Stories
  • Norman Douglas
    • South Wind
  • Aldous Huxley
    • Collected Essays
    • Antic Hay
    • Point Counter Point
    • Brave New World
  • Lawrence Durrell
    • Alexandria Quartet
  • William Golding
    • Pincher Martin
  • Doris Lessing
    • The Golden Notebook
  • Mervyn Peake
    • The Gormenghast Trilogy
  • Jeanette Winterson
    • The Passion
  • W. H. Auden
    • Collected Poems
    • The Dyer's Hand
  • Roy Fuller
    • Collected Poems
  • Gavin Ewart
    • Selected Poems
  • Basil Bunting
    • Collected Poems
  • William Empson
    • Collected Poems
    • Milton's God
    • Some Versions of Pastoral
  • George Wilson Knight
    • The Wheel of Fire
    • The Burning Oracle
  • R. S. Thomas
    • Poems
  • Frank Kermode
    • The Sense of an Ending
  • Stevie Smith
    • Collected Poems
  • F. T. Prince
    • Collected Poems
  • Philip Larkin
    • Collected Poems
  • Donald Davie
    • Selected Poems
  • Geoffrey Hill
    • Collected Poems
  • Jonathan Spence
    • The Death of Woman Wang
    • The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
  • Elizabeth Jennings
    • Selected Poems
  • Keith Douglas
    • The Complete Poems
  • Hugh MacDiarmid
    • Complete Poems
  • Louis MacNeice
    • Collected Poems
  • Dylan Thomas
    • The Poems
  • Nigel Dennis
    • Cards of Identity
  • Seamus Heaney
    • Selected Poems: 1969-1987
    • Field Work
    • Station Island
  • Thomas Kinsella
    • Peppercanister Poems
  • Paul Muldoon
    • Selected Poems
  • John Montague
    • Selected Poems
  • John Arden
    • Plays
  • Joe Orton
    • The Complete Plays
  • Flann O'Brien
    • The Dalkey Archive
    • The Third Policeman
  • Tom Stoppard
    • Travesties
  • Harold Pinter
    • The Caretaker
    • The Homecoming
  • Edward Bond
    • The Fool
    • Saved
  • George Orwell
    • Collected Essays
    • 1984
  • Edna O'Brien
    • A Fanatic Heart

Germany

  • Hugo von Hofmannsthal
    • Poems and Verse Plays
    • Selected Prose
    • Selected Plays and Libretti
  • Rainer Maria Rilke
    • Selected Poetry (including the Duino Elegies)
    • The Sonnets to Orpheus
    • The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
    • New Poems: First Part and Other Part
  • Hermann Broch
    • The Sleepwalkers
    • The Death of Virgil
    • Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time
  • Georg Trakl
    • Selected Poems
  • Gottfried Benn
    • Selected Poems
  • Franz Kafka
    • Amerika
    • The Complete Stories
    • The Blue Octavo Notebook
    • The Trial
    • The Diaries
    • The Castle
    • Parables, Fragments, Aphorisms
  • Bertolt Brecht
    • Poems, 1913-1956
    • The Threepenny Opera
    • The Good Woman of Setzuan
    • Mother Courage and Her Children
    • Galileo
    • The Caucasian Chalk Circle
  • Arthur Schnitzler
    • Plays and Stories
  • Frank Wedekind
    • Lulu Plays
    • Spring Awakening
  • Karl Krauss
    • The Last Days of Mankind
  • Günter Eich
    • Moles
  • Thomas Mann
    • The Magic Mountain
    • Stories of Three Decades
    • Joseph and His Brothers
    • Doctor Faustus
  • Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man
  • Alfred Döblin
    • Berlin Alexanderplatz
  • Hermann Hesse
    • The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)
    • Narcissus and Goldmund
  • Robert Musil
    • Young Törless
    • The Man Without Qualities
  • Joseph Roth
    • The Radetzky March
  • Paul Celan
    • Poems
  • Thomas Bernhard
    • Woodcutters
  • Heinrich Böll
    • Billiards at Half-Past Nine
  • Ingeborg Bachmann
    • In the Storm of Roses
  • Hans Magnus Enzensberger
  • Poems for People Who Don't Read Poems
  • Walter Benjamin
    • Illuminations
  • Robert Walser
    • Selected Stories
  • Christa Wolf
    • Cassandra
  • Peter Handke
    • Slow Homecoming
  • Max Frisch
    • I'm Not Stiller
    • Man in the Holocene
  • Günter Grass
    • The Tin Drum
    • The Flounder
  • Friedrich Dürrenmatt
    • The Visit
  • Johannes Bobrowski
    • Shadow Lands

Russia

  • Anna Akhmatova
    • Poems
  • Leonid Andreyev
    • Selected Tales
  • Andy Bely
    • Petersburg
  • Osip Mandelshtam
    • Selected Poems
  • Velimir Khlebnikov
    • The King of Time
  • Vladimir Mayakovsky
    • The Bedbug and Selected Poetry
  • Mikhail Bulgakov
    • The Master and the Margarita
  • Mikhail Kuzmin
    • Alexandrian Songs
  • Maksim Gorky
    • Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreev
    • Autobiography
  • Ivan Bunin
    • Selected Stories
  • Isaac Babel
    • Collected Stories
  • Boris Pasternak
    • Doctor Zhivago
    • Selected Poems
  • Yury Olesha
    • Envy
  • Marina Tsvetayeva
    • Selected Poems
  • Mikhail Zoshchenko
    • Nervous People and Other Satires
  • Andrei Platonov
    • The Foundation Pit
  • Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
    • One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
    • The Cancer Ward
    • The Gulag Archipelago
    • August 1914
  • Joesph Brodsky
    • A Part of Speech: Poems

Scandinavia

  • Isak Dinesen
    • Winter's Tales
    • Seven Gothic Tales
  • Martin Andersen Nexø
  • Pelle the Conqueror
  • Knut Hamsun
    • Hunger
    • Pan
  • Sigrid Undset
    • Kristin Lavransdatter
  • Gunnar Ekelöf
    • Guide to the Underworld
  • Tomas Tranströmer
    • Selected Poems
  • Pär Lagerkvist
    • Barabbas
  • Lars Gustafsson
    • Selected Poems

Serbo-Croat

  • Ivo Andric
    • The Bridge on the Drina
  • Vasko Popa
    • Selected Poems
  • Danilo Kis
    • A Tomb for Boris Davidovich

Czech

  • Karel Capek
    • War with the Newts
    • R.U.R
  • Václav Havel
    • Largo Desolato
  • Milan Kundera
    • The Unbearable Lightness of Being
  • Jaroslav Seifert
    • Selected Poetry
  • Miroslav Holub
    • The Fly

Polish

  • Bruno Schulz
    • The Street of Crocodiles
    • Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
  • Czeslaw Milosz
    • Selected Poems
  • Witold Gombrowicz
    • Three Novels
  • Stanislaw Lem
    • The Investigation
    • Solaris
  • Zbigniew Herbert
    • Selected Poems
  • Adam Zagajewski
    • Tremor

Hungarian

  • Attila József
    • Perched on Nothing's Branch
  • Ferenc Juhasz
    • Selected Poems
  • Laszlo Németh
    • Guilt

Modern Greek

  • C. P. Cavafy
    • Collected Poems
  • George Seferis
    • Collected Poems
  • Nikos Kazantzakis
    • The Greek Passion
    • The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel
  • Yannis Ritsos
    • Exile and Return
  • Odysseas Elytis
    • What I Love: Selected Poems
  • Angelos Sikelianos
    • Selected Poems

Yiddish

  • Sholem Aleichem
    • Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories
    • The Nightingale
  • Mendele Mokher Seforim
    • The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third
  • I. L. Peretz
    • Selected Stories
  • Jacob Glatstein
    • Selected Poems
  • Moshe-Leib Halpern
    • Selected Poems
  • H. Leivick (Leivick Halpern)
    • Selected Poems
  • Israel Joshua Singer
    • The Brothers Ashkenazi
    • Yoshe Kalb
  • Chaim Grade
    • The Yeshiva
  • S. Ansky
    • The Dybbuk
  • Mani Leib
    • Selected Poems
  • Sholem Asch
    • East River
  • Isaac Bashevis Singer
    • Collected Stories
    • In My Father's Court
    • The Manor, the Estate, the Family Moskat
    • Satan in Goray

Hebrew

  • Hayyim Nahman Bialik
    • Shirot Bialik: The Epic Poems
  • S. Y. Agnon
    • In the Heart of the Seas
    • Twenty-One Stories
  • Aharon Appelfeld
    • The Immortal Bartfuss
    • Badenheim 1939
  • Yaakov Shabtai
    • Past Continuous
  • Yehuda Amichai
    • Selected Poetry
    • Travels
  • A. B. Yehoshua
    • A Late Divorce
  • Amos Oz
    • A Perfect Peace
  • T. Carmi
    • At the Stone of Losses
  • Nathan Zach
    • Selected Poems
  • Dalia Ravikovitch
    • A Dress of Fire
  • Dan Pagis
    • Selected Poems
  • David Shahar
    • The Palace of Shattered Vessels
  • David Grossman
    • See Under: Love
  • Yoram Kaniuk
    • His Daughter

Arabic

  • Najib Mahfuz
    • Midaq Alley
    • Fountain and Tomb
    • Miramar
    • Adunis
    • Selected Poems
  • Mahmud Darwish
    • The Music of Human Flesh
  • Taha Husayn
    • An Egyptian Childhood
  • Latin America
    • Rubén Dário
    • Selected Poetry
  • Jorge Luis Borges
    • The Aleph and Other Stories
    • Dreamtigers (The Maker)
    • Ficciones
    • Labyrinths
    • A Personal Anthology
  • Alejo Carpentier
    • Explosion in a Cathedral
    • The Lost Steps
    • Reasons of State
    • The Kingdom of This World
  • Guillermo Cabrera Infante
    • Three Trapped Tigers
    • View of Dawn in the Tropics
  • Severo Sarduy
    • Maitreya
  • Reinaldo Arenas
    • The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando
  • Pablo Neruda
    • Canto General
    • Residence on Earth
    • Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
    • Fully Empowered
    • Selected Poems
  • Nicolás Guillén
    • Selected Poems
  • Octavio Paz
    • The Collected Poems
    • The Labyrinth of Solitude
  • César Vallejo
    • Selected Poems
    • Spain, Take This Cup from Me
  • MiguAngel Asturias
    • Men of Maize
  • José Lezama Lima
    • Paradiso
  • José Donoso
    • The Obscene Bird of Night
  • Julio Cortázar
    • Hopscotch
    • All Fires the Fire
    • Blow-up and Other Stories
  • Gabriel García Márquez
    • One Hundred Years of Solitude
    • Love in the Time of Cholera
  • Mario Vargas Llosa
    • The War of the End of the World
  • Carlos Fuentes
    • A Change of Skin
    • Terra Nostra
  • Carlos Drummond de Andrade
    • Travelling in thely
    • The West Indies
  • C. L. R. James
    • The Black Jacobins
    • The Future in the Present
  • V. S. Naipaul
    • A Bend in the River
    • A House for Mr. Biswas
  • Derek Walcott
    • Collected Poems
  • Wilson Harris
    • The Guyana Quartet
  • Michael Thelwell
    • The Harder They Come
  • Aimé Césaire
    • Collected Poetry

Africa

  • Chinua Achebe
    • Things Fall Apart
    • Arrow of God
    • No Longer at Ease
  • Wole Soyinka
    • A Dance of the Forest
  • Amos Tutuola
    • The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead's Town
  • Christopher Okigbo
    • Labyrinths, with Path of Thunder
  • John Pepper Clark (-Bekederemo)
    • Casualties: Poems
  • Ayi K. Armah
    • The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
  • Ngugi wa Thiong'o
    • A Grain of Wheat
  • Gabriel Okara
    • The Fisherman's Invocation
  • Nadine Gordimer
    • Collected Stories
  • J. M. Coetzee
    • Foe
  • Athol Fugard
    • A Lesson from Aloes
  • Léopod S. Senghor
    • Selected Poems
    • India (in English)
  • R. K. Narayan
    • The Guide
  • Salman Rushdie
    • Midnight's Children
  • Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
    • Heat and Dust

Canada

  • Malcolm Lowry
    • Under the Volcano
  • Robertson Davies
    • The Deptford Trilogy
    • The Rebel Angels
  • Alice Munro
    • Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You
  • Northrop Frye
    • Fables of Identity
  • Anne Hébert
    • Selected Poems
  • Jay Macpherson
    • Poems Twice Told
  • Margaret Atwood
    • Surfacing
  • Daryl Hine
    • Selected Poems
    • Australia and New Zealand
  • Miles (Stella) Franklin
    • My Brilliant Career
  • Katherine Mansfield
    • The Short Stories
  • A. D. Hope
    • Collected Poems
  • Patrick White
    • Riders in the Chariot
    • A Fringe of Leaves
    • Voss
  • Christina Stead
    • The Man Who Loved Children
  • Judith Wright
    • Selected Poems
  • Les A. Murray
    • The Rabbiter's Bounty: Collected Poems
  • Thomas Keneally
    • The Playmaker
    • Schindler's List
  • David Malouf
    • An Imaginary Life
  • Kevin Hart
    • Peniel and Other Poems
  • Peter Carey
    • Oscar and Lucinda
    • Illywhacker

The United States

  • Edwin Arlington Robinson
    • Selected Poems
  • Robert Frost
    • The Poetry
  • Edith Wharton
    • Collected Short Stories
    • The Age of Innocence
  • Ethan Frome
    • The House of Mirth
    • The Custom of the Country
  • Willa Cather
    • My Ántonia
    • The Professor's House
    • A Lost Lady
  • Gertrude Stein
    • Three Lives
    • The Geographical History of America
    • The Making of Americans
    • Tender Buttons
  • Wallace Stevens
    • Collected Poems
    • The Necessary Angel
    • Opus Posthumous
    • The Palm at the End of the Mind
  • Vachel Lindsay
    • Collected Poems
  • Edgar Lee Masters
    • Spoon River Anthology
  • Theodore Dreiser
    • Sister Carrie
    • An American Tragedy
  • Sherwood Anderson
    • Winesburg, Ohio
    • Death in the Woods and Other Stories
  • Sinclair Lewis
    • Babbitt
    • It Can't Happen Here
  • Elinor Wylie
    • Last Poems
  • William Carlos Williams
    • Spring and All
    • Paterson
    • Collected Poems
  • Ezra Pound
    • Personae: Collected Poems
    • The Cantos
    • Literary Essays
  • Robinson Jeffers
    • Selected Poems
  • Marianne Moore
    • Complete Poems
  • Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)
    • Selected Poems
  • John Crowe Ransom
    • Selected Poems
  • T. S. Eliot
    • The Complete Poems and Plays
    • Selected Essays
  • Katherine Anne Porter
    • Collected Stories
  • Jean Toomer
    • Cane
  • John Dos Passos
    • U.S.A
  • Conrad Aiken
    • Collected Poems
    • Eugene O'Neill
  • Lazarus Laughed
    • The Iceman Cometh
    • Long Day's Journey Into Night
  • e. e. cummings
    • Complete Poems
  • John B. Wheelwright
    • Collected Poems
  • Robert Fitzgerald
    • Spring Shade: Poems
  • Louise Bogan
    • The Blue Estuaries: Selected Poems
  • Léonie Adams
    • Poems: A Selection
  • Hart Crane
    • Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose
  • Allen Tate
    • Collected Poems
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald
    • Babylon Revisited and Other Stories
    • The Great Gatsby
    • Tender is the Night
  • William Faulkner
    • As I Lay Dying
    • Sanctuary
    • Light in August
    • Absalom, Absalom!
    • The Sound and the Fury
    • The Wild Palms
    • The Collected Sories
    • The Hamlet
  • Ernest Hemingway
    • Complete Short Stories
    • A Farewell to Arms
    • The Sun Also Rises
    • The Garden of Eden
  • John Steinbeck
    • The Grapes of Wrath
  • Zora Neale Hurston
    • Their Eyes Were Watching God
  • Nathanael West
    • Miss Lonelyhearts
    • A Cool Million
    • The Day of the Locust
  • Richard Wright
    • Native Son
    • Black Boy
  • Eudora Welty
    • Collected Stories
  • Delta Wedding
    • The Robber Bridegroom
    • The Ponder Heart
  • Langston Hughes
    • Selected Poems
    • The Big Sea
    • I Wonder as I Wander
  • Edmund Wilson
    • The Shores of Light
  • Patriotic Gore
    • Kenneth Burke
    • Counter-statement
    • A Rhetoric of Motives
  • Joseph Mitchell
    • Up in the Old Hotel
  • Abraham Cahan
    • The Rise of David Levinsky
  • Kay Boyle
    • Three Short Novels
  • Ellen Glasgow
    • Barren Ground
    • Vein of Iron
  • John P. Marquand
    • H. M. Pulham, Esquire
    • John O'Hara
    • Collected Stories
    • Appointment in Samarra
  • Henry Roth
    • Call It Sleep
  • Thornton Wilder
    • Three Plays
  • Robert Penn Warren
    • All the King's Men
    • World Enough and Time
    • Selected Poems
  • Delmore Schwartz
    • Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge
  • Weldon Kees
    • Collected Poems
  • Elizabeth Bishop
    • The Complete Poems
  • John Berryman
    • Collected Poems
  • Paul Bowles
    • The Sheltering Sky
  • Randall Jarrell
    • Complete Poems
  • Charles Olson
    • The Maximus Poems
    • Collected Poems
  • Robert Hayden
    • Collected Poems
  • Robert Lowell
    • Collected Poems
  • Theodore Roethke
    • Collected Poems
    • Straw for the Fire
  • James Agee
    • Permit Me Voyage
    • Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
  • Jean Garrigue
    • Selected Poems
  • May Swenson
    • New & Selected Things Taking Place
    • In Other Words
  • Robert Duncan
    • Bending the Bow
  • Richard Wilbur
    • New and Collected Poems
  • Richard Eberhart
    • Collected Poems
  • M. B. Tolson
    • Harlem Gallery
  • Kenneth Koch
    • Seasons on Earth
    • Frank O' Hara
    • Selected Poems
  • James Schuyler
    • Collected Poems
  • James Baldwin
    • The Price of a Ticket
  • Saul Bellow
    • Seize the Day
    • The Adventures of Augie March
    • Herzog
  • John Cheever
    • The Stories
  • Bullet Park
    • Ralph Ellison
    • Invisible Man
  • Truman Capote
    • In Cold Blood
  • Carson McCullers
    • The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
    • The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
    • Flannery O'Connor
    • Complete Stories
    • The Violent Bear It Away
  • Wise Blood
    • Vladimir Nabokov
    • Lolita
  • Pale Fire
    • Gore Vidal
  • Myra Breckenridge
    • Lincoln
  • William Styron
    • The Long March
  • J. D. Salinger
    • The Catcher in the Rye
    • Nine Stories
  • Wright Morris
    • Ceremony in Lone Tree
  • Bernard Malamud
    • The Stories
    • The Fixer
  • Norman Mailer
    • Advertisements for Myself
    • The Executioner's Song
  • Ancient Evenings
    • John Hawkes
    • The Cannibal
  • Second Skin
    • William Gaddis
    • The Recognitions
  • Tennessee Williams
    • The Glass Menagerie
    • A Streetcar Named Desire
    • Summer and Smoke
  • Arthur Miller
    • Death of a Salesman
  • Edwin Justus Mayer
    • Children of Darkness
  • Harold Brodkey
    • Stories in an Almost Classical Mode
  • Ursula K. LeGuin
    • The Left Hand of Darkness
  • Raymond Carver
    • Where I'm Calling From
  • Robert Coover
    • Spanking the Maid
  • Don DeLillo
    • White Noise
    • Libra
  • Running Dog
    • Mao II
  • John Crowley
    • Little, Big
    • Aegypt
    • Love and Sleep
  • Guy Davenport
    • Tatlin!
  • James Dickey
    • The Early Motion
    • The Central Motion
  • E. L. Doctorow
    • The Book of Daniel
    • World's Fair
  • Stanley Elkin
    • The Living End
  • William H. Gass
    • In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
    • Omensetter's Luck
  • Russell Hoban
    • Riddley Walker
  • Denis Johnson
    • Angels
    • Fiskadoro
    • Jesus' Son
  • Cormac McCarthy
    • Blood Meridian
    • Suttree
    • Child of God
  • William Kennedy
    • Ironweed
    • The Albany Cycle
  • Toni Morrison
    • Song of Solomon
  • Gloria Naylor
    • The Women of Brewster Place
  • Joyce Carol Oates
    • Them
  • Walker Percy
    • The Moviegoer
  • Grace Paley
    • The Little Disturbances of Man
  • Thomas Pynchon
    • V
    • The Crying of Lot 49
    • Gravity's Rainbow
  • Cynthia Ozick
    • Envy, or Yiddish in America
    • The Messiah of Stockholm
  • Ishmael Reed
    • Mumbo Jumbo
  • Philip Roth
    • Portnoy's Complaint
    • My Life as a Man
    • Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue
    • The Counterlife
    • Patrimony
  • Operation Shylock
    • James Salter
  • Solo Faces
    • Light Years
  • Robert Stone
    • Dog Soldiers
    • A Flag for Sunrise
  • John Barth
    • The Floating Opera
    • The End of the Road
    • The Sot-Weed Factor
  • Walter Abish
    • Alphabetical Africa
    • How German Is It
  • Eclipse Fever
    • I Am the Dust Under Your Feet
  • Donald Barthelme
    • Forty Stories
    • The Dead Father
  • Thomas M. Disch
    • On Wings of Song
  • Paul Theroux
    • The Mosquito Coast
  • John Updike
    • The Witches of Eastwick
  • Kurt Vonnegut, Jr
    • Cat's Cradle
    • Edmund White
  • Forgetting Elena
    • Nocturnes for the King of Naples
  • James McCourt
    • Time Remaining
  • James Wilcox
    • Modern Baptists
    • A. R. Ammons
    • Collected Poems
    • Selected Longer Poems
    • Sphere: The Form of a Motion
  • John Ashbery
    • The Double Dream of Spring
    • Houseboat Days
    • Selected Poems
  • Flow Chart
    • Hotel Lautréamont
    • And the Stars Were Shining
  • David Mamet
    • American Buffalo
    • Speed-the-Plow
  • David Rabe
    • Streamers
  • Sam Shepard
    • Seven Plays
  • August Wilson
    • Fences
    • Joe Turner's Come and Gone
  • Anthony Hecht
    • Collected Earlier Poems
  • Edgar Bowers
    • Living Together: New and Selected Poems
  • Donald Justice
    • Selected Poems
  • James Merrill
    • From the First Nine
    • The Changing Light at Sandover
  • W. S. Merwin
    • Selected Poems
  • James Wright
    • Above the River: The Complete Poems
  • Galway Kinnell
    • Selected Poems
  • Philip Levine
    • Selected Poems
  • Irving Feldman
    • New and Selected Poems
  • Donald Hall
    • The One Day
    • Old and New Poems
  • Alvin Feinman
    • Poems
  • Richard Howard
    • Untitled Subjects
    • Findings
  • John Hollander
    • Reflections on Espionage
    • Selected Poetry
    • Tesserae
  • Gary Snyder
    • No Nature: New and Selected Poems
  • Charles Simic
    • Selected Poems
  • Mark Strand
    • Selected Poems
    • The Continuous Life
  • Dark Harbor
    • Charles Wright
    • The World of the Ten Thousand Things
  • Jay Wright
    • Dimensions of History
    • The Double Invention of Komo
    • Selected Poems
    • Elaine's Book
    • Boleros
  • Amy Clampitt
    • Westward
  • Allen Grossman
    • The Ether Dome and Other Poems: New and Selected
  • Howard Moss
    • New Selected Poems
  • James Applewhite
    • River Writing: An Eno Journal
  • J. D. McClatchy
    • The Rest of the Way
  • Alfred Corn
    • A Call in the Midst of the Crowd
  • Douglas Crase
    • The Revisionist
  • Rita Dove
    • Selected Poems
  • Thylias Moss
    • Small Congregations: New and Selected Poems
  • Edward Hirsch
    • Earthly Measures
  • Tony Kushner
    • Angels in America

Additions beyond Bloom's survey (editorial, 2026)

Modern China

  • Lu Xun
    • Call to Arms (including Diary of a Madman and The True Story of Ah Q)
  • Wild Grass
    • Shen Congwen
  • Border Town
    • Lao She
    • Rickshaw Boy
    • Teahouse
  • Mao Dun
    • Midnight
  • Ba Jin
    • Family
  • Qian Zhongshu
    • Fortress Besieged
  • Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing)
    • Love in a Fallen City
    • The Golden Cangue
  • Bei Dao
    • The August Sleepwalker: Poems

Modern Japan

  • Akutagawa Ryunosuke
    • Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories
  • Tanizaki Jun'ichiro
    • The Makioka Sisters
    • Some Prefer Nettles
    • In Praise of Shadows
  • Miyazawa Kenji
    • Poems and Stories
  • Kawabata Yasunari
    • Snow Country
    • The Sound of the Mountain
  • Thousand Cranes
    • Dazai Osamu
    • No Longer Human
    • The Setting Sun
  • Mishima Yukio
    • Confessions of a Mask
    • The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
    • The Sea of Fertility (tetralogy)
  • Abe Kobo
    • The Woman in the Dunes
  • Endo Shusaku
    • Silence
  • Oe Kenzaburo
    • A Personal Matter
    • The Silent Cry

Modern Korea

  • Yi Kwang-su
    • The Heartless (Mujeong)
  • Kim Sowol
    • Azaleas: Poems
  • Yi Sang
    • Wings and Other Stories
  • Hwang Sun-won
    • The Stories
  • Park Kyong-ni
    • Land (Toji)
  • Ko Un
    • Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives): Poems
  • Kim Hyesoon
    • Autobiography of Death: Poems
  • Hwang Sok-yong
    • The Guest

Modern Iran

  • Sadegh Hedayat
    • The Blind Owl
  • Forugh Farrokhzad
    • Selected Poems
  • Ahmad Shamlou
    • Selected Poems

India (in addition to Bloom's Narayan, Rushdie, and Jhabvala)

  • Rabindranath Tagore
    • Gitanjali
    • The Home and the World
    • Selected Short Stories
    • Premchand
    • Godan (The Gift of a Cow)
    • Selected Stories
  • Muhammad Iqbal
    • The Secrets of the Self and Selected Poems
  • Saadat Hasan Manto
    • Selected Stories (including Toba Tek Singh)

Modern Arabic (in addition to Bloom's Mahfuz, Adunis, Darwish, and Husayn)

  • Tayeb Salih
    • Season of Migration to the North
  • Ghassan Kanafani
    • Men in the Sun

Europe (omissions)

  • W. G. Sebald (Germany)
    • The Emigrants
    • The Rings of Saturn
    • Austerlitz
  • Georges Perec (France)
    • Life: A User's Manual
    • W, or the Memory of Childhood
  • Raymond Queneau (France)
    • Exercises in Style
    • Zazie in the Metro
  • Yevgeny Zamyatin (Russia)
    • We
  • Vasily Grossman (Russia)
    • Life and Fate
  • Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (Russia)
    • The Letter Killers Club
  • Halldor Laxness (Iceland)
    • Independent People
  • Tarjei Vesaas (Norway)
    • The Ice Palace
  • Tove Jansson (Finland)
    • The Summer Book
  • Inger Christensen (Denmark)
    • Alphabet
  • Cees Nooteboom (Netherlands)
    • Rituals
  • Willem Frederik Hermans (Netherlands)
    • The Darkroom of Damocles
  • Harry Mulisch (Netherlands)
    • The Discovery of Heaven
  • Hugo Claus (Belgium)
    • The Sorrow of Belgium
  • Bohumil Hrabal (Czechoslovakia)
    • Too Loud a Solitude
    • I Served the King of England
  • Sandor Marai (Hungary)
    • Embers
  • Ismail Kadare (Albania)
    • The Palace of Dreams
    • The General of the Dead Army
  • Curzio Malaparte (Italy)
    • Kaputt
    • The Skin
  • Uwe Johnson (Germany)
    • Anniversaries
  • Nazim Hikmet (Turkey)
    • Human Landscapes from My Country
  • Yashar Kemal (Turkey)
    • Memed, My Hawk

Latin America (omissions)

  • Juan Rulfo (Mexico)
    • Pedro Paramo
    • The Burning Plain
  • Clarice Lispector (Brazil)
    • The Passion According to G. H.
    • The Hour of the Star
  • Joao Guimaraes Rosa (Brazil)
    • The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (Grande Sertao: Veredas)
  • Juan Carlos Onetti (Uruguay)
    • The Shipyard
    • A Brief Life
  • Adolfo Bioy Casares (Argentina)
    • The Invention of Morel
  • Felisberto Hernandez (Uruguay)
    • Piano Stories
  • Augusto Roa Bastos (Paraguay)
    • I, the Supreme
  • Manuel Puig (Argentina)
    • Kiss of the Spider Woman

The United States (omissions)

  • Leslie Marmon Silko
    • Ceremony
  • N. Scott Momaday
    • House Made of Dawn
  • Louise Erdrich
    • Love Medicine
  • Toni Morrison
    • Beloved
  • Marilynne Robinson
    • Housekeeping
  • Art Spiegelman
    • Maus
  • Annie Dillard
    • Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

E. The Global Age: A Canonical Prophecy (the last three decades)

The hazard of literary overpopulation Bloom named is only greater now; not all of these can prove canonical. They are included for aesthetic strength and originality as the moment can judge them, and for no other reason. Where a writer already appears in Bloom's lists, only the major later work is given.

The United States

  • Cormac McCarthy
    • No Country for Old Men
    • The Road
  • Toni Morrison
    • Jazz
    • Paradise
  • Don DeLillo
    • Underworld
  • Philip Roth
    • Sabbath's Theater
  • American Pastoral
    • The Human Stain
    • The Plot Against America
  • Thomas Pynchon
    • Mason & Dixon
    • Against the Day
  • Marilynne Robinson
    • Gilead
    • Home
  • David Foster Wallace
    • Infinite Jest
  • Jonathan Franzen
    • The Corrections
  • Jeffrey Eugenides
    • Middlesex
  • Michael Chabon
    • The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
  • George Saunders
    • Tenth of December
    • Lincoln in the Bardo
  • Denis Johnson
    • Tree of Smoke
  • Edward P. Jones
    • The Known World
  • Junot Diaz
    • The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
  • Jhumpa Lahiri
    • Interpreter of Maladies
  • Colson Whitehead
    • The Underground Railroad
    • The Nickel Boys
  • Louise Erdrich
    • The Round House
    • LaRose
  • Tommy Orange
    • There There
  • Richard Powers
    • The Overstory
  • Louise Gluck
    • The Wild Iris
    • Faithful and Virtuous Night
  • Jorie Graham
    • Collected Poems
  • Claudia Rankine
    • Citizen: An American Lyric
  • Natasha Trethewey
    • Native Guard
  • Terrance Hayes
    • American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
  • Joan Didion
    • The Year of Magical Thinking
  • Maggie Nelson
    • The Argonauts
    • Bluets
  • Suzan-Lori Parks
    • Topdog/Underdog
  • Lynn Nottage
    • Sweat

Canada

  • Anne Carson
    • Autobiography of Red
    • Nox
  • Margaret Atwood
    • Alias Grace
    • The Blind Assassin
    • Oryx and Crake
  • Michael Ondaatje
    • The English Patient
    • Anil's Ghost
  • Anne Michaels
    • Fugitive Pieces
  • Madeleine Thien
    • Do Not Say We Have Nothing
  • Esi Edugyan
    • Washington Black
  • Dionne Brand
    • Ossuaries

Latin America and the Caribbean

  • Roberto Bolano
    • The Savage Detectives
    • 2666
    • By Night in Chile
  • Mario Vargas Llosa
    • The Feast of the Goat
  • Cesar Aira
    • An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter
  • Juan Gabriel Vasquez
    • The Sound of Things Falling
  • Valeria Luiselli
    • Lost Children Archive
  • Samanta Schweblin
    • Fever Dream
  • Fernanda Melchor
    • Hurricane Season
  • Mariana Enriquez
    • The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
  • Edwidge Danticat
    • The Farming of Bones
  • Jamaica Kincaid
    • The Autobiography of My Mother
  • Patrick Chamoiseau
    • Texaco
  • Edouard Glissant
    • Poetics of Relation
  • Marlon James
    • A Brief History of Seven Killings

Great Britain and Ireland

  • Kazuo Ishiguro
    • The Remains of the Day
    • Never Let Me Go
  • Hilary Mantel
    • Wolf Hall
    • Bring Up the Bodies
  • Ian McEwan
    • Atonement
  • Penelope Fitzgerald
    • The Blue Flower
  • Julian Barnes
    • Flaubert's Parrot
    • The Sense of an Ending
  • Salman Rushdie
    • The Moor's Last Sigh
  • Zadie Smith
    • White Teeth
    • NW
  • Alasdair Gray
    • Lanark
  • Ali Smith
    • How to Be Both
    • Autumn
  • John Banville
    • The Book of Evidence
    • The Sea
  • Colm Toibin
    • The Master
    • Brooklyn
  • Anne Enright
    • The Gathering
  • Sebastian Barry
    • A Long Long Way
    • Days Without End
  • Claire Keegan
    • Foster
    • Small Things Like These
  • Eimear McBride
    • A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing
  • Max Porter
    • Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
  • Alice Oswald
    • Dart
    • Memorial
  • Don Paterson
    • Selected Poems
  • Bernardine Evaristo
    • Girl, Woman, Other

Continental Europe

  • Michel Houellebecq (France)
    • The Elementary Particles
  • Annie Ernaux (France)
    • The Years
  • Patrick Modiano (France)
    • Missing Person
  • Emmanuel Carrere (France)
    • The Adversary
  • Pierre Michon (France)
    • Small Lives
  • Mathias Enard (France)
    • Compass
  • Marie NDiaye (France)
    • Three Strong Women
  • Elena Ferrante (Italy)
    • My Brilliant Friend (the Neapolitan Quartet)
  • Umberto Eco (Italy)
    • The Name of the Rose
  • Roberto Calasso (Italy)
    • The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
  • Claudio Magris (Italy)
    • Danube
  • Antonio Tabucchi (Italy)
    • Pereira Maintains
  • Javier Marias (Spain)
    • A Heart So White
    • Your Face Tomorrow
  • Enrique Vila-Matas (Spain)
    • Bartleby & Co.
  • Javier Cercas (Spain)
    • Soldiers of Salamis
  • Jose Saramago (Portugal)
    • Blindness
    • The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
  • Antonio Lobo Antunes (Portugal)
    • The Land at the End of the World
  • Thomas Bernhard (Austria)
    • Extinction
  • Elfriede Jelinek (Austria)
    • The Piano Teacher
  • Herta Muller (Germany)
    • The Hunger Angel
  • Jenny Erpenbeck (Germany)
    • Visitation
    • Go, Went, Gone
    • Kairos
  • Daniel Kehlmann (Germany)
    • Measuring the World
  • Karl Ove Knausgaard (Norway)
    • My Struggle
  • Jon Fosse (Norway)
    • Septology
    • Melancholy
  • Per Petterson (Norway)
    • Out Stealing Horses
  • Sjon (Iceland)
    • The Blue Fox
  • Tove Ditlevsen (Denmark)
    • The Copenhagen Trilogy
  • Cees Nooteboom (Netherlands)
    • The Following Story
  • Wislawa Szymborska (Poland)
    • Poems New and Collected
  • Olga Tokarczuk (Poland)
    • Flights
    • The Books of Jacob
  • Ryszard Kapuscinski (Poland)
    • The Emperor
  • Laszlo Krasznahorkai (Hungary)
    • Satantango
    • The Melancholy of Resistance
  • Peter Nadas (Hungary)
    • A Book of Memories
  • Imre Kertesz (Hungary)
    • Fatelessness
  • Magda Szabo (Hungary)
    • The Door
  • Mircea Cartarescu (Romania)
    • Blinding
    • Solenoid
  • Svetlana Alexievich (Belarus)
    • Secondhand Time
  • Lyudmila Ulitskaya (Russia)
    • The Big Green Tent
  • Georgi Gospodinov (Bulgaria)
    • Time Shelter
  • Dubravka Ugresic (Croatia)
    • The Museum of Unconditional Surrender

Africa

  • J. M. Coetzee
    • Disgrace
    • Elizabeth Costello
  • Nadine Gordimer
    • The Pickup
  • Abdulrazak Gurnah
    • Paradise
    • Afterlives
  • Ngugi wa Thiong'o
    • Wizard of the Crow
  • Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
    • Half of a Yellow Sun
    • Americanah
  • Ben Okri
    • The Famished Road
  • Tsitsi Dangarembga
    • Nervous Conditions
  • Mariama Ba
    • So Long a Letter
  • Bessie Head
    • A Question of Power
  • Nuruddin Farah
    • Maps
  • Assia Djebar
    • Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade
  • Tahar Ben Jelloun
    • The Sand Child
  • Mia Couto
    • Sleepwalking Land
  • Jose Eduardo Agualusa
    • The Book of Chameleons
  • Damon Galgut
    • The Promise
  • Marlene van Niekerk
    • Agaat
  • Maaza Mengiste
    • The Shadow King

The Middle East

  • Orhan Pamuk (Turkey)
    • My Name Is Red
    • Snow
    • The Museum of Innocence
  • David Grossman (Israel)
    • To the End of the Land
  • Amos Oz (Israel)
    • A Tale of Love and Darkness
  • Etgar Keret (Israel)
    • The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God
  • Elias Khoury (Lebanon)
    • Gate of the Sun
  • Hanan al-Shaykh (Lebanon)
    • The Story of Zahra
  • Alaa Al Aswany (Egypt)
    • The Yacoubian Building

South Asia

  • Arundhati Roy
    • The God of Small Things
  • Amitav Ghosh
    • The Shadow Lines
    • Sea of Poppies (the Ibis Trilogy)
  • Vikram Seth
    • A Suitable Boy
  • Rohinton Mistry
    • A Fine Balance
  • Anita Desai
    • Clear Light of Day
  • Kiran Desai
    • The Inheritance of Loss
  • Aravind Adiga
    • The White Tiger
  • Mohsin Hamid (Pakistan)
    • The Reluctant Fundamentalist
    • Exit West
  • Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lanka)
    • Anil's Ghost
  • A. K. Ramanujan
    • The Collected Poems

East and Southeast Asia

  • Murakami Haruki (Japan)
    • The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
    • Kafka on the Shore
  • Ogawa Yoko (Japan)
    • The Memory Police
  • Tawada Yoko (Japan)
    • The Emissary
  • Kawakami Mieko (Japan)
    • Breasts and Eggs
  • Mo Yan (China)
    • Big Breasts and Wide Hips
  • Yan Lianke (China)
    • Dream of Ding Village
  • Su Tong (China)
    • Raise the Red Lantern
  • Wang Anyi (China)
    • The Song of Everlasting Sorrow
  • Can Xue (China)
    • Frontier
  • Liu Cixin (China)
    • The Three-Body Problem
  • Han Kang (Korea)
    • The Vegetarian
    • Human Acts
    • We Do Not Part
  • Bae Suah (Korea)
    • Untold Night and Day
  • Bao Ninh (Vietnam)
    • The Sorrow of War
  • Wu Ming-yi (Taiwan)
    • The Stolen Bicycle

Oceania

  • Gerald Murnane (Australia)
    • The Plains
    • Border Districts
  • Tim Winton (Australia)
    • Cloudstreet
  • Peter Carey (Australia)
    • True History of the Kelly Gang
  • Richard Flanagan (Australia)
    • The Narrow Road to the Deep North
  • Alexis Wright (Australia)
    • Carpentaria
  • Kim Scott (Australia)
    • That Deadman Dance
  • Les Murray (Australia)
    • Fredy Neptune
  • Janet Frame (New Zealand)
    • An Angel at My Table
  • Keri Hulme (New Zealand)
    • The Bone People
  • Witi Ihimaera (New Zealand)
    • The Whale Rider
  • Epeli Hau'ofa (Tonga/Fiji)
    • Tales of the Tikongs

    New Forms: The Graphic Narrative

  • Art Spiegelman
    • Maus
  • Marjane Satrapi
    • Persepolis
  • Alison Bechdel
    • Fun Home
  • Chris Ware
    • Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth