The 100 best books about technology and modernity by men

No. 11 on this list. Sister Carrie · Theodore Dreiser · 1900

Appears on 1,040 university syllabi and sits on the Modern Library 100 Best Novels list. It is a standard text for American naturalism and the Gilded Age city.

No. 12 on this list. The Home and the World · Rabindranath Tagore · 1916

The Home and the World is one of Tagore's most celebrated novels and a staple of postcolonial literature syllabi worldwide. Written by the first non-European Nobel laureate, it occupies a significant position in the global literary canon, particularly in discussions of Indian literature, nationalism, and modernity. Satyajit Ray's 1984 film adaptation further cemented its cultural status. It appears in 7 Wikipedia languages and has remained continuously in print for over a century.

No. 13 on this list. Tropic of Cancer · Henry Miller · 1934

Tropic of Cancer holds established position in modernist and 20th-century literature curricula, taught in courses on American modernism, expatriate literature, and the experimental novel. Recognized as significant but not universally required reading at all levels like Gatsby or 1984; more niche canonical status within specific literary traditions.

No. 14 on this list. The Rainbow · D.H. Lawrence · 1915

The Rainbow is firmly established in the English literary canon as one of Lawrence's major novels and a landmark of early modernism. It appears on the Modern Library 100 Best Novels list, is a staple of university curricula covering British modernism, and is widely recognized as a foundational text in the novel of sexuality and consciousness.

No. 15 on this list. House of Glass · Pramoedya Ananta Toer · 1988

House of Glass is the concluding volume of the Buru Quartet, which is universally regarded as the most important work of Indonesian literature and one of the defining anticolonial novels of the twentieth century. It appears on numerous world literature reading lists and is taught at universities across Southeast Asia, Europe, and North America, though its presence in Western canons is less robust than its literary standing merits.

No. 16 on this list. Nova · Samuel R. Delany · 1968

Nova holds a firm place in the SF literary canon, included in the SF Masterworks series and cited as a defining text of the New Wave movement. Its standing is strong within genre criticism but has not fully crossed into mainstream literary canonization.

No. 17 on this list. Saint Joan · George Bernard Shaw · 1923

Included in: Great Books of the Western World

In 1429, Joan, an illiterate seventeen-year-old peasant girl from Domrémy, arrives at the castle of Vaucouleurs claiming that saints' voices command her to crown the Dauphin and drive the English from France. Through sheer conviction, she persuades the skeptical Captain Robert de Baudricourt to send her to Chinon, where she astounds the French court. The weak Dauphin Charles, his cynical Archbishop, and the capable soldier Dunois all find themselves swept along by her extraordinary certainty. Joan leads French forces to lift the siege of Orleans and sees Charles crowned at Rheims, but her military boldness and claim to direct divine guidance threaten both Church hierarchy and feudal nobility. The English Earl of Warwick and the French Bishop Cauchon, neither villains nor fools, recognize that Joan's proto-Protestant insistence on individual conscience and her proto-nationalist loyalty to France above feudal allegiances endanger their entire world order. At her trial for heresy, Joan faces judges who believe sincerely that they serve God by destroying her. She recants briefly under threat of burning, then reclaims her voices and goes to the stake. Twenty-five years later, in Charles's dream, the rehabilitated and eventually canonized Joan asks when the world will be ready to receive its saints—and receives only silence.

No. 18 on this list. From Hell · Alan Moore · 1999

Widely regarded as one of the greatest graphic novels ever produced. A staple of comics criticism and increasingly taught in university courses.

No. 19 on this list. The Cyberiad · Stanisław Lem · 1965

Trurl and Klapaucius are constructors — engineers of impossible things — who travel the universe building machines that write poetry, create dragons out of probability, and kidnap kings using algorithms. In the opening story, Trurl builds a machine that can make anything starting with the letter N. When it begins making Nothing — not ordinary nothing, but dynamic, aggressive Nothingness — it starts erasing the world one item at a time: the gruncheons go, then the pritons, then the zits, and the sky acquires holes that have never healed. Stanisław Lem writes fairy tales about robots, but the fairy tales are philosophical arguments in disguise. Each of the fifteen linked adventures runs a thought experiment: what happens when collective intelligence exceeds the scale at which militarism makes sense? Can a machine write great poetry if civilization wrote the poet? What does it mean to exist inside a simulation you cannot distinguish from reality? The deadpan fable narrator treats catastrophe and cosmic comedy with identical gravity, and the gap between that voice and what is actually happening is where all the meaning lives. The Cyberiad reads as slapstick adventure on the surface — Trurl escaping dungeon after dungeon with improbable ingenuity — and as philosophy underneath, where questions about consciousness, creation, and the purpose of intelligence are never resolved. Lem gives you both pleasures at once, and the math jokes are genuine.

No. 20 on this list. Spring Snow · Yukio Mishima · 1969

Included in: UNESCO Collection of Representative Works

Spring Snow is the first volume of Mishima's Sea of Fertility tetralogy and is regularly taught in world literature and Japanese literature courses at universities globally. While no database syllabus data was retrieved, the novel is widely regarded as one of the essential works of 20th-century Japanese literature and appears frequently on recommended reading lists for modern world fiction.

No. 21 on this list. Nana · Émile Zola · 1880

Nana stands as a defining text of literary naturalism and a cornerstone of French 19th-century fiction. As the ninth novel in Zola's ambitious Rougon-Macquart cycle, it regularly appears in French literature curricula and surveys of European realism. While perhaps less universally assigned than Germinal or L'Assommoir, it remains essential to understanding naturalism, Second Empire social critique, and Zola's literary project.

No. 22 on this list. The Master of Go · Yasunari Kawabata · 1954

Regularly taught in Japanese literature and world literature courses at university level, though less ubiquitous than Kawabata's Snow Country. Recognized as one of the key texts for understanding 20th-century Japanese prose and the aesthetic of mono no aware. Its inclusion in Nobel Prize retrospectives solidified its place in the world literature canon.

No. 23 on this list. The Palace of Dreams · Ismail Kadare · 1981

Mark-Alem Quprili wakes one morning to begin his first day at the Tabir Sarrail — the Palace of Dreams — where the Ottoman State collects, sorts, and interprets every dream dreamed by every subject across the Empire, searching for the one divine signal that might save or doom the Sultan. His family, the great Quprili dynasty that has given the Empire five Grand Viziers and as many imprisoned or decapitated members, arranged the appointment. The building swallows him whole: labyrinthine corridors, blue-green files stacked floor to ceiling, clerks bent over thousands of nightly visions from Kustendil to the European borders. Kadare wrote this novel in 1981 as allegory, the Ottoman machinery standing in for communist Albania under Enver Hoxha. The Palace of Dreams does not merely observe its citizens — it harvests their unconscious, processing the darker side of the population's inner life as raw material for state power. Mark-Alem, caught between his family's grandeur and the bureaucracy's anonymous terror, learns to alter dream interpretations to avoid culpability, to keep his head down while the system grinds. At dinner, his uncle Kurt speaks with reckless brilliance about the Tabir as the only institution where the masses make direct contact with the state. Nobody changes the subject in time. This is a Kafkaesque novel that knows exactly what it is doing with Kafka — the dreamworld is not metaphor but administrative fact, and the dread is the dread of the functionary who understands, too late, that he has become part of the machine.

No. 24 on this list. Naomi · Jun'ichirō Tanizaki · 1924

Naomi is a staple of Japanese literature and world literature courses at universities across the United States, Europe, and Japan — Tanizaki's most accessible novel and the one most commonly assigned to introduce his work. While not as universally required as Kafka or Fitzgerald, it appears consistently in syllabi on Japanese modernism and postcolonial readings of cultural identity. The 'Naomi-ism' phenomenon it catalyzed became shorthand in Japanese cultural criticism for the era's anxious Westernization.

No. 25 on this list. The Lost Steps · Alejo Carpentier · 1953

A core text in Latin American literature and comparative literature courses worldwide, taught alongside García Márquez and Borges as a foundational work of the region's literary tradition. Less universally assigned than One Hundred Years of Solitude but standard in any serious Latin American or world literature syllabus. The novel's prologue, which theorizes 'lo real maravilloso,' makes it required reading for understanding 20th-century Latin American fiction.

No. 26 on this list. Slowness · Milan Kundera · 1995

Slowness is widely taught in European literature and comparative literature courses, particularly as a late-career Kundera work written in French — a singular act that attracted sustained critical attention. No syllabus data was found in the database, but the novel appears on numerous university reading lists for postmodern and Central European literature. Its canonical status is solid within Kundera scholarship though less universal than his earlier novels like The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

No. 27 on this list. Man and Superman · George Bernard Shaw · 1903

Man and Superman appears on 86 university syllabi (48th percentile by Open Syllabus data) and holds Wikipedia articles in 9 languages. It is taught in drama and modern literature courses but sits behind Pygmalion and Major Barbara in Shaw's own canon. The Wikipedia article includes dedicated Reception and Adaptations sections, indicating sustained critical discourse.

No. 28 on this list. The Confessions of Felix Krull · Thomas Mann · 1954

Felix Krull introduces himself in the opening pages as a man of exceptional gifts — charm, beauty, and a talent for deceit he regards as a form of artistry. Mann's confidence man begins in Rhineland Germany, faking an epileptic fit to avoid military service, then slides into Paris hotel life as a lift-boy and waiter, studying the wealthy guests who pass through his cage with the eye of a naturalist. When a young aristocrat, the Marquis de Venosta, asks Felix to take his place on a voyage to Lisbon so he can stay in Paris with his mistress, Felix accepts without hesitation. He becomes the Marquis entirely — adopting the title, the wardrobe, the social obligations, including conversations with a king. In Lisbon he falls simultaneously for a paleontologist's wife and her daughter, a situation the novel pursues to its famous abrupt ending. Mann worked on this picaresque novel intermittently from 1910 until his death in 1955, leaving it deliberately unfinished. The comedy is philosophical: Felix's frauds expose aristocratic convention as performance all the way down, and his Hermes-like nature — trickster, god of travelers and thieves — gives the social satire a mythological undertow. Mann writes sentences that curl back on themselves in self-admiring spirals that perfectly mirror his narrator. You read it trusting nothing Felix says and believing everything.

No. 29 on this list. Crash · J.G. Ballard · 1973

Crash appears regularly on university syllabi in cultural studies, media studies, and postmodern fiction courses, and appears on several 'great novels' lists including the Guardian's and Modern Library. It is firmly established as a significant postwar British novel taught across disciplines, though not in the volume of the most canonical literary texts (Beloved at 85, Great Gatsby at 95). Ballard's work is more consistently taught in British universities than American ones.

No. 30 on this list. The Guide · R.K. Narayan · 1958

Taught in schools: CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council

The Guide is the central text of Indian English fiction before Rushdie and appears regularly in postcolonial, South Asian, and world literature courses. It was the first novel in English to win the Sahitya Akademi Award, India's national literary prize. Wikipedia articles in multiple languages; the 1965 Bollywood film adaptation signals deep cultural penetration within India.