The 100 best books about love and desire

No. 11 on this list. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock · T. S. Eliot · 1915

Taught in schools: Common Core text exemplars (Appendix B) (US)

One of the most taught poems in English, standard in introductory poetry courses, modernism surveys and the major anthologies. First printed in Poetry magazine in 1915 at Ezra Pound's urging, it is usually treated as the start of modernist verse in English.

No. 12 on this list. The Tale of Genji · Murasaki Shikibu · 1010

Included in: Bokklubben World Library, UNESCO Collection of Representative Works

Written by a Heian court lady six centuries before Don Quixote, The Tale of Genji traces the emotional life of a prince and his descendants through a world governed by aesthetic refinement, seasonal feeling, and erotic longing — inventing the psychological novel before the concept existed in any other literary tradition.

No. 13 on this list. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality · Sigmund Freud · 1905

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is a foundational text in psychology, psychoanalysis, sexuality studies, and cultural theory curricula worldwide. Listed among Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century (1999), the Open Syllabus Top 500 in Literature, and available on Wikipedia in 20 languages. Taught in psychology, philosophy, literature, gender studies, and history of science courses, it is considered inescapable for anyone studying psychoanalysis or the history of sexuality.

No. 14 on this list. David Copperfield · Charles Dickens · 1850

Taught in schools: WJEC/Eduqas GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

David Copperfield is firmly established in the Western literary canon as one of Dickens's supreme achievements and a defining example of the Victorian Bildungsroman. It remains widely taught, studied, and adapted across cultures.

No. 15 on this list. Twelfth Night · William Shakespeare · 1602

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK), CAPE Literatures in English – Caribbean Examinations Council, Pearson Edexcel GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

Included in: Great Books of the Western World

Twelfth Night is among the most widely taught and performed Shakespeare comedies and a near-universal fixture in secondary school and university Shakespeare curricula. Its themes of disguise, gender ambiguity, and unrequited love have made it a central text in gender studies, queer theory, and Renaissance drama courses. It appears on more syllabi than any other Shakespeare comedy except perhaps A Midsummer Night's Dream.

No. 16 on this list. A Streetcar Named Desire · Tennessee Williams · 1947

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK), Cambridge IGCSE Literature in English (0475), UNAM Escuela Nacional Preparatoria – programas de Literatura (Mexico)

Required reading in virtually every American literature curriculum, from high school through university, and among the most-produced plays in the American theater canon. It appears on nearly every 'great American plays' list alongside Death of a Salesman, and has been continuously performed since its 1947 Broadway premiere.

No. 17 on this list. Collected Poems of W.H. Auden · W.H. Auden · 1976

One of the most important English-language poets of the twentieth century, central to the modern canon alongside Yeats and Eliot.

No. 18 on this list. Hippolytus · Euripides · c. 428 BCE

Included in: Great Books of the Western World

Hippolytus is a cornerstone of classical literature curricula worldwide, appearing in virtually every Greek tragedy anthology and university drama syllabus. It is one of only 17 surviving plays by Euripides and is consistently featured in courses on Western drama, classical antiquity, and the history of theatre. No direct Open Syllabus data was available, but its canonical presence in the Western literary tradition is unambiguous.

No. 19 on this list. Middlemarch · George Eliot · 1871

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

Included in: Bokklubben World Library, Great Books of the Western World

Appears on 1,070 university syllabi (75th percentile by Open Syllabus), anchoring Victorian literature courses worldwide. Wikipedia covers it in 25 languages with a substantial 52,926-character article including dedicated Reception and Adaptations sections. Virginia Woolf's declaration that it is 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people' has given it a persistent critical shorthand that appears on nearly every canonical 'greatest novels' list.

No. 20 on this list. A Hunger Artist · Franz Kafka · 1924

Kafka's short fiction is taught in university literature courses worldwide, and 'A Hunger Artist' is among his most frequently anthologized works. It appears in virtually every Kafka collection and features in major short story anthologies. The work has sustained academic and pedagogical attention since its posthumous publication in 1922.

No. 21 on this list. The Sorrows of Young Werther · Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1774

Standard curriculum in German literature and comparative literature courses worldwide. The novel launched the Sturm und Drang movement and anchored the European Romantic turn. No syllabus data is available in the database, but its presence in university world literature courses is pervasive and long-established.

No. 22 on this list. Lolita · Vladimir Nabokov · 1955

Included in: Bokklubben World Library

Nabokov gave a monster the most beautiful prose in the English language and dared the reader to be seduced by it, producing the most disturbing test case for the relationship between aesthetic pleasure and moral judgment. Humbert Humbert's sentences are so exquisite that noticing your own enchantment becomes the novel's real subject.

No. 23 on this list. The Idiot · Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1869

Taught in schools: Russian FGOS literature standard

Included in: Bokklubben World Library

Prince Myshkin steps off a train into St. Petersburg after four years in a Swiss sanatorium, cured of his epilepsy but carrying no money, no connections, and a disposition so transparently good that everyone around him assumes he is simple. He is not simple. He sees directly into people — their vanity, their suffering, their better selves — and says so without calculation, which the society he enters reads as idiocy. Within days he is entangled with two women: Nastasya Filippovna, a celebrated beauty who has been kept and ruined by a wealthy patron and who tears through every room she enters, and Aglaya Epanchina, young and proud and surrounded by suitors. Both fall in love with him. He loves both. He cannot save either. Dostoevsky set out to portray a 'positively beautiful man' and then placed him in conditions designed to break such a man apart. The question the novel drives toward — whether goodness has any purchase on the world, whether beauty can save or only destroy — is never answered. What accumulates instead is a portrait of Russian society in the 1860s: the new money, the decayed gentry, the radical youths, the drawing rooms where everyone performs and no one is seen. Myshkin alone refuses to perform, which makes him simultaneously the novel's moral center and its most helpless figure. The final scene — two men sitting in darkness beside a dead woman — is among the most harrowing endings in 19th-century fiction.

No. 24 on this list. Troilus and Criseyde · Geoffrey Chaucer · 1385

Included in: Great Books of the Western World

Required reading in virtually every medieval English literature curriculum, taught across English, Comparative Literature, and Medieval Studies programs at universities worldwide. Though Open Syllabus data is unavailable here, Chaucer courses built around this text are standard at every major university with an English department. It holds a place among the most-studied long poems in the English language.

No. 25 on this list. Wuthering Heights · Emily Brontë · 1847

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK), CAPE Literatures in English – Caribbean Examinations Council, CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council

Included in: Bokklubben World Library

Appears on 4,582 university syllabi (91.5th percentile per Open Syllabus), placing it above most Victorian novels. Wikipedia coverage in 61 languages with dedicated reception and adaptations sections signals global canonical standing. Listed in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and the BBC Big Read Top 100.

No. 26 on this list. Three Sisters · Anton Chekhov · 1901

Taught in schools: Hungarian literature curriculum (magyar nyelv és irodalom) (Hungary), Russian FGOS literature standard

Taught in every course on modern drama and staged continuously by major companies since its 1901 Moscow Art Theatre premiere. The sisters' longing for Moscow is one of the best-known situations in world theatre.

No. 27 on this list. The Lady with the Dog · Anton Chekhov · 1899

Taught in schools: Russian FGOS literature standard

Among the most anthologized and taught short stories in any language, a staple of fiction courses and writing workshops. It is frequently named as the greatest short story ever written.

No. 28 on this list. Long Day's Journey into Night · Eugene O'Neill · 1956

O'Neill dramatized his own family — the morphine-addicted mother, the alcoholic father, the doomed brother — with such lacerating honesty that he ordered the play sealed until twenty-five years after his death. The result is the most autobiographically raw masterpiece in American theater, a four-act cycle of blame and forgiveness that never grants its characters the relief of a resolution.

No. 29 on this list. The Decameron · Giovanni Boccaccio · 1353

Included in: Bokklubben World Library

Ten young Florentines flee the Black Death and tell a hundred stories—bawdy, tragic, satirical—that give prose fiction its first great architecture. Chaucer borrowed from it, and the frame-narrative technique Boccaccio perfected here became the scaffolding for centuries of European storytelling.

No. 30 on this list. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame · Victor Hugo · 1831

Among Hugo most famous novels. Sparked Gothic Revival and cathedral preservation movement.