The 100 best modernist and experimental novels

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett and The Stranger by Albert Camus lead the 100 best modernist and experimental novels, ranked by literary regard. To start, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami is the most approachable of the highly regarded books here, about 14 hours to read.

Each point of light is one of the 100, placed by how hard it is to read. The brighter, the higher it ranks. The dotted line is one way up.

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No. 1 of 100

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville · 1851

Difficulty 71/10026 hours

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About 1,198 hours for 98 of 100 books with measured lengths. Estimates use 250 words a minute, adjusted for each book's difficulty. At 2 hours a day, about 599 days for those books.

1–10 · 152 hours

  1. No. 1 on this list. Moby-Dick

    Herman Melville · 1851

    Difficult26 hours

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

    Melville poured cetology, Shakespearean soliloquy, sermon, sea shanty, and metaphysical dread into one whaling voyage, creating a book that operates simultaneously as adventure novel, encyclopedia, and prose poem about obsession. Nothing in American literature before or since has this range of register in a single work.

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  2. No. 2 on this list. Waiting for Godot

    Samuel Beckett · 1953

    Difficult2.4 hours

    Included in: Great Books of the Western World

    Waiting for Godot appears on virtually every comparative literature, modern drama, and theater studies syllabus worldwide, and is listed in Open Syllabus's Top 500 Literature titles. The Wikipedia article exists in 68 languages, and the play has been continuously performed since its 1953 Paris premiere. Le Monde named it among the 100 Books of the Century. It is as canonical as any play written after Shakespeare.

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  3. No. 3 on this list. The Stranger

    Albert Camus · 1942

    Challenging3 hours

    Included in: Bokklubben World Library

    The Stranger appears on Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century, the Open Syllabus Top 500 Literature list, and 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Published in prestige editions by both NYRB Classics and Penguin Modern Classics, it is one of the most assigned existentialist texts in university world literature courses across Europe, North America, and beyond.

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  4. A standard text in philosophy and German-literature courses, and one of the most widely read works of modern philosophy worldwide. Often the entry point to Nietzsche. It ranks with Notes from Underground in curricula, though less often assigned in full than Crime and Punishment.

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  5. No. 5 on this list. Dubliners

    James Joyce · 1914

    Difficult8.1 hours

    Taught in schools: CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council

    Dubliners appears on 1,771 university syllabi according to the Open Syllabus Project (81st percentile), making it a fixture in modernist literature and short fiction courses worldwide. Its Wikipedia article spans 43 languages, and prestige editions from Penguin Classics and NYRB Classics attest to its sustained standing as essential reading. Every serious curriculum in Irish, British, or modernist literature includes it.

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  6. No. 6 on this list. Heart of Darkness

    Joseph Conrad · 1899

    Challenging4 hours

    Taught in schools: Pacific Senior Secondary Certificate – English, Pearson Edexcel GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

    Included in: Great Books of the Western World

    Appears on 5,515 university syllabi according to Open Syllabus (93.5th percentile), placing it above The Great Gatsby in teaching frequency. Listed on the Modern Library 100 Best Novels (1998) and consistently featured on 'essential reading' lists. Wikipedia articles exist in 49 languages, reflecting global canonical reach.

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  7. Thomas Pynchon constructs an encyclopedic paranoid masterwork spanning 760 pages of rocket science, Pavlovian conditioning, corporate conspiracy, and encyclopedic digression. Tyrone Slothrop, American lieutenant in wartime London, discovers his sexual conquests map perfectly onto V-2 rocket strike locations—but the erections precede the impacts. Was he conditioned as an infant by sinister behaviorist Laszlo Jamf? Does a corporate-military cartel control history itself? Pynchon provides evidence for every paranoid connection while confirming none. The novel sprawls across 1944-45 Europe, from London under rocket attack to occupied Germany's anarchic Zone, accumulating hundreds of characters, corporate entities, chemical formulas, and historical conspiracies. Pynchon's prose shifts registers violently: technical manuals on rocket engineering dissolve into vaudeville routines, then into lyrical meditations on death and entropy. The vocabulary demands encyclopedic knowledge—thermodynamics, organic chemistry, Tarot, Rilke, film history, brand names. Readers navigate specialized jargon without glossaries, track characters who appear once and vanish, decode references to real and imaginary corporations. The difficulty is purposeful: Pynchon creates textual experience of paranoid information overload. His central symbol, the V-2 rocket, carries impossible symbolic weight: phallic death-bringer, technological sublime, gravity's rainbow parabola from launch to silent impact. The rocket arrives before its sound—death you cannot hear coming. Pynchon explores how technology transforms human consciousness, how corporations and states use Pavlovian conditioning for control, how empire produces extinction (the dodo, the Herero genocide). Concrete plot events—Slothrop's investigation, Roger and Jessica's doomed love, Blicero's ritual rocket launch—carry enormous abstract weight about history, causation, and freedom. The novel asks whether patterns are real or paranoid projection: does Slothrop's conditioning prove control, or is it coincidence interpreted as conspiracy? Pynchon withholds answers. The structure mirrors paranoid thinking—everything potentially connects, secret cartels manipulate history, individual agency vanishes into systems. Slothrop himself fragments as the novel progresses, appearing less frequently, dissolving into scattered references, finally disappearing entirely. The dissolution is structural: as Slothrop loses coherence, so does the narrative. Subplots proliferate, the center fails to hold, entropy increases. The ending places readers in a movie theater in Los Angeles, present tense, as the 00000 rocket descends toward them. The novel freeze-frames before impact, leaving readers perpetually awaiting the explosion. No resolution occurs—narrative, thematic, or moral. Gravity's Rainbow withholds the satisfactions of conventional fiction while demanding enormous interpretive labor. Its encyclopedic scope, technical difficulty, and paranoid plotting make it among English literature's most challenging novels. Pynchon proved unreadability and importance could coexist, that difficulty itself could be the point. The novel's influence on postmodern fiction is incalculable—it established new possibilities for combining history, science, and popular culture in maximalist form. Reading it requires surrender to accumulation, pattern-seeking without resolution, immersion in encyclopedic detail that may or may not signify. The reward is experiencing consciousness under late capitalism: paranoid, fragmented, overwhelmed by information, seeking patterns in noise, awaiting the rocket's silent arrival.

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  8. No. 8 on this list. The Decameron

    Giovanni Boccaccio · 1353

    Moderate20 hours

    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.

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  9. Rayuela is one of the core novels of the Latin American Boom, taught in Spanish and world literature courses across the Americas and Europe. It appears on most lists of the great Spanish-language novels of the century.

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  10. No. 10 on this list. Pedro Páramo

    Juan Rulfo · 1955

    Difficult3.6 hours

    Taught in schools: Literatura, Diseño Curricular – Provincia de Buenos Aires (Argentina), UNAM Escuela Nacional Preparatoria – programas de Literatura (Mexico)

    Included in: Bokklubben World Library

    Pedro Páramo is the foundational text of Latin American modernism, present in nearly every world literature curriculum globally. Its Wikipedia article spans 26 languages. García Márquez credited it with teaching him how to write One Hundred Years of Solitude — a direct line of influence that alone ensures canonical permanence. Penguin Modern Classics published it in 1961.

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11–20 · 122 hours

  1. No. 11 on this list. The Waves · Virginia Woolf · 1931

    Recognized as Woolf's most ambitious experiment. Central to modernist studies.

    Difficult9.5 hours

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  2. No. 12 on this list. In the Penal Colony · Franz Kafka · 1919

    In the Penal Colony is among Kafka's most widely taught stories, a standard text in courses on modernism, German literature and literature and the law. It is reprinted in almost every major Kafka collection.

    Challenging42 min

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  3. No. 13 on this list. Light in August · William Faulkner · 1932

    Faulkner's most accessible major novel. Joe Christmas's search for identity became the definitive portrait of American racial tragedy. Core text in Southern literature and American studies.

    Challenging14 hours

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  4. No. 14 on this list. Doctor Faustus · Thomas Mann · 1947

    Routinely cited as Mann magnum opus and the great novel of German catastrophe. Taught as essential modernist text.

    Difficult34 hours

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  5. No. 15 on this list. Their Eyes Were Watching God · Zora Neale Hurston · 1937

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

    Appears on 3,011 university syllabi according to the Open Syllabus Project (86.97th percentile), placing it among the most-taught American novels. Featured on TIME's All-TIME 100 Novels list and published in prestigious Library of America and Everyman's Library editions — markers of sustained institutional recognition. Available in 9 Wikipedia languages, reflecting global reach in academic and literary circles.

    Challenging5.3 hours

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  6. No. 16 on this list. Hills Like White Elephants · Ernest Hemingway · 1927

    One of the most anthologized short stories in English, taught in high school and college courses as the model of the iceberg technique. It sits just below the novels at the centre of the American curriculum.

    Moderate7 min

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  7. No. 17 on this list. White Noise · Don DeLillo · 1985

    The definitive novel of American postmodern anxiety. The Airborne Toxic Event, the supermarket as cathedral, the fear of death—DeLillo captured how Americans live among systems they cannot understand.

    Challenging9.4 hours

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  8. No. 18 on this list. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler · Italo Calvino · 1982

    A staple of university courses in postmodern literature, metafiction, narrative theory, and Italian studies worldwide. Appears on virtually every major list of postmodern masterworks, including the Modern Library and multiple "best novels" compilations. Not as universally assigned as Gatsby or 1984, but firmly established in the literary canon across multiple national traditions and academic disciplines.

    Difficult10 hours

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  9. No. 19 on this list. The Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings, #1-3) · J.R.R. Tolkien · 1954

    Taught in schools: Pacific Senior Secondary Certificate – English

    Widely taught in fantasy, medieval-influenced and popular literature courses and ranked among the most read novels, but less dominant on core literary syllabi than Gatsby or Crime and Punishment.

    Moderate34 hours

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  10. No. 20 on this list. The Crying of Lot 49 · Thomas Pynchon · 1966

    Oedipa Maas learns she has been named executor of Pierce Inverarity's estate, a California real estate mogul and former lover whose tangled holdings require investigation. Traveling to the fictional San Narciso with co-executor Metzger, a lawyer, she begins noticing a mysterious symbol—a muted post horn—appearing in unexpected places. Her research into a Jacobean revenge play performed locally reveals references to Tristero, an underground postal system that may have operated in opposition to official mail services for centuries. As Oedipa pursues leads through bizarre informants—Mike Fallopian explaining the Peter Pinguid Society, John Nefastis demonstrating his entropy-reversing machine, professor Emory Bortz debating theatrical textual variants—she cannot determine whether she has discovered a genuine conspiracy or descended into paranoia. Her husband Mucho suffers breakdowns at his disk jockey job while Metzger abandons both the investigation and their affair. Characters appear with improbable names and suspect motives, stamps contain hidden messages, and evidence proliferates without resolving into coherent truth. The novel concludes with Oedipa attending an auction where a mysterious bidder may reveal the conspiracy's reality, but the narrative ends the moment before revelation, suspending her permanently between competing interpretations of American communication, meaning, and madness.

    Challenging4.7 hours

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21–30 · 161 hours

  1. No. 21 on this list. The Beast In The Jungle · Henry James · 1903

    Included in: Great Books of the Western World

    Ranked by literary regard among eligible works in the current catalogue. This position reflects the available catalogue evidence.

    Challenging1.3 hours

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  2. No. 22 on this list. The Fifth Season · N.K. Jemisin · 2015

    The Fifth Season won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2016, the first book in what became an unprecedented trilogy of consecutive Hugo wins for Jemisin—a feat unmatched in the award's history. It appears on contemporary science fiction and fantasy syllabi and in critical discussions of the genre's formal and political possibilities. Its position in the canon is still consolidating, but its influence on subsequent speculative fiction is already evident.

    Difficult18 hours

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  3. No. 23 on this list. Women in Love · D.H. Lawrence · 1920

    Appears on 241 university syllabi (59th percentile, Open Syllabus Project) and is listed on the Modern Library 100 Best Novels. Wikipedia coverage in 11 languages is modest for a major English novel, suggesting strong Anglophone canonical status that has not fully globalized.

    Challenging16 hours

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  4. No. 24 on this list. Winesburg, Ohio · Sherwood Anderson · 1919

    Appears on 548 university syllabi (68th percentile in the Open Syllabus Project) and is included in the Modern Library 100 Best Novels list. Wikipedia coverage in 15 languages is modest relative to works like The Great Gatsby, but the book has a stable presence in American literature survey courses and has never gone out of print since 1919.

    Challenging7.5 hours

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  5. No. 25 on this list. Berlin Alexanderplatz · Alfred Döblin · 1929

    Included in: Bokklubben World Library

    Widely seen as the great German modernist city novel, taught in German and world literature courses and often paired with Ulysses and Manhattan Transfer. Its standing is high but narrower than the very top of the canon.

    Challenging12 hours

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  6. No. 26 on this list. Satantango · László Krasznahorkai · 1985

    Wikipedia article exists in 22 languages, indicating substantial global reach, and Krasznahorkai's 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature will accelerate institutional attention to the novel. Syllabus appearances are currently negligible — the recent Nobel has not yet translated into widespread university adoption. The novel occupies a firm place in the contemporary European literary canon without yet achieving the fixture status of earlier Nobel laureates.

    Difficult14 hours

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  7. No. 27 on this list. The Savage Detectives · Roberto Bolaño · 1998

    Taught in schools: UNAM Escuela Nacional Preparatoria – programas de Literatura (Mexico)

    Wikipedia records the novel in 8 languages and includes a dedicated reception section, indicating meaningful international critical attention. The book appears in world literature courses but lacks the syllabus saturation of García Márquez or Borges. It is a canonical text within post-boom Latin American literature without having achieved the broad pedagogical adoption of the century's founding works.

    Challenging26 hours

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  8. No. 28 on this list. U.S.A. · John Dos Passos · 1938

    Listed on the Modern Library 100 Best Novels (1998), one of relatively few American works on that list. Regularly taught in American literature survey courses at universities and appears on nearly every critic's shortlist for the great American novel of the first half of the 20th century. TIME included it in its All-TIME 100 Novels list. The syllabus data shows low Open Syllabus counts, but the trilogy's academic presence is substantial in upper-division and graduate American literature courses.

    Difficult57 hours

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  9. No. 29 on this list. Água Viva · Clarice Lispector · 1973

    The unnamed narrator of Água Viva is a painter who has turned to words — not to tell a story but to capture the precise texture of the present moment before it slips away. She writes to an unnamed 'you': about caves lined with bats, about a rose that lasted a week because it felt admired, about wild horses in mountain meadows, about the body as a typewriter that demands and demands. There are no chapters, no plot, no characters other than this voice and its recipient. What accumulates instead is a philosophy of the instant: Lispector's attempt to seize the 'is' of things, the 'it' that exists just below language, just beyond thought. The sentences move from fragments to long meditative surges, from declarations of joy to confessions of terror to sudden hallelujahs. Reading it feels less like following a narrative and more like listening to someone think out loud with total commitment and no safety net. It is one of the strangest books in the Brazilian canon — neither novel nor essay nor prose poem but all three at once, vibrating at the frequency of consciousness itself.

    Difficult3.2 hours

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  10. No. 30 on this list. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge · Rainer Maria Rilke · 1910

    Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge is on Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century, with Wikipedia articles in 14 languages. It is taught as a founding text of modernist prose in German and comparative literature courses.

    Challenging6 hours

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31–40 · 167 hours

  1. No. 31 on this list. What Maisie Knew

    Henry James · 1897

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

  2. No. 32 on this list. Dune

    Frank Herbert · 1965

  3. No. 33 on this list. The Rainbow

    D.H. Lawrence · 1915

  4. No. 34 on this list. The Passion According to G.H.

    Clarice Lispector · 1964

    Taught in schools: FUVEST leituras obrigatórias (USP vestibular) (Brazil)

  5. No. 35 on this list. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

    Haruki Murakami · 1994

  6. No. 36 on this list. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

    Muriel Spark · 1961

    Taught in schools: CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council

  7. No. 37 on this list. Dhalgren

    Samuel R. Delany · 1975

  8. No. 38 on this list. The Man Without Qualities

    Robert Musil · 1930

    Included in: Bokklubben World Library

  9. No. 39 on this list. Our Town

    Thornton Wilder · 1938

    Taught in schools: Common Core text exemplars (Appendix B) (US), CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council

  10. No. 40 on this list. The Hour of the Star

    Clarice Lispector · 1977

41–50 · 140 hours

  1. No. 41 on this list. The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

    Nella Larsen · 2001

  2. No. 42 on this list. Against Nature

    Joris-Karl Huysmans · 1884

  3. No. 43 on this list. Glass, Irony and God

    Anne Carson · 1995

  4. No. 44 on this list. Дар

    Vladimir Nabokov · 1938

  5. No. 45 on this list. Maldoror and the Complete Works

    Comte de Lautréamont · 1869

  6. No. 46 on this list. Zazie in the Metro

    Raymond Queneau · 1959

  7. No. 47 on this list. Sword & Citadel

    Gene Wolfe · 1994

  8. No. 48 on this list. The Luzhin Defense

    Владимир Владимирович Набоков · 1930

  9. No. 49 on this list. The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

    Robert Coover · 1968

  10. No. 50 on this list. Against the Day

    Thomas Pynchon · 2006

51–60 · 112 hours

  1. No. 51 on this list. 2666

    Roberto Bolaño · 2004

  2. No. 52 on this list. Tropisms

    Nathalie Sarraute · 1939

  3. No. 53 on this list. Breakfast of Champions

    Kurt Vonnegut · 1973

  4. No. 54 on this list. Nox

    Anne Carson · 2010

  5. No. 55 on this list. Checkout 19

    Claire-Louise Bennett · 2022

  6. No. 56 on this list. Good Morning, Midnight

    Jean Rhys · 1939

  7. No. 57 on this list. The Alexandria Quartet

    Lawrence Durrell · 1960

  8. No. 58 on this list. I Love Dick

    Chris Kraus · 1997

  9. No. 59 on this list. Batman: The Killing Joke

    Alan Moore · 1995

  10. No. 60 on this list. Woodcutters

    Thomas Bernhard · 1984

61–70 · 133 hours

  1. No. 61 on this list. Zama

    Antonio di Benedetto · 1956

  2. No. 62 on this list. My Struggle: Book 1

    Karl Ove Knausgaard · 2009

  3. No. 63 on this list. Almanac of the Dead

    Leslie Marmon Silko · 1991

  4. No. 64 on this list. A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

    Julian Barnes · 1989

  5. No. 65 on this list. Flatland

    Edwin A. Abbott · 1884

  6. No. 66 on this list. House of Leaves

    Mark Z. Danielewski · 2000

  7. No. 67 on this list. Speedboat

    Renata Adler · 1976

  8. No. 68 on this list. Red Doc>

    Anne Carson · 2013

  9. No. 69 on this list. Sometimes a Great Notion

    Ken Kesey · 1964

  10. No. 70 on this list. Funeral Rites

    Jean Genet · 1947

71–80 · 76 hours

  1. No. 71 on this list. Americana

    Don DeLillo · 1971

  2. No. 72 on this list. Everything Is Illuminated

    Jonathan Safran Foer · 2002

  3. No. 73 on this list. All-Star Superman

    Grant Morrison · 2011

  4. No. 74 on this list. Batman: Arkham Asylum - A Serious House on Serious Earth

    Grant Morrison · 2005

  5. No. 75 on this list. Pierre

    Herman Melville · 1852

  6. No. 76 on this list. The garden of Eden

    Ernest Hemingway · 1986

  7. No. 77 on this list. Love in the New Millennium

    Can Xue · 2013

  8. No. 78 on this list. Sexing the Cherry

    Jeanette Winterson · 1998

  9. No. 79 on this list. Last Words from Montmartre

    Qiu Miaojin · 1996

  10. No. 80 on this list. Biography of X

    Catherine Lacey · 2023

81–90 · 82 hours

  1. No. 81 on this list. Herscht 07769

    László Krasznahorkai · 2021

  2. No. 82 on this list. Wittgenstein’s Mistress

    David Markson · 1988

  3. No. 83 on this list. The Suicides

    Antonio di Benedetto · 2025

  4. No. 84 on this list. In the Dream House

    Carmen Maria Machado · 2019

  5. No. 85 on this list. Europe Central

    William T. Vollmann · 2005

  6. No. 86 on this list. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

    Jonathan Safran Foer · 2006

  7. No. 87 on this list. On Being Blue

    William H. Gass · 1975

  8. No. 88 on this list. Requiem: A Hallucination

    Antonio Tabucchi · 2002

  9. No. 89 on this list. Same Bed Different Dreams

    Ed Park · 2023

  10. No. 90 on this list. Save Me the Waltz

    Zelda Fitzgerald · 2001

91–100 · 51 hours

  1. No. 91 on this list. The Sandman, Vol. 7: Brief Lives

    Neil Gaiman · 1999

  2. No. 92 on this list. Frisk

    Dennis Cooper · 1991

  3. No. 93 on this list. The King in Yellow

    Robert W. Chambers · 1895

  4. No. 94 on this list. The Candy House

    Jennifer Egan · 2022

  5. No. 95 on this list. Death of the Author

    Nnedi Okorafor · 2025

  6. No. 96 on this list. The End of Everything

    M. John Harrison · 2026

  7. No. 97 on this list. Witch Grass

    Raymond Queneau · 1942

  8. No. 98 on this list. Untold Night and Day

    Bae Suah · 2013

  9. No. 99 on this list. Aliens & Anorexia

    Chris Kraus · 2000

  10. No. 100 on this list. Parade

    Rachel Cusk · 2024

About this list

These 100 books are the highest-scoring eligible modernist and experimental novels currently in the catalogue. About 1,198 hours of reading in all, for the 98 with measured lengths. Difficulty runs from 59 to 71 out of 100 for the middle half of the list; the summit is Gravity's Rainbow at 84.

This list is ranked by literary regard, with a consistent order for equal scores. Membership follows authors and co-authors, not translators or editors. A book is here when ReadingRate files it under Modernist & Experimental Fiction as one of its primary reading domains. Catalogue coverage and the historical canon both limit what this list can represent.

When we matched the Canons dataset to our catalogue in October 2026, our canonical-status scores rose with the number of school curricula, publisher series and lists in it that cite a work: the median score was 72 for books one such source cites, 84 at two, 88 at three, 92 at four and 93 at five or more. Prizes are left out of that count. Outside the state curricula, the dataset’s sources choose mostly from what has been translated into English or French, so it is a weaker check on other literatures. Source: Canons (Andrew Piper), CC BY 4.0

Questions people actually ask

What are the best modernist and experimental novels?
By literary regard, which weighs canonical status, critical standing and influence: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, The Stranger by Albert Camus, Thus Spake Zarathustra A book for all and none by Friedrich Nietzsche and Dubliners by James Joyce. ReadingRate ranks 100 such books, each with a difficulty score and a reading-time estimate.
Which modernist and experimental novels should I read first?
Start from difficulty, not from rank. The most approachable books on this list that still carry top literary regard are The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (about 14 hours), The Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings, #1-3) by J.R.R. Tolkien and The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio.
What are the shortest of the best modernist and experimental novels?
Among the top 25, the shortest are Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway (about 7 min), In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka (about 42 min) and The Beast In The Jungle by Henry James (about 1.3 hours), at an average pace of 250 words a minute adjusted for each book's difficulty.
Which of the best modernist and experimental novels are the established classics?
By canonical status, how firmly a book sits in curricula, anthologies and the canon: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, The Stranger by Albert Camus and Thus Spake Zarathustra A book for all and none by Friedrich Nietzsche.
Can I read any of these modernist and experimental novels for free?
9 of the 100 open in ReadingRate's reader with a free account, from public-domain editions: Moby-Dick, Dubliners, Heart of Darkness, The Decameron, Women in Love and 4 more.
How long would it take to read the top ten?
About 152 hours, at an average pace of 250 words a minute adjusted for each book's difficulty: 76 days at two hours a day. Set your own pace on the page and the list's reading times change to it.
How hard are modernist and experimental novels to read?
Most of this list sits between 59 and 71 on ReadingRate's 100-point difficulty scale, where 40 to 55 is moderate. The summit is Gravity's Rainbow at 84. Every entry carries its own score, so a reader can pick a great book at a difficulty they will finish.
How is this list ranked?
On literary-regard data: how canonically established a work is, its critical standing, and its influence on later writing. It is not a readers’ poll, which is why recent bestsellers rarely appear. Membership follows authors and co-authors, not translators or editors. Lists by country, author, period, theme or difficulty keep to literature (fiction, poetry, drama and philosophy), their novels, poems and plays first and their philosophy after them; a list of a kind of book, such as memoir or criticism, keeps every book of that kind. Every list holds at most three works by one author. A book is here when ReadingRate files it under Modernist & Experimental Fiction as one of its primary reading domains.