The 80 best easy books about the body and illness

One of the most important collections in postwar American poetry. 'Skunk Hour' alone secures its place in the canon.

Anne Sexton arranged these thirty-three poems in the order she wrote them — January 1962 to February 1966 — and called the result 'a fever chart for a bad case of melancholy.' Each poem arrives with a date at the bottom, evidence rather than ornament. The collection opens with her father, a wool salesman who drank in his bedroom and died on the road; within pages she has checked herself into a psychiatric ward, addressed Sylvia Plath's corpse ('Thief!— how did you crawl into, crawl down alone into the death I wanted so badly'), mourned a son she never had, and watched her daughter call on God instead of her mother when a horse crushes her foot. Sexton's language stays in the body. She counts out eight pharmaceutical capsules each night, arranges them 'as in the laying on of hands or the black sacrament.' Suicides, she observes, 'have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.' The hospital and the suburban kitchen share equal authority. God appears, and Mary, and Judas, and Sylvia, and none of them offer adequate answers. The final poem, 'Live,' turns the collection's entire argument on its axis. Eight Dalmatian puppies survive the pails of water that waited to drown them. 'I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann. The poison just didn't take.' The fever chart ends with a temperature that isn't, finally, fatal. This is the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection that defined confessional poetry as a form capable of sustaining both unbearable honesty and survival.

Munro's final collection, published the year before her Nobel Prize. Regarded as a fitting capstone to one of the great careers in short fiction.

Highly regarded in German literature as Fontane's most experimental work. Less widely known internationally than Effi Briest but increasingly appreciated by scholars.

Frequently anthologized and taught as one of Tolstoy's finest short works. Its concentrated power and accessible length keep it in regular circulation.

Pulitzer Prize winner and widely regarded as Albee's late masterpiece. A standard text in American drama courses and regularly revived in major productions.

Ranked 87th on the Modern Library 100 Best Novels and regularly taught in courses on Edwardian and realist fiction. It is the Bennett novel most likely to appear on syllabi.

Increasingly recognized as a Scandinavian masterpiece. A quiet classic with a devoted readership.

The book won the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. It is regularly taught in contemporary American literature courses and in courses on aging, yet it sits below Roth's major works such as Portnoy's Complaint and American Pastoral in the syllabus ranking. It has a Wikipedia page in 4 languages.

Well-regarded within Turkish literature and among specialists, but less widely known internationally than Memed, My Hawk.