New James Joyce · Ulysses

"Ulysses shows us that an advertising canvasser's journey throughout a day may be as challenging as that undertaken by a Greek wanderer, and no less worthy of a hero."

— Philip Kitcher

Voltaire · Candide

"The work survives. The writers sometimes don't."

— Salman Rushdie

Charles Dickens · A Tale of Two Cities

"The devil has all the best lines. If there's no fall in the Garden of Eden, there's no redemption."

— Margaret Atwood

Edith Wharton · The Age of Innocence

"People are attached to the idea of individualism without wanting to pay the price of individualism."

— Roxane Gay

Friedrich Nietzsche · Thus Spoke Zarathustra

"You don't want to just live onward—you want to live upward."

— Clancy Martin

James Joyce · Dubliners

"If you can put your sins into a good, entertaining and halfway plausible story, you'll get away with it."

— John Banville

Mary Shelley · Frankenstein

"Many years later, she will tell a story that isn't true."

— Charlotte Gordon

Marcus Aurelius · Meditations

"The pursuit of fame is, in a way, the obvious secular response to seeking an afterlife."

— Derren Brown

Jane Austen · Pride and Prejudice

"I am very attached to the idea that being interesting can trump everything and that at the end of the day nothing is more devastatingly attractive."

— Sadie Stein

Immanuel Kant · A Kant Primer

"But it leaves open what the true nature of things, including ourselves and our will, might be."

— Paul Guyer

Henry James · The Golden Bowl

"There can be no value without loss, and that is a tragic vision."

— Garth Greenwell

Henry David Thoreau · Walden

"The scariest part of death isn't the dying part."

— John Kaag

Nathaniel Hawthorne · The Scarlet Letter

"Armor starts with an A."

— Megan Marshall

E. M. Forster · A Room with a View

This is a story about a good girl in every sense. And it would be a terribly boring book if she remained perfectly so for the duration.

— Lena Dunham

Plato · Dialogues

It's as if he raised up the whole submerged continent of philosophy, like the submerged continent of Atlantis.

— Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

Franz Kafka · Three Stories

He wrote of the lostness and confusion, the boredom and anxiety, the hilarious absurdity, the tragedy, the illogic of being a human lodged in the great machine of civilized life.

— Deb Olin Unferth

Joseph Conrad · Heart of Darkness

If I'm honest, those early encounters with this text left me a bit cold, and maybe you've had a similar experience, struggling alone with its pages.

— Chloe Cooper Jones

William James · The Varieties of Religious Experience

He was once described as an adorable genius, and I think that really describes him, because he had this capacious and very wide mind that could go anywhere.

— Bessel van der Kolk and John Kaag