Prose & Poetry

Andre Breton Nadja stands as a foundational Surrealist work that blurs the boundaries between fiction, autobiography, and philosophical exploration. Core themes include the marvellous, psychic automatism, objective chance, identity, and the ambiguity of reality. The...

Roberto Bolano The Savage Detectives stands as a transformative exploration of artistic longing, identity, and the relentless pursuit of meaning within a shifting Latin American landscape. Primary themes include literary obsession, exile, fragmentation of narrative,...

John Williams Stoner defines a portrait of academic devotion, ordinary resilience, and the understated dignity embedded in a single life. Through his story, readers confront themes of perseverance, alienation, the search for meaning, familial struggle, and inner...

Yukio Mishima The Temple of the Golden Pavilion presents a psychological portrait of obsession, beauty, and destruction through the story of a troubled young acolyte fixated upon Kyoto’s famed Golden Pavilion. Core themes include alienation, aesthetics, violence,...

Louis-Ferdinand Celine Journey to the End of the Night presents a groundbreaking, unvarnished exploration of alienation, violence, and societal decay through the eyes of its antihero. Major themes include wartime trauma, colonial exploitation, social absurdity, the...

Karl Ove Knausgaard My Struggle Book 2 chronicles a writer’s life as he navigates the everyday challenges of marriage, parenthood, and creative pursuit. Main themes include self-revelation, memory, shame, masculine vulnerability, and the tension between art and...

Ben Lerner Leaving the Atocha Station is a celebrated contemporary work exploring the inner life of a young American poet lost in Madrid. Main themes include linguistic alienation, authenticity, subjectivity, personal and political history, and the permeability of...

Donna Tartt The Secret History defines a landmark in contemporary American fiction, offering an immersive portrait of privilege, transgression, and consequence rooted in the cloistered world of an elite college. Main themes include obsession, morality, friendship,...

John Fowles The Magus is a psychological exploration of uncertainty, manipulation, and personal transformation, set on a mysterious Greek island. Core themes include existential freedom, the tension of reality versus illusion, metafictional play, identity crisis, and...

Michel Houellebecq Platform refers to a controversial and thought-provoking work by the French author, focusing on a uniquely modern crisis of desire, commodification, and existential drift. Main themes include sexual tourism, globalization, alienation, Western...

Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer stands as an influential twentieth-century literary work that captures the rawness of Parisian expatriate life through stark realism and radical self-exploration. Main themes include personal freedom, artistic rebellion, sexuality,...

Philip Roth The Dying Animal presents an unflinching exploration of aging, sexuality, obsession, and self-deception through the confessional lens of its central character, David Kepesh. Core themes include eros and mortality, power and vulnerability, gender dynamics,...