Tudo que você precisa ler sem um rato de biblioteca [Everything You Should Read without Being a Library Rat]
This comes from a book by Luiz Carlos Lisboa, published by Editora Papagalo. There are actually two books. This one is a guide to the best of world literature. (The other one is a guide to Brazilian literature).
This list will only give the authors and titles of twentieth century novels but, in fact, the book goes back to Homer and covers short stories, poetry, drama and non-fiction, with a brief (one-page) description of each work and its author.
It’s a somewhat eccentric and old-fashioned list – 39 American, 24 English, 7 French, 6 Italian, 4 Austrian, 4 German, 2 Irish, 2 Portuguese, 2 Japanese, 1 Canadian, 1 Colombian, 1 Mexican, 1 Russian, 1 Spanish and 1 Swedish.
1902 Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
1902 Arthur Conan Doyle: The Hound of the Baskervilles
1903 Henry James: The Ambassadors
1904 Joseph Conrad: Nostromo
1904-1912 Romain Rolland: Jean Christophe
1908 Arthur Bennett: The Old Wives Tale
1908 G K Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday
1909 Jack London: Martin Eden
1911 G K Chesterton: The Innocence of Father Brown
1911 Edith Wharton: Ethan Frome
1912 Edgar Rice Burroughs: Tarzan
1913-1927 Marcel Proust: A la recherché du temps perdu
1914 Selma Lagerlöf: Troll och människor [Devils and Men]
1916 Franz Kafka: Die Verwandluing (Metamorphosis)
1922 James Joyce: Ulysses
1922 Sinclair Lewis: Babbitt
1922 Boris Pilnyak: Golyfi god (The Naked Year)
1923 Italo Svevo: La Coscienza di Zeno (The Conscience of Zeno)
1923 P G Wodehouse: The Inimitable Jeeves
1924 E M Forster: Passage to India
1924 Thomas Mann: Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain)
1925 F Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
1925 Theodore Dreiser: An American Tragedy
1925 John dos Passos: Manhattan Transfer
1925 Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
1926 Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises
1926 Franz Kafka: Das Schloss (The Castle)
1926 A A Milne: Winnie the Pooh
1927 Thornton Wilder: The Bridge of San Luis Rey
1928 Virginia Woolf: Orlando
1928 Aldous Huxley: Point Counter Point
1929 William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury
1930 William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying
1930-1940 Robert Musil: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities)
1931 Giovanni Papini: Gog (Gog)
1932 Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
1932 James Farrell: Studs Lonigan
1932 Louis-Ferninand Céline: Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night)
1934 Aquilino Ribeiro: Terras do demo
1934 Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer
1934 Isaac Bashevis Singer: Satan in Goray
1937 Yasunari Kawabata: Snow Country
1937 Ignazio Silone: Pane e vino (Bread and Wine)
1939 Nathanael West: The Day of the Locust
1939 Margaret Mitchell: Gone with the Wind
1939 John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath
1940 Arthur Koestler: Darkness at Noon
1940 Carson McCullers: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
1942 Albert Camus: L’étranger (The Outsider)
1943 Hermann Hesse: Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game)
1944 Lillian Smith: Strange Fruit
1945 Hermann Broch: Tod des Vergil (The Death of Vergil)
1947 Thomas Mann: Doktor Faustus (Doctor Faustus)
1947 Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano
1947 Albert Camus: La Peste (The Plague)
1948 Graham Greene: The Heart of the Matter
1949 George Orwell: 1984
1949 Paul Bowles: The Sheltering Sky
1951 Graham Greene: The End of the Affair
1951 J D Salinger: Catcher in the Rye
1952 Ralph Ellison: The Invisible Man
1952 Camilo José Cela: La Colmena (The Hive)
1953 Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
1954-1956: J R R Tolkien: Lord of the Rings
1954 William Golding: Lord of the Flies
1955 Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
1956 Yukio Mishimo: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
1957 Jack Kerouac: On the Road
1957 Michel Butor: La modification (A Change of Heart)
1957-60 Lawrence Durrell: The Alexandria Quartet
1958 Giuseppe di Lampedusa: Il Gattopardo (The Leopard)
1958 James Agee: Death in the Family
1959 Saul Bellow: Henderson, the Rain King
1960 Walter M Miller, Jr: A Canticle for Leibowitz
19060-1990 John Updike: Rabbit series
1961 Iris Murdoch: A Severed Head
1961 Joseph Heller: Catch 22
1961 Robert Heinlein: A Stranger in a Strange Land
1962 Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange
1964 Saul Bellow: Herzog
1965 Truman Capote: In Cold Blood
1969 Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse 5
1969 Vladimir Nabokov: Ada
1969 Philip Roth: Portnoy’s Complaint
1970 Gabriel Garcia Márquez: Cien Años de Soledad (A Hundred Years of Solitude)
1975 E L Doctorow: Ragtime
1975 Carlos Fuentes: Terra Nostra (Terra Nostra)
1980 Anthony Burgess: Earthly Powers
1981 Italo Calvino: Se una notte d’invierno un viaggiatoreÖ (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller)
1984 Marguerite Duras: L’Amant (The Lover)
1985 Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale
1986 José Saramago: A jangada de pedra (Stone Raft)
1988 Bruce Chatwin: Utz
1988 Tom Wolfe: The Bonfire of the Vanities
1996 Christa Wolf: Medea (Medea)