Le Monde 200 best books list
The March 19, 1999 issue of Le Monde (published in Paris), announced a contest for its readers: Entrants were to choose either a top 50 or top 100 livres du siècle from the list of 200 titles below, and also rank this list from 1-50 or 1-100: The editors of Le Monde were then to select their rankings, and grant the award to the entrant whose submitted list comes closest to theirs. The final list was of 100 books.
The list includes works of literary fiction, science fiction, detective/mystery, essays, philosophy, and the social sciences, but leans towards literature: The list is relatively broad in national origin as well as genre: although it is French-centric, inevitably, it includes a fair proportion of works from other countries and other languages.
The list below presents the titles as published in English, when possible.
Aderzo and Goscinny: Astérix
Adorno, Theodor: Dialectic of Enlightenment
Alain-Fourier: Le Grand Meaulnes
Antelme, Robert: The Human Race
Apollinaire, Guillaume: Alcools
Aragon, Louis: Aurélian
Arendt, Hannah: The Origins of Totalitarianism
Ariès, Philippe: The Hour of Our Death
Artaud, Antonin: The Theater and its Double
Asimov, Isaac: Foundation Trilogy
Barthes, Roland: Writing Degree Zero
Bataille, Georges: Blue of Noon
Beauvoir, Simone de: The Second Sex
Beckett, Samuel: Waiting for Godot
Benveniste, Emile: Problems of General Linguistics
Bernanos, Georges: Sous le soleil de Satan
Bernhard, Thomas: Wittgenstein’s Nephew
Bilal, Christin: Partie de chasse
Blanchot, Maurice: Thomas the Obscure
Böll, Heinrich: The Lost Honor of Katarina Blum
Borges, Jorge Luis: Fictions
Boulgakov, Mikhail: The Master and Margherita
Bourdieau, Pierre: The Inheritors: French Students and their relations to Culture
Bradbury, Ray: The Martian Chronicles
Brecht, Bertolt: The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui
Breton, André: Nadja
Broch, Hermann: The Sleepwalkers
Burroughs, William: Naked Lunch
Butor, Michel: La Modification
Buzzati, Dino: The Tartar Steppe
Calvino, Italo: The Baron in the Trees
Calvo, E: F.: La bête est morte
Camus, Albert: The Stranger
Canguilhem, Georges: The Normal and the Pathological
Capote, Truman: In Cold Blood
Carpentier, Alejo: El Siglo De Las Luces
Cassirer, Ernst: Philosophy of the Enlightenment
Céline, Lous-Ferdinand: Journey to the End of the Night
Cendrars, Blaise: Moravagine
Césaire, Aimé: Return to my Native Land
Chandler, Raymond: The Big Sleep
Char, René: Fureur et mystère
Chase, James Hadley: No Orchids for Miss Blandish
Christie, Agatha: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Claudel, Paul: The Satin Slippers
Cohen, Albert: Belle du seigneur
Colette: Sido
Doyle, Arthur Conan: The Hound of the Baskervilles
Conrad, Joseph: Lord Jim
Cortazar, Julio: Hopscotch
Debord, Guy: Society of the Spectacle
Deleuze, Gilles: Anti-Oedipus
Derrida, Jacques: Writing and Difference
Dick, Philip K.: Ubik
Döblin, Alfred: Berlin Aldexanderplatz
Doderer, Heimito von: The Demons
Dos Passos, John: Manhattan Transfer
Duby, Georges: The Legend of Bouvines
Dumézil, Georges: Myth et épopée
Duras, Marguerite: The Ravaging of Lol Stein
Durrell, Lawrence: The Alexandria Quartet
Eco, Umberto: The Name of the Rose
Elias, Norbert: The Civilizing Process
Eluard, Paul: Capital of Pain
Fanon, Frantz: The Damned of the Earth
Faulkner,William: The Sound and the Fury
Fitzgerald, F: Scott: The Great Gatsby
Foucault, Michel: The Order of Things
Frank, Anne: Journal
Franquin: Gaston
Freud, Sigmund: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Freyre, Gilberto: The Masters and the Slaves
Galbraith, John Kenneth: The New Industrial State
Garcia Lorca, Federico: Romancero Gitano
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Genet, Jean: Our Lady of Flowers
Gide, André: The Counterfeiters
Giono, Jean: The Horseman on the Roof
Gombrich, Ernst: History of Art
Gombrowicz, Witold: Ferdydurke
Gracq, Julien: The Opposing Shore
Grossman, Vassili: Life and Fate
Guimarães, Rosa: The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
Guyotat, Pierre: Eden, Eden, Eden
Hammett, Dashiell: Red Harvest
Hampate, Bâ: Amkoullel, l’enfant peul
Harrison, Jim: Dalva
Hayek, Friedrich von: Prix et production
Heidegger, Martin: Being and Time
Hemingway, Ernest: For Whom the Bell Tolls
Herbert, George: Dune
Hergé: Tintin
Husserl, Edmund: The Crisis of European Sciences
Huzley, Aldous: Brave New World
Inoué, Yasushi: Hunting Gun
Ionesco, Eugène: The Bald Soprano
Jacobs, E: P: Blake and Mortimer
Jakobson, Roman: Essays in General Linguistics
James, Henry: What Maisie Knew
Jankélévitch, Vladimir: Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le Presque-rien
Joyce, James: Ulysses
Jung, Carl Gustav: Man and His Symbols
Jünger, Ernst: On the Marble Cliffs
Kadaré, Ismail: The General of the Dead Army
Kafka, Franz: The Trial
Kawabata, Yasunari: House of the Sleeping Beauties, and Other Stories
Kazantzakis, Nikos: Zorba the Greek
Kerouac, Jack: On the Road
Keynes, John Maynard: The General Theory
Kundera, Milan: The Joke
Lacan, Jacques: Ecrits
Lagerlöf, Selma: The Marvellous Voyage of Nils Holgersson
Lao She: Quatre générations sous un même toit (translated as The Yellow Storm in an abridged version)
Lawrence, D: H.: Lady Chatterly’s Lover
Le Clezio, J: M: G: Le Procès Verbal
Le Goff, Jacques: The Birth of Purgatory
Leduc, Violette: La Bâtarde
Leiris, Michel: Manhood
Leroi-Gourhan, André: Gesture and Speech
Levi, Primo: If This is a Man
Lévi-Strauss, Claude: Tristes tropiques
Levinas, Emmanuel: Totality and Infinity
Lezama Lima, José: Paradiso
London, Jack: Martin Eden
Lowry, Malcolm: Underneath the Volcano
Malraux, André: Man’s Fate
Mann, Thomas: The Magic Mountain
Marcuse, Herbert: One Dimensional Man
Mauriac, Francois: Thérèse Desqueyroux
Mauss, Marcel: Sociologie et anthropologie
McCay, Winsor: Little Nemo in Slumberland
Mead, Margaret: Coming of Age in Samoa
Michaux, Henri: Epreuves, exorcismes
Michon, Pierre: Vies minuscules
Miller, Henry: The Rosy Crucifixion
Mishima, Yukio: Confessions of a Mask
Mitchell, Margaret: Gone With the Wind
Modiano, Patrick: La Place de l’étoile
Moravia, Alberto: Contempt
Morin, Edgar: Method
Morrison, Toni: Beloved
Musil, Robert: The Man Without Qualities
Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita
Nizan, Paul: Aden Arabie
Orwell, George: 1984
Panofsky, Erwin: Meaning in the Visual Arts
Pavese, Cesare: Le Bel Eté
Paz, Octavio: The Labyrinth of Solitude
Péguy, Charles: Notre patrie
Perec, Georges: Life: A User’s Manual
Pessoa, Fernando: Le Livre de l’intranquillité
Pirandello, Luigi: Six Characters in Search of an Author
Ponge, Francis: Le Parti pris des choses
Popper, Karl: Logic of Scientific Discovery
Pratt, Hugo: Corto Maltese (La Ballade de la mer salée)
Prévert, Jacques: Paroles
Proust, Marcel: Remembrance of Things Past
Queneau, Raymond: Zazie dans le métro
Rawls, John: A Theory of Justice
Renard, Jules: Journal
Ricoeur, Paul: Temps et récit
Rilke, Rainer Maria: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Robbe-Grillet, Alain: Jealousy
Roth, Philip: Portnoy’s Complaint
Rousset, David: The Other Kingdom
Rushdie, Salman: Midnight’s Children
Sagan, Françoise: Bonjour tristesse
Saint-John, Perse: Amers
Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de: Le Petit Prince
Salinger, J: D: The Catcher in the Rye
Sarraute, Nathalie: Tropismes
Sartre, Jean-Paul: Being and Nothingness
Saussure, Ferdinand de: Course in General Linguistics
Simenon, Georges: Pietr le Letton
Simon, Claude: The Acacia
Singer, Isaac Bashevis: Enemies
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander: The Gulag Archipelego
Sollers, Philippe: Women
Spiegelman, Art: Maus
Steinbeck, John: The Grapes of Wrath
Styron, William: Sophie’s Choice
Svevo, Italo: The Confessions of Zeno
Tanizaki, Junichiro: Diary of a Mad Old Man
Tardi: C’était la guerre des tranchées
Tolkien, J: R.: The Lord of the Rings
Tournier, Michel: Friday, or Life in the Wilderness
Toynbee, Arnold: A Study of History
Uhlman, Fred: Reunion
Unamuno, Miguel de: The Tragic Sense of Life
Vargas Llosa, Mario: Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.
Vercors: Le Silence de la mer
Vian, Boris: L’Ecume des jours
Weber, Max: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Wells, H: G: The War of the Worlds
Winnicott, Donald: Playing and Reality
Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Tractacus logico-philosophicus
Woolf, Virginia: A Room of One’s Own
Wright, Richard: Black Boy
Yourcenar, Marguerite: L’Oeuvre au noir
Zweig, Stefan: Beware of Pity