A Book That is Considered to be in the "Classic" Literary Canon

These books fulfill this category for UBN 2025.

Updated January 28, 2025
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The great Gatsby
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Paper Book
A beautiful, collectible hardcover edition of The Great Gatsby, one of the great American novels - and one of America's most popular - featuring an introduction by Min Jin Lee, the New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko. Part of the Penguin Vitae series, a deluxe hardcover series from Penguin...
Frankenstein
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
Paper Book
More than 200 years after it was first published, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has stood the test of time as a gothic masterpiece-a classic work of horror that blurs the line between man and monster. "If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear." For...
The catcher in the rye
Salinger, J. D.
Paper Book
The "brilliant, funny, meaningful novel" (The New Yorker) that established J. D. Salinger as a leading voice in American literature--and that has instilled in millions of readers around the world a lifelong love of books. "If you...
One hundred years of solitude
Garc©?a M©?rquez, Gabriel
Paper Book
Now a Netflix original series! "One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. . . . García Márquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound,...
Things fall apart
Achebe, Chinua.
Paper Book
The most widely read book in modern African literature, presented here in stunning hardcover, tells two overlapping, intertwining stories, both of which center around a fearless Igbo warrior in Nigeria in the late 1800s, before and after the European colonization of the continent. ...
Their eyes were watching God
Hurston, Zora Neale.
Paper Book
A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick "A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don't know how to live properly." --Zadie Smith One of the most important...
The alchemist
Coelho, Paulo
Paper Book
Paulo Coelho's enchanting novel has inspired a devoted following around the world. This story, dazzling in its powerful simplicity and soul-stirring wisdom, is about an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago who travels from his homeland in Spain to the Egyptian desert in search of...
The color purple
Walker, Alice
Paper Book
Read the original inspiration for the new, boldly reimagined film from producers Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg, starring Taraji P. Henson, Danielle Brooks, and Fantasia Barrino. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, now in a beautiful Penguin Vitae edition...
Night
Wiesel, Elie
Paper Book
A new translation from the French by Marion Wiesel. Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent...
The haunting
Jackson, Shirley
Paper Book
The greatest haunted house story ever written--the inspiration for the hit Netflix horror series! One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has been...
1984
Orwell, George
Paper Book
One flew over the cuckoo's nest
Kesey, Ken
Ebook
The Odyssey
Homer.
Paper Book
The great epic of Western literature, translated by the acclaimed classicist Robert Fagles A Penguin Classic Robert Fagles, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters,...

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