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Recommendations based on Nadjaby André Breton
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Ulysses
by James Joyce
Epic narrative following a day in the life of an Irishman living in Dublin.
It is 8 a.m. Buck Mulligan , a boisterous medical student, calls Stephen Dedalus (a young writer encountered as the principal subject of, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ) up to the roof of ... (Wikipedia)
Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
A fantastical exploration of the cities of the imagination and the possibilities of life.
"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young ... (Goodreads)
Illuminations
by Arthur Rimbaud
Collection of prose and poetry exploring the depths of the human experience.
The prose poems of the great French Symbolist, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), have acquired enormous prestige among readers everywhere and have been a revolutionary influence on poetry in the twentieth ... (Goodreads)
Leaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman
An exploration of the relationship between the individual and the divine, viewed through the lens of nature and its rhythms.
A collection of quintessentially American poems, the seminal work of one of the most influential writers of the nineteenth century. ... (Goodreads)
The Castle
by Franz Kafka
Townspeople's surreal struggle against a mysterious ruling power.
The protagonist, K., arrives in a village governed by a mysterious bureaucracy operating in a nearby castle. When seeking shelter at the town inn, he claims to be a land surveyor summoned by the ... (Wikipedia)
The Trial
by Franz Kafka
A man is arrested and put on trial for a crime that remains unclear throughout the novel.
On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, Josef K., the chief cashier of a bank, is unexpectedly arrested by two unidentified agents from an unspecified agency for an unspecified crime. Josef is not ... (Wikipedia)
Howl and Other Poems
by Allen Ginsberg
A collection of poems exploring themes of individualism and modern culture.
Swann's Way
by Marcel Proust
Autobiographical novel tracing the narrator's reminiscences of an aristocratic upbringing.
Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is one of the most entertaining reading experiences in any language and arguably the finest novel of the twentieth century. But since its original prewar ... (Goodreads)
Les Fleurs du Mal
by Charles Baudelaire
Collection of poems exploring the beauty and depravity of human nature.
Charles Baudelaire's 1857 masterwork was scandalous in its day for its portrayals of sex, same-sex love, death, the corrupting and oppressive power of the modern city and lost innocence, Les Fleurs ... (Goodreads)
Naked Lunch
by William S. Burroughs
Surrealist exploration of addiction, delusions, and reality.
Naked Lunch is a non-linear narrative without a clear plot. The following is a summary of some of the events in the book that could be considered the most relevant. The book begins with the ... (Wikipedia)
Waiting for Godot
by Samuel Beckett
Two men wait for a mysterious figure who never arrives, reflecting on their lives and existence.
Two men, Vladimir and Estragon, have met near a leafless tree. Estragon spent the previous night lying in a ditch and receiving a beating from some unnamed assailants. The two men discuss a variety ... (Wikipedia)
Hunger
by Knut Hamsun
The story of a man's battle against poverty and his descent into near-madness.
The novel's first-person protagonist, an unnamed vagrant with intellectual leanings, probably in his late twenties, wanders the streets of Norway's capital, Kristiania ( Oslo ), in pursuit of ... (Wikipedia)
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
by Marcel Proust
A young man's coming of age in a world of high society, exploring the depths of his own heart.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is Proust’s spectacular dissection of male and female adolescence, charged with the narrator’s memories of Paris and the Normandy seaside. At the heart of the ... (Goodreads)
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
by William Blake
A poetic collection exploring the duality of human nature, innocence and experience.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, is an collection of poems by William Blake., Note:, For a complete Table of Contents of the included poems, see the 'Questions' section below. This book appeared ... (Goodreads)
Ficciones
by Jorge Luis Borges
A collection of short stories exploring the limits of the imagination.
The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the whirlwind of Borges's genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his ... (Goodreads)
The Rings of Saturn
by W.G. Sebald
An exploration of the physical and metaphysical landscapes of the English coast.
The Rings of Saturn — with its curious archive of photographs — records a walking tour along the east coast of England. A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is ... (Goodreads)
The Woman in the Dunes
by Kōbō Abe
A man finds himself stuck in a remote village, struggling to escape a mysterious sand pit.
In 1955, , Jumpei Niki, , a schoolteacher from Tokyo, visits a fishing village to collect insects. After missing the last bus, he is led by the villagers, in an act of apparent hospitality, to a ... (Wikipedia)
Paris Spleen
by Charles Baudelaire
A collection of prose poems that explore the beauty and darkness of Parisian life, capturing the essence of modernity and urban experience.
Set in a modern, urban Paris, the prose pieces in this volume constitute a further exploration of the terrain Baudelaire had covered in his verse masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil : the city and its ... (Goodreads)
Gravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
A surreal exploration of war and technology, and their impact on the human spirit.
Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its ... (Goodreads)
Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A collection of four works exploring the human psyche, morality, and existentialism through the lens of Russian society.
The story opens with the narrator wandering the streets of St. Petersburg . He is contemplating the ridiculousness of his own life, and his recent realization that nothing matters to him any more. It ... (Wikipedia)
Against Nature
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
A decadent exploration of art and beauty, challenging the conventions of society.
The epigraph is a quotation from Jan van Ruysbroeck ('Ruysbroeck the Admirable'), the fourteenth-century Flemish mystic: Jean des Esseintes is the last member of a powerful and once proud noble ... (Wikipedia)
Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
A black man's journey towards self-actualization in a world of racial oppression.
The narrator, an unnamed black man, begins by describing his living conditions: an underground room wired with hundreds of electric lights, operated by power stolen from the city's electric grid. He ... (Wikipedia)
Six Characters in Search of an Author
by Luigi Pirandello
A play exploring illusion and reality, as six characters search for a playwright to tell their story.
An acting company prepares to rehearse the play Mixing it Up by Luigi Pirandello. As the rehearsal is about to begin, they are unexpectedly interrupted by the arrival of six strange people. The ... (Wikipedia)
Faust, First Part
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A timeless story of a man's struggle between the forces of good and evil.
Goethe’s masterpiece and perhaps the greatest work in German literature, Faust has made the legendary German alchemist one of the central myths of the Western world. Here indeed is a monumental ... (Goodreads)
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
by Italo Calvino
An exploration of the nature of storytelling, as two readers attempt to uncover the lost story of the novel's title.
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a marvel of ingenuity, an experimental text that looks longingly back to the great age of narration—"when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to ... (Goodreads)
Journey to the End of the Night
by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
A darkly comic, nihilistic journey of self-discovery, following a man into the heart of an absurd world.
Céline’s masterpiece—colloquial, polemic, hyper-realistic, boiling over with black humor Céline’s masterpiece—colloquial, polemic, hyper realistic—boils over with bitter humor and revulsion at ... (Barnes & Noble)
Père Goriot
by Honoré de Balzac
A tale of ambition, greed, and human relationships in 19th century Paris.
The novel opens with an extended description of the Maison Vauquer, a boarding house in Paris' rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève covered with vines, owned by the widow Madame Vauquer. The residents include ... (Wikipedia)
Nine Stories
by J.D. Salinger
Nine short stories of insight into the human condition and its mysteries.
Nine Stories (1953) is a collection of short stories by American fiction writer J. D. Salinger published in April 1953. It includes two of his most famous short stories, "A Perfect Day for ... (Goodreads)
Salomé
by Oscar Wilde
A retelling of the Biblical story of a young woman's defiance and seductive power.
Outraged by the sexual perversity of this one-act tragedy, Great Britain's Lord Chamberlain banned Salomé from the national stage. Symbolist poets and writers — Stéphane Mallarmé and Maurice ... (Goodreads)
The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
Tragic story of the decline of a southern family, exploring the human condition.
The first section of the novel is narrated by Benjamin "Benjy" Compson, a source of shame to the family due to his diminished mental capacity; the only characters who show genuine care for him are ... (Wikipedia)
