My Ántonia

A teenage German immigrant lands in New York and is funneled through one bizarre system after another. Kafka's first novel, unfinished and oddly hopeful.

Franz Kafka

A family spends two summers ten years apart at a Scottish house. Woolf compresses time and grief into prose nobody had written before.

Virginia Woolf

A traveling salesman wakes up as a giant insect and worries mainly about being late for work. The opening sentence is the entire book.

Franz Kafka

A German teenager goes to the trenches of WWI and finds out what war actually is. Remarque was 30 when he wrote it, and the Nazis burned it.

Erich Maria Remarque

A landlady manipulates a young clerk into proposing to her daughter. A short story from Dubliners, ice-cold.

James Joyce