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Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas by Clarice Lispector (Penguin Modern Classics) — over five hundred weekly columns, written for the Jornal do Brasil between 1960 and 1985, gathered in their first complete English translation. The most intimate access to Lispector’s mind available anywhere — thinking aloud about cooking, children, God, writing, and the precise texture of a particular morning’s light. Essential. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (Penguin) — Gregor Samsa wakes to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect, and his first thought is whether he will make it to work. In this fresh, acclaimed Penguin edition, Kafka’s most famous story recovers its capacity to surprise — to feel immediate and strange rather than merely canonical. One hundred pages that contain more than most novels manage in three hundred. Published by Penguin.

The Life of a Stupid Man and Other Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (Penguin Modern Classics) — includes ‘Rashōmon’ and ‘In a Grove’, which inspired Kurosawa’s landmark film, and the devastating autobiographical title story written before his suicide in 1927. An ideal introduction to the father of the Japanese short story. Trans. Jim Rubin.

The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector (Penguin Modern Classics) — her most celebrated novel. The killing of a cockroach precipitates G.H.’s complete dissolution of self and a near-mystical confrontation with the nature of existence. Written in Lispector’s extraordinary spiralling prose — one of the great works of twentieth-century literature. Trans. Idra Novey.

Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre (Penguin Modern Classics) — the novel that launched existentialism as a cultural movement. Antoine Roquentin’s diary records his overwhelming confrontation with the meaningless facticity of existence — the existentialist vocabulary at its most vivid and accessible. First published in 1938. Trans. Robert Baldick.

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Penguin Classics) — Dostoevsky’s attempt to portray a truly good man in a corrupt world. Prince Myshkin’s Christ-like innocence collides with the self-destructive Nastasya and the passionate Rogozhin in a novel of extraordinary psychological intensity. Trans. David Magarshack.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt (Penguin) — the debut novel that invented the dark academic genre. Richard Papen’s entanglement with a secretive group of Greek students at a Vermont college ends in murder. Rich, seductive, and atmospherically perfect — one of the most gripping thrillers of its generation.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (Vintage) — told through fifteen narrators as the Bundren family transports their dead matriarch for burial. A formally brilliant, darkly comic masterpiece of American modernism, written in six weeks with concentrated power. One of literature’s great experiments in narrative voice.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (Vintage) — a masterpiece of American modernism. The Compson family’s decline is told through four radically different perspectives, beginning with the fragmented consciousness of Benjy. Technically dazzling, emotionally devastating, and one of the most important American novels ever written.