World Literature Reading Lists

1900-Present

Part 1 Reading List

1. Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun or Americanah

2. Mann, Death in Venice

3. Proust, Swann's Way

4. Kafka, The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and Other Stories

5. Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children or The Caucasian Chalk Circle

6. Gide, The Immoralist

7. de Beauvoir, selections from The Second Sex (tbd)

8. Coetzee, Disgrace

9. Camus, The Stranger, "The Myth of Sisyphus"

10. Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist

11. Borges, Ficciones

12. Neruda, Selected Poetry

13. Duras. Hiroshima, Mon Amor

14. Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

15. Brodsky, Selected Poems

16. Marquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold or Memories of My Melancholy Whores

17. Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis

18. Xin, An Empty Room: Stories.

19. Schlink, The Reader.

20. Cortazar, The Blow-Up & Other Stories

21. Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Poetry

22. Sebbar, Sherazade

23. Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

24. Menchu, I, Rigoberta Menchu

25. Mahfouz, Children of Gebelawi

Part 2

The next time this exam is offered, the text for Part 2 will be Children of Gebelawi.