WORLD LITERATURE

At the top of my list are both books of Kafka and "Don Quixote" of Cervantes. 

And then I somehow single out: Beckett, Broch, Camus, Céline, Hemingway, Ishiguro, Joyce, Modiano, Pessoa, Proust, J. Roth, Steinbeck, West, Woolf, plus "Ansichten eines Clowns" of Böll, "Nostromo" of Conrad, "Tanagokoro no shōsetsu" of Kawabata, "Nineteen eighty-four" of Orwell.

The poetry of Benn, Dickinson, Frost, Pasternak, Pessoa, Rimbaud, Tranströmer and Ungaretti is incomparable. Especially Dickinson, for me.

And I should mention separately the short stories of Anderson, Carver, Chekhov, Cortázar, Hemingway, Joyce, and Kawabata.

Most books in my list are "old". But I must say that I was astonished by the tenderness and humanity of the very recent (and quite difficult) book of Helle, the also very recent book of  Doude van Troostwijk and the recent "Klara and the sun" of Ishiguro. 

(The books come with their titles in their original language. If this is other than english, then I have read them in their greek or english translation. Well, I know (?) only greek and some english.)