The Tale of the 1002nd Night
by Joseph Roth | 
Confession of a Murderer
by Joseph Roth | 
East of Eden
by John Steinbeck | 
Nine Stories
by J. D. Salinger | 
David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens | 
Stoner
by John Williams | 
Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf | 
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers | 
White Noise
by Don DeLillo | 
The Mayor of Casterbridge
by Thomas Hardy |
Hard Times
by Charles Dickens | 
Embers
by Sandor Marai | 
Sometimes a Great Notion
by Ken Kesey |
The Tunnel
by Ernesto Sabato | 
Suttree
by Cormac McCarthy | 
Barren Lives
by Graciliano Ramos |
The Life Before Us
by Romain Gary |
Against Nature
by Joris-Karl Huysmans |
They Were Sisters
by Dorothy Whipple | 
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
by Henry Fielding |
This book, one of the most haunting things that Joseph Roth ever composed, was published in 1939, the same year the author died. Like Andreas, the hero of the story, Roth drank himself to death in Paris, but this is not an autobiographical confession. It is a secular miracle-tale, in which the vagrant Andreas, after living under bridges, has a series of lucky breaks that lift him briefly onto a different plane of existence. The novella is extraordinarily compressed, dry-eyed and witty, despite its melancholic subject-matter.