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DeutschThe most popular books in English
from 19401 to 19600
What books are currently the most popular and which are the all time classics? Here we present you with a mixture of those two criteria. We update this list once a month.
Théophile Gautier
Romantic provocateur, flamboyant bohemian, precocious novelist, perfect poet—not to mention an inexhaustible journalist, critic, and man-about-town—Théophile Gautier is one of the major figures, and great characters, of French literature. In My Fantoms Richard Holmes, the …
Marcel Proust
In this conclusion to this section of Proust’s classic, we get to understand what he means by budding grove.’ As the summer on the beach winds down, the adolescent Proust is increasingly smitten by the young beauties his age he passes by but never gets to meet... until a …
Olivier Ka
"Peter was a populist priest. He was cool. He was funny. He was no priest, just a regular guy. It’s like I had another uncle. A great one, who laughed, who sang, who tickled. Until he took us for summer camp. Until we were so close, temptation came in the picture." Based on a …
Florian Zeller
The Catcher in the Rye with a French accent. Even if it blows your mind, I want to tell you about this unbelievable thing that happened to me last year. I’m not bragging, but things as unbelievable as the one I’m going to tell you about don’t happen every day, I swear. In fact, …
Frédérick Leboyer
The classic guide to gentle birth that revolutionized the way we welcome our children into the world. • The first book to express what mothers have always known: babies are born complete human beings with the ability to experience a full range of emotions. • Shows how gentle …
Alfred de Musset
Maître Blazius, Dame Pluche, le chœur. Le Choeur Doucement bercé sur sa mule fringante, messer Blazius s’avance dans les bluets fleuris, vêtu de neuf, l’écritoire au côté. Comme un poupon sur l’oreiller, il se ballotte sur son ventre rebondi, et les yeux à demi fermés, il …
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre
Paul et Virginie is a novel by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, first published in 1788. The novel's title characters are friends since birth who fall in love. The story is set on the island of Mauritius under French rule, then named Île de France. Written on the eve of …
Tonino Benacquista
Praise for Holy Smoke, the first in the Antoine series:“A terrific black comedy …both a blasphemously funny satire of provincial Italian chicanery and a wry acknowledgment of the ambivalence that ambitious immigrants feel about their roots.”—The New York Times“Unexpected deadly …
Jean-Claude Izzo
"Izzo digs deep into what makes men weep."-Time Out New York In this moving investigation into the human comedy, the men aboard an impounded freighter in the port of Marseilles are divided: Wait for the money owed them, or accept their fate and abandon ship? Captain Abdul Aziz …
Tahar Djaout
This elegant, haunting novel takes us deep into the world of bookstore owner Boualem Yekker. He lives in a country being overtaken by the Vigilant Brothers, a radically conservative party that seeks to control every element of life according to the laws of their stringent moral …
Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
Doctor Pascal is the twentieth and final novel of the Rougon-Macquart series by Émile Zola, first published in June 1893 by Charpentier. Zola's plan for the Rougon-Macquart novels was to show how heredity and environment worked on the members of one family over the course of the …
Georges Bernanos
Under the Sun of Satan was the first novel published by Georges Bernanos. It was #45 on Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century.
Ousmane Sembène
Xala is a 1973 novel by Ousmane Sembène. It is about El Hadji Abdou Kader Beye, a businessman who is struck by impotence on the night of his wedding to his third wife. It was adapted into a movie, also called Xala and directed by Sembene.
Patrick Modiano
La Place de l'étoile is the first novel of the French writer Patrick Modiano. It was published by Gallimard in 1968 and won the Roger Nimier Prize and Fénéon Prize. The novel, which draws on elements of autobiography, recounts the story of Raphael Schlemilovitch, a French Jew …
Georges Simenon
Maigret and the Yellow Dog is a detective novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon.
Jacques Derrida
Limited Inc is a 1988 book by Jacques Derrida, containing two essays and an interview. The first essay, "Signature Event Context," is about J. L. Austin's theory of the illocutionary act outlined in his How To Do Things With Words. The second essay, "Limited Inc a b c...", is …
Claude Lévi-Strauss
The Raw and the Cooked is the first volume from Mythologiques, a structural study of Amerindian mythology written by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. It was originally published in French as Le Cru et le Cuit. Although the book is part of a larger volume Lévi-Strauss …
Naoki Urasawa
20th Century Boys, Vol. 21 is a book written by Naoki Urasawa.
Christa Wolf
When The Quest for Christa T. was first published in East Germany ten years ago, there was an immediate storm: bookshops in East Berlin were given instructions to sell it only to well-known customers professionally involved in literary matters; at the annual meeting of East …
Joseph Roth
Confession of a Murderer details the interior life of a man consumed by jealousy and hatred. In a Russian restaurant on Paris's Left Bank, Russian exile Golubchik alternately fascinates and horrifies a rapt audience with a wild story of collaboration, deception, and murder in …
Earl Derr Biggers
The House Without a Key is a novel that was written in 1925 by Earl Derr Biggers. It is the first of the Charlie Chan mysteries written by Biggers. The novel, which takes place in 1920s Hawaiʻi, spends time acquainting the reader with the look and feel of the islands of that era …
Nicholas Meyer
The Canary Trainer: From the Memoirs of John H. Watson is a 1993 Sherlock Holmes pastiche by Nicholas Meyer. Like The Seven Percent Solution and The West End Horror, The Canary Trainer was published as a "lost manuscript" of the late Dr. John H. Watson. In "The Adventure of …
Thomas Mann
Royal Highness is the delightfully ironic tale of a small, decadent German duchy and its invigoration by the intellect and values of an independent-minded American woman. Peopled with a range of characters from aristocrat to artisan, Royal Highness provides a microcosmic view of …
Lion Feuchtwanger
First published in 1934 but fully imagining the future of Germany over the ensuing years, The Oppermanns tells the compelling story of a remarkable German Jewish family confronted by Hitler's rise to power. Compared to works by Voltaire and Zola on its original publication, this …
Lee Child
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Everything starts somewhere. For elite military cop Jack Reacher, that somewhere was Carter Crossing, Mississippi, way back in 1997. A lonely railroad track. A crime scene. A cover-up. A young woman is dead, and solid evidence points to a soldier at …
Arthur Koestler
The Roots of Coincidence is a 1972 book by Arthur Koestler, an introduction to theories of parapsychology, including extrasensory perception and psychokinesis. Koestler postulates links between modern physics, their interaction with time and paranormal phenomena. It is …
Hans Fallada
The Drinker is a novel by German writer Hans Fallada, first published posthumously in 1950. Fallada began the novel, in 1944, when he was imprisoned in a criminal asylum for the attempted murder of his wife. It is autobiographical, in diary form, and tells the story of a man in …
Dave Duncan
Stricken Field is a book published in 1993 that was written by Dave Duncan.
Johann D. Wyss
The Swiss Family Robinson is a novel by Johann David Wyss, first published in 1812, about a Swiss family shipwrecked in the East Indies en route to Port Jackson, Australia.
Gordon R. Dickson
The Dragon Knight is the second book of Gordon R. Dickson's Dragon Knight series. The novel begins five months after the battle at Loathly Tower which took place in The Dragon and The George.
Sigmund Freud
This classic edition of The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud includes complete texts of six works that have profoundly influenced our understanding of human behavior. The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud is presented here in the translation by Dr. A. A. Brill, who for almost forty …
Bertolt Brecht
Described by Brecht as 'a gangster play that would recall certain events familiar to us all', Arturo Ui is a witty and savage satire of the rise of Hitler - recast by Brecht into a small-time Chicago gangster's takeover of the city's greengrocery trade. Using a wide range of …
Peter Stamm
A new novel of artful understatement about mortality, estrangement, and the absurdity of life from the acclaimed author of Unformed Landscape and In Strange GardensOn a day like any other, Andreas changes his life. When a routine doctor’s visit leads to an unexpected prognosis, …
Jacqueline Wilson
The Dare Game is a children's novel written by Jacqueline Wilson and illustrated by Nick Sharratt, first published in 2000. It is a sequel to the best-selling The Story of Tracy Beaker.
Elfriede Jelinek
Lust is a novel by Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek. Originally published in German in 1989, it was translated into English in 1992 by Michael Hulse.
Carolyn Keene
The Strange Message in the Parchment is the fifty-fourth volume in the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series. It was first published in 1974 under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene. The actual author was ghostwriter Harriet Stratemeyer Adams. A sheep farmer receives a mysterious telephone …
