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Things you must have read to be my lover
A Season in Hell: The Illuminations (Galaxy Books)A Season in Hell: The Illuminations (Galaxy Books) by Arthur Rimbaud
Buy used from: £7.90
As violent as a young man or woman should be, not more, not less
Billy Budd (English Library)Billy Budd (English Library) by Herman Melville
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Any longer work of Melville will do, but these stories are as crazy as hell, specially "Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids"!!! Brutal
On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic. By way of clarification and supplement to my last book Beyond Good and Evil (Oxford World's Classics)On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic. By way of clarification and supplement to my last book Beyond Good and Evil (Oxford World's Classics) by Friedrich Nietzsche
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The most powerful writer ever, and his most powerful book
The Interpretation of Dreams (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature)The Interpretation of Dreams (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature) by Sigmund Freud
Buy new: £3.77 / Used from: £0.85
Inside this book there is "manifest content" for a million novels... let alone the latent content. One of the great storytellers of all time
Demian (Peter Owen Modern Classic)Demian (Peter Owen Modern Classic) by Hermann Hesse
Buy used from: £0.75
His most stricking book, speacially towards the end. Poetic, well written, and not as predictable as the Steppenwolf (which, still, is also a masterpiece). Ambivalent towards war. I love it
The Castle (Penguin Modern Classics)The Castle (Penguin Modern Classics) by Franz Kafka
Buy new: £5.73 / Used from: £3.52
Marvellous set of charactes... all of them deep and symbollic, impossible but understandable. Kafka knows that intelligence and poetry are the same thing
Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (Dover Thrift)Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (Dover Thrift) by Henry David Thoreau
Buy new: £2.21 / Used from: £0.01
I would love to be Thoreau... I would love to have written this book, and live his world. His outlook is global: he is a humanist, and ecologyst, a man, a woman, a tree...
The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman (Wordsworth Poetry) (Wordsworth Poetry Library)The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman (Wordsworth Poetry) (Wordsworth Poetry Library) by Walt Whitman
Buy new: £3.17 / Used from: £1.04
I have a special inclination for the Greates 5 American writers to have existed: Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne and Whitman. Song of Myself is unique: linguistically and metaphisically
Dubliners (Penguin Modern Classics)Dubliners (Penguin Modern Classics) by Joyce James
Buy new: £4.82 / Used from: £0.01
All his major works are a must. But just experience "The Dead", written when Joyce was 25. Only a man with so much feeling and an understanding of it could write his future works
Collected Short Prose: 1Collected Short Prose: 1 by Samuel Beckett
Specially First Love. The perfect short story: tense, dramatic, comic, intelligent and absurd. Beckett's piece I have most enjoyed
The Importance of Being Earnest (Penguin Popular Classics)The Importance of Being Earnest (Penguin Popular Classics) by Oscar Wilde
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I read it during a delicious evening... He had nothing to declare but his genius... It is true
Heartbreak House: A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes (Penguin Classics)Heartbreak House: A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes (Penguin Classics) by George Bernard Shaw
Buy new: £6.49 / Used from: £0.96
The first play I read of Bernard Shaw. Sincere and extravagant. The setting of the scene is suberb.
Jude the Obscure (Penguin Popular Classics)Jude the Obscure (Penguin Popular Classics) by Thomas Hardy
Buy new: £2.18 / Used from: £0.01
It has something in it which makes me think no book has described better the personality of the artist. At the other end of Joyce's description of the artist, but can be ranked with his
Sons and Lovers (Penguin Modern Classics)Sons and Lovers (Penguin Modern Classics) by D.H. Lawrence
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Of a beauty so delicate it sometimes hurts. You will have to put the book down and think about jealousy, sex and power. So fragile
Four Quartets (Faber Poetry)Four Quartets (Faber Poetry) by T.S. Eliot
Buy new: £5.96 / Used from: £2.00
This edition is beautiful. I prefer it to the Waste Land, because this is the truest Eliot. The passage of the children in the garden is what he had always desired to write; we fee it. Perfect overall
Adventures of the Ingenious Alfanhui (Dedalus Europe 2000)Adventures of the Ingenious Alfanhui (Dedalus Europe 2000) by Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio
Buy new: £8.09 / Used from: £2.68
Here all the poetry and sadness and culture of my country (Spain) is packed up. As lyrical as anything I have read.
Pedro Paramo (Five Star)Pedro Paramo (Five Star) by Juan Rulfo
Buy new: £5.08 / Used from: £2.76
The real masterpiece. Probably the loveliest fiction book I have ever read. It was the outcome of a terrible and perfect exercise of condensation. Unbelievable
Lights of Bohemia: Luces de Bohemia (Hispanic Classics)Lights of Bohemia: Luces de Bohemia (Hispanic Classics) by Ramon Del Valle-Inclan
One of the best theatrical texts ever to be written. Valle Inclan masters prose and dialogue writing.
Poet in New York (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)Poet in New York (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) by Federico Garcia Lorca
Buy used from: £6.81
One of the masterpieces of Eurpean 20th century poetry. Lorca's best piece of writing: he is impressed by New York, and he condemns and loves passionately.
Duino ElegiesDuino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke
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Unique in its imaginery, rhythm and style. Difficult in the way that perfection requires. It gives the idea of a wholly developed poetic world.
Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Collins classics)Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Collins classics) by William Shakespeare
Buy used from: £7.94
Take whatever you want. Everything will satisfy you as long as you understand it. The sonnets are overwhelming. "Much Ado About Nothing" is the perfect melodrama
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Poetry Paperbacks)Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Poetry Paperbacks) by Pablo Neruda
Buy used from: £1.02
Among all his latter poetry, these poems have been imprinted on me: Me gustas cuando callas porque estas como ausente, y estas como distante, mariposa en arrullo... It will make you cry