In celebration of its 75th anniversary, World Literature Today at the University of Oklahoma has selected a list of the 40 most important books of the last 75 years. It includes works by writers from 29 countries.
"To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf
"Gypsy Ballads" by Federico Garcia Lorca
"The Tower" by William Butler Yeats
"The Sound and the Fury" by William Faulkner
"Turning Point (I strofí)" by Giorgios Seferiades
"Residence on Earth" by Pablo Neruda
"Independent People" by Halldór Laxness
"Requiem" by Anna Akhmatova
"Mother Courage and Her Children" by Bertolt Brecht
"The Stranger" by Albert Camus
"The Four Quartets" by T. S. Eliot
"Ficciones" by Jorge Luis Borges
"The Day Before Yesterday" by S. Y. Agnon
"Snow Country" by Yasunari Kawabata
"The Labyrinth of Solitude" by Octavio Paz
"Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett
"Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison
"The Old Man and the Sea" by Ernest Hemingway
"In Country Sleep" by Dylan Thomas
"The Lost Steps" by Alejo Carpentier
"The Devil to Pay in the Backlands" by João Guimarães Rosa
"The Cairo Trilogy" by Naguib Mahfouz
"Voss" by Patrick White
"Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe
"The Guide" by R. K. Narayan
"The Tin Drum" by Günter Grass
"A House for Mr. Biswas" by V. S. Naipaul
"The Book of Disquiet" by Fernando Pessoa
"The Golden Notebook" by Doris Lessing
"Pale Fire" by Vladimir Nabokov
"The Time of the Doves" by Mercé Rodoreda
"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"A Personal Matter" by Kenzaburo Oe
"Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957" by W. H. Auden
"One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel García Márquez