Includes bibliographical references and index.

Prologue: The ellipsis: Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from underground
Part 1: Breaking the vessels. The vivisector: H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau
The abyss: Andre Gide's The immoralist
Shutter time: Alfred Kubin's The other side and Franz Kafka's Amerika
Youth and age: Colette's Claudine at school and Rudyard Kipling's Kim
The American sentence: Gertrude Stein's Three lives
A world of literature: Machado de Assis's The posthumous memoirs of Bras Cubas and Natsume Soseki's Kokoro
Hippe's pencil: Thomas Mann's The magic mountain
What did you do in the war? Marcel Proust's In search of lost time and James Joyce's Ulysses
Part 2: A scattering of sparks. For there she was: Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway
Nick stands up: Ernest Hemingway's In our time
Critic as creator: Robert Musil's The man without qualities
The human and the inhuman: Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno and Jean Rhys's Good morning, midnight
The exception: D. H. Lawrence's Sons and lovers and The rainbow
The end: Hans Erich Nossack's The end and Vasily Grossman's Life and fate
Part III: The withdrawal. Don't cry: Anna Banti's Artemisia and Chinua Achebe's Things fall apart
Reflections on damaged life: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and Alejo Carpentier's The lost steps
The whole story of America: Ralph Ellison's Invisible man
Boom: Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One hundred years of solitude
Into the abyss: George Perec's Life a user's manual
Being historical: Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian and Elsa Morante's History
The enigma of arrival: V. S. Naipaul's The enigma of arrival
Epilogue: W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz

"A notable editor's survey of the defining novels of the twentieth century"-- Provided by publisher.