The editors of the Norwegian Book Clubs, with the Norwegian Nobel Institute, polled a panel of 100 authors from 54 countries on what they considered the “best and most central works in world literature.” Among the authors polled were Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing, Seamus Heaney, Salman Rushdie, Wole Soyinka, John Irving, Nadine Gordimer, and Carlos Fuentes. The list of 100 works appears alphabetically by author. Although the books were not ranked, the editors revealed that Don Quixote received 50% more votes than any other book.

1. Ulysses by James Joyce
2. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
3. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (MOST VOTES)
4. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
6. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
7. Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
8. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
9. The Odyssey by Homer
10. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
11. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
12. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
13. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
14. The Iliad by Homer
15. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
16. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
17. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
18. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
19. Beloved by Toni Morrison
20. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
21. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
22. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
23. The Stranger by Albert Camus
24. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
25. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
26. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
27. The Trial by Franz Kafka
28. Middlemarch by George Eliot
29. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
30. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
31. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
32. One Thousand and One Nights
33. The Aeneid by Virgil
34. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
35. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
36. The Red and the Black by Stendhal
37. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
38. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
39. Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
40. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
41. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe by Edgar Allan Poe
42. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
43. The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
44. Essays by Michel de Montaigne
45. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
46. Collected Fiction by Jorge Luis Borges
47. The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
48. The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka by Franz Kafka
49. Journey to the End of The Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
50. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
51. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
52. Fairy Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Anderson
53. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
54. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
55. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
56. Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
57. Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
58. Mahabharata by Vyasa
59. Metamorphoses by Ovid
60. Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
61. The Castle by Franz Kafka
62. Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
63. Medea by Euripides
64. The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
65. The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoevsky
66. A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen
67. Epic of Gilgamesh by Unknown
68. Father Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
69. King Lear by William Shakespeare
70. Hunger by Knut Hamsun
71. A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
72. Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
73. Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett
74. Molloy by Samuel Beckett
75. Blindness by Jose Saramago
76. Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo
77. Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
78. The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
79. Complete Poems of Giacomo Leopardi by Giacomo Leopardi
80. Independent People by Halldor Laxness
81. Othello by William Shakespeare
82. Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo
83. Ramayana by Valmiki
84. The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
85. Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Xun Lu
86. Gypsy Ballads by Federico Garcia Lorca
87. History by Elsa Morante
88. Jacques the Fatalist and His Master by Denis Diderot
89. Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
90. Poems by Paul Celan
91. The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
92. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by Joao Guimaraes Rosa
93. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
94. Bostan by Saadi
95. Children of Gebelawi by Naguib Mahfouz
96. Masnavi by Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi
97. Njal's Saga by Iceland
98. Season of Migration to the North by Al-Tayyib Salih
99. The Book of Job by Israel
100. The Recognition of Sakuntala by Kalidasa
101. The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata