Great Books Foundation
Discussion Guides for Novels

Longer Works Recommended for Discussion

The Great Books Foundation and Penguin Books have collaborated to create online discussion guides for selected classic and contemporary Penguin titles. Each Penguin book selected by Foundation editors is imprinted with a "Recommended for Discussion by the Great Books Foundation" seal and is available online or at your local bookstore. 

Written by Foundation editors and writers, the discussion guides feature interpretive questions that support lively and extended discussion, biographical background on the author, and recommended related titles. The discussion guides can be downloaded for free below and are also available at the Penguin Books Web site.

Penguin Classics Recommended for Discussion

The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
Age of Iron
J.M. Coetzee
Amongst Women
John McGahern
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
James Weldon Johnson
The Bell
Iris Murdoch
Carpenter's Gothic
William Gaddis
The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Confessions of a Fallen Standard-Bearer
Andreï Makine
Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller
The Divine Comedy Volume I: Inferno
Dante
Dubliners
James Joyce
Eichmann in Jerusalem
Hannah Arendt
Emma
Jane Austen
Equus
Peter Shaffer
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, and The Pearl
John Steinbeck
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
Howards End
E. M. Forster
Ironweed
William Kennedy
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
Justine
Lawrence Durrell
The Last Days of Socrates
Plato
The Little Disturbances of Man
Grace Paley
Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman
Libra
Don DeLillo
Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel García Márquez
The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
My Ántonia
Willa Cather
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Frederick Douglass
Of Human Bondage
W. Somerset Maugham
The Odyssey
Homer
On the Black Hill
Bruce Chatwin
The Oresteia
Aeschylus
The Pickup
Nadine Gordimer
The Prince
Niccolò Machiavelli
The Procedure
Harry Mulisch
The Red and the Black
Stendhal
The Red Badge of Courage
Stephen Crane
Seize the Day
Saul Bellow
Siddhartha
Hermann Hesse
The Street of Crocodiles
Bruno Schulz
Swann's Way
Marcel Proust
Thinks
David Lodge
Two Lives
William Trevor
When the Elephants Dance
Tess Holthe