Desk I · Language, text-based
Prose and fiction, poetry, the play and the screenplay as written: the work is read. Every work the desk has reviewed here, ranked by standing.
433 works · mean standing 8.6 · Literature 433
Dante Alighieri · Literature
9.7 · Tier V
Homer · Literature
9.6 · Tier V
Anonymous · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Virgil · Literature
Sophocles · Literature
William Shakespeare · Literature
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
James Joyce · Literature
John Milton · Literature
Aeschylus · Literature
Miguel de Cervantes · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
Herman Melville · Literature
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
Marcel Proust · Literature
Anonymous (the Yahwist and the other sources) · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Ovid · Literature
Murasaki Shikibu · Literature
Cao Xueqin · Literature
Plato · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Augustine of Hippo · Literature
Franz Kafka · Literature
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
Du Fu · Literature
Euripides · Literature
Ferdowsi · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Charles Baudelaire · Literature
Walt Whitman · Literature
Samuel Beckett · Literature
Emily Brontë · Literature
T. S. Eliot · Literature
William Faulkner · Literature
Jean Racine · Literature
George Eliot · Literature
Virginia Woolf · Literature
Vyasa (attributed) · Literature
9.1 · Tier IV
9.0 · Tier V
George Orwell · Literature
Jonathan Swift · Literature
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
Ralph Ellison · Literature
Friedrich Hölderlin · Literature
Lucretius · Literature
William Blake · Literature
Charles Dickens · Literature
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
Paul the Apostle · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Valmiki · Literature
Attar · Literature
Giovanni Boccaccio · Literature
Jalal al-Din Rumi · Literature
Joseph Conrad · Literature
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
Emily Dickinson · Literature
Anton Chekhov · Literature
J. R. R. Tolkien · Literature
Fernando Pessoa · Literature
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
Juan Rulfo · Literature
Arthur Rimbaud · Literature
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
Giacomo Leopardi · Literature
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
Hafez · Literature
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
Thomas Mann · Literature
Toni Morrison · Literature
W. B. Yeats · Literature
Alessandro Manzoni · Literature
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
Michel de Montaigne · Literature
F. Scott Fitzgerald · Literature
François Rabelais · Literature
Mark Twain · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Friedrich Nietzsche · Literature
Samuel Richardson · Literature
Honoré de Balzac · Literature
Victor Hugo · Literature
Luigi Pirandello · Literature
Li Bai · Literature
Chinua Achebe · Literature
William Wordsworth · Literature
Pedro Calderón de la Barca · Literature
Stendhal · Literature
Sappho · Literature
Albert Camus · Literature
Henry David Thoreau · Literature
Anna Akhmatova · Literature
William Gaddis · Literature
John Keats · Literature
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons · Literature
David Foster Wallace · Literature
Isaac Babel · Literature
Don DeLillo · Literature
Laurence Sterne · Literature
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
Roberto Bolaño · Literature
Kalidasa · Literature
Machado de Assis · Literature
Mary Shelley · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Edgar Allan Poe · Literature
James Boswell · Literature
Nathaniel Hawthorne · Literature
Søren Kierkegaard · Literature
Louis-Ferdinand Céline · Literature
Mikhail Bulgakov · Literature
Charlotte Brontë · Literature
Robert Browning · Literature
D. H. Lawrence · Literature
Émile Zola · Literature
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos · Literature
Henry Fielding · Literature
Thomas Hardy · Literature
George Gordon, Lord Byron · Literature
Flannery O'Connor · Literature
Sylvia Plath · Literature
Percy Bysshe Shelley · Literature
Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell · Literature
John Donne · Literature
Henry James · Literature
Henrik Ibsen · Literature
Horace · Literature
Vasily Grossman · Literature
Federico García Lorca · Literature
Anonymous (the Gawain poet) · Literature
Sigmund Freud · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Lu Xun · Literature
John Bunyan · Literature
Ivan Goncharov · Literature
Molière · Literature
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
August Strindberg · Literature
Joseph Heller · Literature
Salman Rushdie · Literature
Luo Guanzhong (attributed) · Literature
Catullus · Literature
Apuleius · Literature
John Steinbeck · Literature
Ivan Turgenev · Literature
Pablo Neruda · Literature
Alfred Tennyson · Literature
Mikhail Lermontov · Literature
James Baldwin · Literature
Wallace Stevens · Literature
Kurt Vonnegut · Literature
Natsume Sōseki · Literature
J. M. Coetzee · Literature
José Saramago · Literature
Philip Roth · Literature
W. G. Sebald · Literature
Christopher Marlowe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Stanisław Lem · Literature
Alejo Carpentier · Literature
Ursula K. Le Guin · Literature
Zora Neale Hurston · Literature
Lewis Carroll · Literature
Thomas Malory · Literature
Knut Hamsun · Literature
Robert Louis Stevenson · Literature
Eugenio Montale · Literature
Paul Celan · Literature
Luis Cernuda · Literature
William Makepeace Thackeray · Literature
Jane Austen · Literature
Graham Greene · Literature
Hart Crane · Literature
Robert Frost · Literature
J. D. Salinger · Literature
Samuel Johnson · Literature
Naguib Mahfouz · Literature
Seamus Heaney · Literature
Margaret Atwood · Literature
Marilynne Robinson · Literature
Yasunari Kawabata · Literature
Octavio Paz · Literature
Hilary Mantel · Literature
Gérard de Nerval · Literature
Wu Cheng'en (attributed) · Literature
Daniel Defoe · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Richard Wright · Literature
H. G. Wells · Literature
Ralph Waldo Emerson · Literature
Nikos Kazantzakis · Literature
Frank Herbert · Literature
W. H. Auden · Literature
J. G. Ballard · Literature
Boris Pasternak · Literature
Octavia E. Butler · Literature
Anthony Burgess · Literature
Willa Cather · Literature
Robert Penn Warren · Literature
Christina Rossetti · Literature
Paul Auster · Literature
Kazuo Ishiguro · Literature
Edith Wharton · Literature
Paul Valéry · Literature
John Crowley · Literature
Denis Johnson · Literature
Voltaire · Literature
Aldous Huxley · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Aristophanes · Literature
Jack Kerouac · Literature
Edward FitzGerald, after Omar Khayyam · Literature
Hermann Hesse · Literature
David Markson · Literature
Haruki Murakami · Literature
Italo Calvino · Literature
Alan Moore and David Lloyd · Literature
Evelyn Waugh · Literature
Milan Kundera · Literature
Mark Z. Danielewski · Literature
John Updike · Literature
Alice Munro · Literature
Oscar Wilde · Literature
Thomas Carlyle · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Philip K. Dick · Literature
Bret Easton Ellis · Literature
Martin Amis · Literature
George Saunders · Literature
John Barth · Literature
Dashiell Hammett · Literature
Walter Pater · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Wilkie Collins · Literature
Raymond Chandler · Literature
William Gibson · Literature
Alexandre Dumas · Literature
John Ruskin · Literature
Iris Murdoch · Literature
Patricia Highsmith · Literature
Harriet Beecher Stowe · Literature
H. P. Lovecraft · Literature
Bram Stoker · Literature
Algernon Charles Swinburne · Literature
Sei Shōnagon · Literature
Alan Moore · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Elena Ferrante · Literature
Donna Tartt · Literature
Ray Bradbury · Literature
Jules Verne · Literature
Alan Moore and J. H. Williams III · Literature
Harper Lee · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
Arthur Conan Doyle · Literature
7.8 · Tier III
Agatha Christie · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
Chuck Palahniuk · Literature
P. G. Wodehouse · Literature
Louisa May Alcott · Literature
Stephen King · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
Robertson Davies · Literature
Terry Pratchett · Literature