Anna Gát: My Podcast with Henry Oliver where we built a Western Literary Canon from scratch

Watch the conversation. Consider the list. Argue with us.

Hello my dears,

Henry Oliver

and I both do a lot of podcasts so for our getting together I wanted to do something special. And so I asked him: if a delegation of friendly aliens were to visit and go to his house, and ask for his specific personal opinion on this, what 20 works of fiction would he select to show them what Western literature is.

Below is what he chose…

(For Spotify and RSS feed click here. For Apple Podcasts click here.)

Henry's Canon:

1) The King James Bible

2) The Odyssey

3) The Aeneid

4) Dante's Inferno

5) Petrarch's Canzoniere

6) Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur

7) The Canterbury Tales

8) Molière’s Tartuffe

9) A Winter's Tale

10) The Pilgrim's Progress

11) Montaigne's Essays

12) The Gargantua-Pantagruel series

13) Gulliver's Travels

14) The Sorrows of Young Werther

15) Emma

16) Fathers and Sons

17) The Death of Ivan Ilyich

18) Chekhov: The Seagull

19) The Lord of the Rings

20) The Last Samurai

Disagree with something? Would you add / remove some works? Please leave a comment below!

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