It's time to talk books—and the conversation starts here. Encompassing fiction, poetry, science and science fiction, memoir, travel writing, biography, children's books, history, and more, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die moves across cultures and through time to present an eclectic collection of titles, each described with the special enthusiasm readers summon when recommending a book to a friend. The expected pillars are here, including Jane Austen and Toni Morrison, Virgil, Dante, Dickens and Tolstoy, Franz Kafka and Simone de Beauvoir—their works made fresh through the author's animated essays. Established classics are joined by new and unexpected choices like Citizen and Friday Night Lights. A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Pillow Bookof Sei Shōnagon, The Day of the Jackal and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The result is a treasury of essential reading for expansive...

The most notable story is again an investigation into the gulf between the sexes. "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" won both the Hugo (in a tie with Spider Robinson's "By Any Other Name") and Nebula awards as the best novella published in 1976. In it a crew of three American astronauts are caught up in an intense solar storm which apparently propels them through a time vortex into a world several hundred years into their future. A devastating plague has reduced the human population to just a few thousand, all female, whose only means of reproduction is the cloning of several basic genome types.