List of books and authors

Why Tolstoy is 11.6% better than Shakespeare.

This is a list of best-selling fiction authors to date, in any language. While finding precise sales numbers for any given author is nearly impossible, the list is based on approximate numbers provided or repeated by reliable sources. To keep the list manageable, only authors with estimated sales of at least million are included. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Best selling fiction authors to date in any language.

Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift A wonderful satire that still works for all ages, despite the savagery of Swift's vision. Tom Jones Henry Fielding The adventures of a high-spirited orphan boy: an unbeatable plot and a lot of sex ending in a blissful marriage. Clarissa Samuel Richardson One of the longest novels in the English language, but unputdownable. Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne One of the first bestsellers, dismissed by Dr Johnson as too fashionable for its own good. But Emma never fails to fascinate and annoy. Wrongly overlooked. Sybil Benjamin Disraeli Apart from Churchill, no other British political figure shows literary genius.

One key to being a good writer is to always keep reading—and that doesn't stop after you've been published. Here are 25 authors' favorite reads. Who knows, one of these books might become your new favorite. Papa Hemingway once said "there is no friend as loyal as a book," and in a piece published in Esquire , he laid out a list of a few friends he said he would "rather read again for the first time It wasn't the first reading list he'd made; just a year earlier, Hemingway had dashed off a list of 14 books for an aspiring writer who had hitchhiked to Florida to meet him. It included a few of the same books above, plus two short stories by Stephen Crane. In an interview with The Paris Review in , novelist and creative nonfiction scribe Joan Didion called Joseph Conrad's Victory "maybe my favorite book in the world