Books like

Books like All Men Are Mortal

12 books with a reading profile close to All Men Are Mortal by Simone de Beauvoir. Deep, contemplative and thought-provoking; a moderate read.

1

The power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, classic literature

Set in 1930s Mexico during the Cristero War, the narrative follows a nameless whiskey priest fleeing a paramilitary police force.
2

The Road Not Taken and Other Poems

by Robert Frost

Also contemplative · philosophy, classic literature

Robert Frost’s 1916 collection, originally titled Mountain Interval, centers on the rural landscapes and social dynamics of New England.
3

Fathers and Sons

by Ivan Turgenev

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, classic literature

Arkady Kirsanov returns from university to his father's estate in 1859, bringing his friend Yevgeny Bazarov, a medical student and self-declared nihilist who rejects authority, art, and tradition.
4

Il visconte dimezzato

by Italo Calvino

Also deep and thought-provoking · philosophy, classic literature

During a war against the Turks in Bohemia, a young nobleman, Viscount Medardo of Terralba, is split down the middle by a cannonball.
5

Eugene Onegin

by Alexander Pushkin

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, classic literature

Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse follows Eugene Onegin, a cynical aristocrat weary of Saint Petersburg’s high society.
6

Antigone

by Jean Anouilh

Also deep and thought-provoking · philosophy, classic literature

Jean Anouilh's play, first staged in occupied Paris in 1944, retells Sophocles.
7

Songs of innocence and of experience

by William Blake

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, classic literature

William Blake’s hand-colored collection contrasts two differing states of the human soul.
8

The Last Day of a Condemned Man

by Victor Hugo

Also deep and thought-provoking · philosophy, classic literature

Focused on the final six weeks of a prisoner awaiting execution in nineteenth-century France, Victor Hugo’s novel follows an unnamed protagonist from his trial at the Bicêtre Hospital to the guillotine at Place de Grève.
9

The Old Man and the Sea

by Ernest Hemingway

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, classic literature

Set in a small Cuban fishing village in 1952, the story follows Santiago, an aging fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without a catch.
10

Alcestis

by Euripides

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, classic literature

In this tragedy, King Admetus is granted a reprieve from his impending death on the condition that someone else dies in his place.
11

The Razor’s Edge

by W. Somerset Maugham

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, classic literature

Larry Darrell returns to Chicago from the battlefields of World War I, but find himself unable to settle into a conventional social life or a marriage with his fiancée, Isabel Bradley.
12

Resurrection

by Leo Tolstoy

Also deep and thought-provoking · philosophy, classic literature

Prince Dmitri Nekhlyudov serves as a juror in a murder trial, only to recognize the defendant as Maslova, a woman he seduced and abandoned years earlier.

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