Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster (1905). “For fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” wrote Alexander Pope. That quote informs this biting tale that begins when a rich young widow, Lilia Herriton, travels to Italy. There she meets and marries a penniless Italian and dies in childbirth.

White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985). Professor Jack Gladney teaches Hitler studies at the local college and trawls through the tabloid mall of American culture with his pill-popping fourth wife and their four preternaturally knowing children. Then an accident near their town generates a huge poisonous cloud—“an airborne toxic event”—and disrupts their uneasy idyll.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966).  Carolyn Leavitt writes:  “Suicidal and alcoholic Jean Rhys wrote shatteringly spare books about women being beaten down by life. Rhys takes the classic story of “Jane Eyre” and spins it on its head, telling it from the viewpoint of none other than Mrs.

Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin (1983). One winter night, Peter Lake—master mechanic and second-storey man—attempts to rob a fortress-like mansion on the Upper West Side. Though he thinks it is empty, the daughter of the house is home. Thus begins the affair between a middle-aged Irish burglar and Beverly Penn, a young girl dying of consumption.

With by Donald Harrington (2004). The Ozark town of Stay More was Harington’s Yoknapatawpha, a literary landscape much like the Arkansas community where he spent youthful summers that Harington created and populated with a cast of indelible charcaters.

Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan (1993). Nordan unleashes the hellhounds of his prodigious imagination on one of the most notorious racial killings of the century, the Emmett Till murder. Soon we're on a magical mystery tour of the Southern psyche of the mid-1950s and the dawning of guilt and recognition in a whole generation of white Southerners.

Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence (1920). An angry young man before there were angry young men, Lawrence explores politics, art, economics, and sexuality through sisters Gudrun and Ursula Brangwen and their respective lovers.

Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard (1984). In this darkly humorous, hypnotically repetitious, stream of consciousness novel, an embittered and idealistic Austrian writer attends an “artistic” dinner party soon after the suicide of an old friend.

Works of William Shakespeare (1564–1616). In a writing career of only two decades, from 1590 to 1610, Shakespeare produced the most influential canon of dramatic literature in history.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847). The author’s only novel, published a year before her death, centers on the doomed love between Heathcliff, a tormented orphan, and Catherine Earnshaw, his benefactor’s vain and willful daughter. Passion brings them together, but class differences, and the bitterness it inspires, keeps them apart and continues to take its toll on the next generation.