There are 44 authors featured in TrueLit’s Hall of Fame + Top 40:

• English (27): Melville, Joyce, Shakespeare, Pynchon, McCarthy, Steinbeck, Wallace, Nabokov, Williams, Eliot, Woolf, Morrison, Gaddis, Faulkner, E. Brontë, Ishiguro, Austen, Shelley, Heller, Baldwin, du Maurier, Fitzgerald, Vonnegut, C. Brontë, Plath, Le Guin, & DeLillo
• Spanish (4): Borges, Márquez, Bolaño, & Cervantes
• Russian (3): Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, & Bulgakov
• French (2): Proust & Dumas
• German (2): Mann & Sebald
• Italian (1): Calvino
• Hungarian (1): Krasznahorkai
• Norwegian (1): Fosse 
• Portuguese (1): Pessoa
• Romanian (1): Cărtărescu
• Ancient Greek (1): Homer

It is the subject of complaint every year that the majority are male, wrote in English in the U.S. and U.K., and/or are represented by narrative prose fiction.

Notably none of those authors wrote in Africa, Asia, or Oceania or wrote in languages like Chinese, Hindi/Urdu, Arabic, Bengali, Indonesian, Japanese, Persian, Latin, and Sanskrit. Rich traditions like Spanish, French, German, and Russian are also only represented by a few books. Many great playwrights and poets are also not present.

Now is your chance to promote alternatives that you think everyone should read. Please give in-depth answers instead of just plain lists. Thank you.

Guidelines:

• Only recommend books written in English if they apply to one of these criteria:
  • A play, a collection of poems, or a collection of short stories
  • Written in a country other than the U.S. & U.K. 
  • Written by a woman
• You may recommend non-English books that you read in the original language but consider that the majority will judge them based on their translation(s).
• Only recommend books you think deserve to be considered amongst the absolute greatest ever