Seeing that website and its picks it reminded me of the acerbic comment of a Swedish academic:
"Permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdahl told the Associated Press that US writers were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture", which he said dragged down the quality of their work. "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," Engdahl said. "That ignorance is restraining."
For sure; I should have added a note to say it's not any sort of definitive list of books – they cover a pretty narrow set of tastes, mostly English-centric literary fiction [^1] – and they're pretty explicit about the idea of it being a contest is really just "dumb fun" (their words) to kindle discussion about books they like. I'm always looking for good sources of book recommendations if you've got any that cover a wider array of tastes.
For sure. For worldwide literature translated to English you could do a lot worse that the Complete review[1] its father site the Literary Saloon is quite good too[2]
If you know French La Republique des Livres is a good choice[3]
In Spanish there are lots of sites, but this book recommendation section from Clarin has a good selection from all over the world [4]
I really liked this site[5] in English about "post-modern" writers (Kafka, Borges,Joyce,Beckett etc), too bad it was shut down, but you can still read it on Internet archive.
Surprisingly 4chan /lit has very good taste in literature.They have several guides,for example one by origin of the work[6]
To finish I will give 7 books, very well known, but they wont always appear in, say a reddit top 100 books or whatever:
1. The tartar steppe. Dino Buzzati
2. Pedro Paramo. Juan Rulfo.
3. Life and fate.Vasily Grossman
4.Memoirs of Hadrian. Marguerite Yourcenar
5. The book of disquiet. Fernando Pessoa
6. The House of the Sleeping Beauties. Yasunari Kawabata.
"Permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdahl told the Associated Press that US writers were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture", which he said dragged down the quality of their work. "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," Engdahl said. "That ignorance is restraining."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/01/us.literature....