Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1923
1923 cannot match the sheer concentration of 1922, the year of Ulysses and The Waste Land, and several critics looking back a century later have called it the quieter year by comparison. But quieter is not the same as empty. A young writer of mixed Black and white heritage, having spent only a few months as a school principal in rural Georgia, publishes a strange, genre-defying book of poems, sketches, and dramatic fragments that will be recognised as the opening statement of the Harlem Renaissance, even though he himself spent the rest of his life resisting the label. Rainer Maria Rilke, who had been unable to finish a sequence of elegies begun a decade earlier at a castle on the Adriatic, finally completes them in a three-week creative storm at a small Swiss tower, alongside an entirely new sequence of sonnets written almost as a fever dream after the death of a young woman he barely knew. A Lebanese-American poet living in New York publishes a slim book of aphoristic parables that nobody expects to become one of the best-selling books of the entire century. And a young Englishwoman named Dorothy Sayers, working as an advertising copywriter, publishes her first detective novel, introducing an aristocratic amateur sleuth named Lord Peter Wimsey almost as an afterthought to a career she had not yet decided to pursue.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 books · Fiction & Poetry · Updated June 2026
Cane
A genre-defying composite of poetry, short fiction, and dramatic dialogue exploring Black life in the rural Georgia of the Jim Crow South and the urban Black neighbourhoods of Washington, D.C. and Chicago, structured in three sections that move between countryside and city without a single protagonist or linear plot to hold them together. Toomer, of mixed Black and white heritage who struggled throughout his life against being categorised by either, drew the material from a few transformative months in 1921 as the principal of a rural Black school in Sparta, Georgia, the first time he had lived immersed in the specifically Southern Black folk culture his own upbringing had kept him distant from. Critics, both Black and white, recognised the book’s significance immediately, though it sold modestly and Toomer, frustrated by being marketed specifically as a Negro writer, refused to write the further race-focused fiction publishers wanted from him afterward.
Cane is now recognised as one of the foundational texts of both the Harlem Renaissance and American literary modernism, and its experimental, polyphonic structure, multiple voices, genres, and locations woven together by theme rather than plot, was a genuinely radical formal choice that anticipated techniques later writers would take decades to fully develop. W.E.B. Du Bois praised the book while admitting its deliberate strangeness frustrated him; that tension between immediate recognition and genuine difficulty has defined the book’s reception ever since. Toomer largely stopped publishing fiction after this single book, which only intensifies its singular, unrepeatable quality. Read it as the most formally ambitious opening statement any literary movement has ever produced.
The Prophet
A series of poetic essays delivered by a fictional prophet named Al Mustafa to the people of a city he is about to leave, addressing love, marriage, children, work, joy, sorrow, death, and a dozen other fundamental human concerns in a lyrical, aphoristic style drawing on Gibran’s own Lebanese Maronite Christian upbringing alongside Sufi mysticism and Romantic poetry. Gibran, who had emigrated to the United States as a child and written extensively in both Arabic and English, intended the book as a work of universal spiritual wisdom rather than any specific religious doctrine, deliberately avoiding the particular theological commitments that might have limited its audience. The book sold modestly upon publication but its sales grew steadily and substantially across the following decades, eventually making it one of the best-selling books of the twentieth century.
The Prophet earns its lasting place not through formal innovation but through the sheer durability of its appeal: generations of readers across radically different cultural and religious backgrounds have found in its deliberately non-denominational spiritual language something they can apply directly to their own lives, marriages, grief, and work. Gibran’s prose poetry has been criticised by some literary critics as sentimental, but its continuous, multi-generational popularity, quoted at weddings and funerals decades after its publication, suggests it is doing something that purely literary judgment does not fully capture. Read it slowly, a section at a time, rather than straight through.
Duino Elegies & Sonnets to Orpheus
Ten elegies addressing mortality, transcendence, and the difficulty of authentic human existence, begun a decade earlier at Duino Castle on the Adriatic and left unfinished through years of war and personal anguish that left Rilke unable to write, until he completed the remaining elegies in a single concentrated burst at a small tower in Muzot, Switzerland, in February 1922. In the same astonishing three-week period, which Rilke himself described as a savage creative storm, he also wrote an entirely separate sequence of fifty-five sonnets addressing the mythical figure of Orpheus, written partly in response to the recent death of Wera Knoop, a young dancer and friend of his daughter, whose memory Rilke said felt as though it were commanding him to write. Both sequences were published together in 1923 and are now considered, together, his masterwork.
The Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus represent one of the most remarkable creative recoveries in modern literary history: a decade of near-total silence on a major project, broken open in three weeks by what reads, even to readers without any belief in the supernatural, like genuine inspiration arriving from outside the poet’s own will. Rilke’s late style, dense, philosophically demanding, frequently addressing death not as tragedy but as a necessary completion of life, reaches its fullest and most difficult expression here. This is poetry that asks real patience of its reader and repays that patience with some of the most profound meditations on mortality written in the twentieth century.
Antic Hay
Theodore Gumbril, a former schoolteacher in postwar London, invents a pair of pneumatic, inflatable trousers designed to make sitting more comfortable, and his half-hearted attempt to actually manufacture and sell the invention becomes the loose thread holding together a satirical portrait of a directionless, intellectually exhausted London bohemia drifting between parties, casual affairs, and conversations about art and meaning that none of the participants seem to genuinely believe will lead anywhere. Huxley, following the success of Crome Yellow two years earlier, sharpened his satirical eye on the specific emptiness of postwar intellectual and artistic London, a milieu he knew intimately from his own circle of acquaintances. The novel’s title comes from Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, referencing frivolous, antic dancing.
Antic Hay is a sharper, angrier satire than Huxley’s debut, less interested in gentle comic observation and more concerned with diagnosing a genuine spiritual exhaustion among a postwar generation that has lost its capacity for sincere belief in anything, including its own bohemian rebellion against convention. Gumbril’s absurd invention is the perfect comic vehicle for the novel’s underlying argument: that this generation’s restless energy has nowhere serious left to go, so it exhausts itself instead on trivial, half-committed projects. Read it as Huxley sharpening the satirical instrument he would eventually turn, far more devastatingly, on the whole of modern civilisation in Brave New World.
Whose Body?
A naked corpse, wearing nothing but an incongruous pair of pince-nez spectacles, is discovered in the bathtub of a respectable London architect who has no idea how it got there, and Lord Peter Wimsey, an aristocratic amateur detective with a passion for rare books and a deceptively foppish manner, takes up the case alongside his loyal valet Bunter and his friend Inspector Charles Parker of Scotland Yard. Sayers, working at the time as a copywriter for an advertising agency, wrote the novel introducing Wimsey before she had any clear plan to make detective fiction her primary career, and the character’s particular blend of aristocratic frivolity and genuine, careful intelligence would carry her through more than a decade of subsequent novels. Whose Body? established the template, and the partnership between Wimsey and Bunter, that the entire series would build on.
Whose Body? is a less psychologically ambitious novel than the Wimsey books Sayers would write later, particularly Gaudy Night, but it establishes the central character with real assurance from the start: Wimsey’s combination of apparent silliness and genuine deductive seriousness, a pose he deploys deliberately to disarm suspects who underestimate him, is fully present in this first appearance. Sayers, herself one of the first women to receive an Oxford degree, brought a literary sophistication to detective fiction that distinguished her from many of her Golden Age contemporaries from the very beginning of her career. Read it as the start of one of the most intellectually substantial detective series the genre has produced.
Zeno’s Conscience
Zeno Cosini is a wealthy, perpetually anxious Italian businessman undergoing psychoanalysis, and the novel takes the form of the memoir his analyst has instructed him to write, an account riddled with self-deception, comic digression, and Zeno’s repeated, sincere, and repeatedly failed attempts to quit smoking, framed by his own unreliable insistence that he is recounting events honestly even as the narrative itself reveals how thoroughly he is deceiving himself. Svevo, a Triestine businessman who wrote fiction largely as a private pursuit while running an industrial paint company, had published two earlier novels that received almost no attention; Zeno’s Conscience went similarly unnoticed in Italy until James Joyce, who had taught Svevo English in Trieste and read the novel in manuscript, championed it enthusiastically to French and English critics, eventually securing it the wider recognition it had been denied at home.
Zeno’s Conscience is one of the great comic novels of psychological self-deception, and its central formal device, a memoir explicitly framed as therapeutic confession that the narrator is constitutionally incapable of making honestly, anticipates by decades the unreliable narrator techniques that would become common across twentieth-century fiction. Svevo’s comic timing is genuinely sharp, particularly in Zeno’s escalating, doomed campaigns against his own smoking habit, even as the novel quietly makes a serious argument about how thoroughly self-knowledge eludes even a man actively, expensively paying a professional to help him achieve it. That James Joyce personally rescued the novel from obscurity is itself one of literary history’s better stories.
Where to start
If you want the book that announced an entire literary movement
→ Read Cane. Toomer’s genre-defying composite of poetry, prose, and drama is now recognised as the opening statement of the Harlem Renaissance, written by a man who spent the rest of his life resisting the label.
If you want poetry that emerged from genuine creative crisis and breakthrough
→ Read the Duino Elegies. Rilke could not finish them for a decade, then completed the entire remaining sequence in three weeks. The result is among the most demanding and rewarding poetry of the century.
If you want the book that quietly became one of the best-selling of the century
→ Read The Prophet. Gibran’s slim collection of spiritual parables sold modestly at first and has never really stopped selling since. Read a section at a time.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 1923
From the bookshelf
“For beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.” — Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
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