Movies Gallery Books: All-Time Greatest Novels, Nos. 50-26 ''Ender's Game,'' ''Color Purple,'' ''A Confederacy of Dunces,'' ''Native Son,'' ''Catcher In the Rye'' in this batch -- see where we rank 'em By EW Staff Published on July 12, 2013 05:00AM EDT Close 50. Orhan Pamuk, Snow (2002) The plight of modern Turkey is distilled eloquently through Pamuk's novel about a man who returns to his country after being exiled to Germany. Download it:AmazoniTunes 49. Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game (1985) A beloved sci-fi novel about an astonishingly precocious kid who must undergo brutal command training in space because (little does he know) he alone has been chosen to lead Earth's forces in a desperate war against an alien race known as buggers. Ender's is a thrilling novel about compassion and vengeance, love and loyalty. Download it:AmazoniTunes 48. Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) Ripley, simultaneously the most sinister and appealing murderer in all of fiction, makes his debut here. Highsmith pulls off her character with attention to psychological nuance and practical detail — how to dispose of a body and perfect a forgery — with wit so dry it snaps off the page like a static shock. Download it:AmazoniTunes 47. Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994) Reading Murakami is like falling down a rabbit hole, not only because he traffics in surreal plots about such things as lost cats and weird, life-altering phone calls, but because once you're hooked you want to read every novel that he's ever written. Download it:AmazoniTunes 46. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920) Set in a stuffy chunk of old New York society at a time when people ''dreaded scandal more than disease,'' Wharton's novel follows the doomed love affair of a gentleman and our exotic and unconventional heroine. The romance will make you swoon, but it is Wharton's brilliant exposé of a stagnant culture of hypocrisy that will leave you shaking your fist. Download it:AmazoniTunes 45. Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982) The story of a Georgia girl's perseverance against and triumph over racism, incest, and violent men offered readers the experience of black women as memorably as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison had offered the experience of black men. Download it:AmazoniTunes 44. Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials Trilogy (1995-2000) A fantasy trilogy so much better than it had any need to be. Pullman sends his scrappy kid characters on quests through parallel universes full of corruption, war, and creatures both strange and familiar. Download it:AmazoniTunes 43. John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) Ignatius J. Reilly, a mass of flesh and bombast, is as singular a literary creation as Quixote, Ahab, or Humbert, and just as obsessed as any of them. The novel was published 11 years after the author's suicide and went on to win the Pulitzer. Download it:AmazoniTunes 42. Stephen King, The Stand (1978) This is King's War and Peace: Its themes are as heavy as the tome itself. And never in his work has evil been so well-defined as in his devil in blue jeans, Randall Flagg. Download it:AmazoniTunes 41. James Baldwin, Go Tell It on The Mountain (1953) Baldwin's novel about a group of parishioners from Harlem's Temple of the Fire Baptized church remains American literature's most thought-provoking examination of the power of religion. Download it:AmazoniTunes 40. Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy (1993) At 1,349 pages, Seth's multifamily epic set in a newly independent India is about the size of a small briefcase, but its intertwining stories are not just grand but intimate. Download it:AmazoniTunes 39. Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002) Eugenides spent nine years crafting this saga about a hermaphrodite with a male brain who's raised as a young girl by her Greek-American immigrant parents. His yeoman efforts produced both a wildly unique and a beautifully universal coming-of-age story. Download it:AmazoniTunes 38. Pat Barker, The Regeneration Trilogy (1991-95) Three spare but harrowing novels that have become contemporary classics because of the artful and moving way they turn World War I into a morality play about duty, conscience, love, and fear. Download it:AmazoniTunes 37. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926) Read it for its evocative portrait of disillusioned Jazz Age expatriates, drinking their way from Paris to Pamplona, or for the achingly exquisite, never-to-be love between Jake Barnes and Lady Brett. Download it:AmazoniTunes 36. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957) Rarely does a book rivet you and make you ponder the Big Picture, but Rand's masterwork, about a man who decides to organize a strike and bring the world to a standstill, does both. Download it:AmazoniTunes 35. Kenzaburo Oë, A Personal Matter (1964) Drawn from his own experiences, Oë's soul-baring novel about a father who must come to grips with the birth of his mentally disabled son is a powerful and public work of self-administered open-heart surgery. Download it:AmazoniTunes 34. John Irving, The World According to Garp (1978) Irving's enthralling and humane knockabout drama — combining an old-fashioned plot with new-fashioned plot elements (sex change, feminism, mayhem) — turned a page in American fiction, from blasé minimalism to tub-thumping maximalism. Download it:AmazoniTunes 33. Art Spiegelman, Maus (1986) Spiegelman's graphic novel tells of his parents' struggle to survive the Holocaust by anthropomorphizing them as mice evading feline Nazis. It works on all the intended levels: as biography, history, and a critique of comic-book conventions. Download it:Amazon 32. J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951) Boy flees prep school. Boy takes girl on date. Boy revisits Manhattan childhood. Boy — that's Holden Caulfield, if you really want to hear about it — becomes Defiant Adolescent Hero of the whole baby-boom generation. Download it:AmazoniTunes 31. José Saramago, Blindness (1995) A horrific, all-consuming allegory about an unnamed city where everyone loses their eyesight — and their humanity. The dude won the Nobel Prize for a reason. Download it:AmazoniTunes 30. Richard Wright, Native Son (1940) Wright focuses a floodlight on the Depression-era social system in his tale of a poverty-stricken African-American man who hurtles toward an awful conclusion. This is protest fiction at its grimmest — and most mesmerizing. Download it:AmazoniTunes 29. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1986) Atwood at her most startling. The novel imagines a futuristic block of America ruled by a racist, sexist, theocratic military dictatorship. Under its angry thumb wriggles Offred, a woman kept as a concubine solely for reproductive purposes. An important benchmark of feminist literature, wrapped in thriller guise. Download it:AmazoniTunes 28. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869) Tolstoy's novel asks the question ''What happened to the aristocracy when Napoleon invaded Russia?'' Sure, the answer turns out to be kind of long. But novels like this are the reason someone had to think up the word masterpiece. Download it:AmazoniTunes 27. Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (1962) Science, philosophy, and adventure collide in L'Engle's brilliant mash-up about a brother and sister who embark on an interplanetary adventure to save their father. L'Engle's fantasy was rejected by publisher after publisher, partly because the protagonist was female — ''I'm a female,'' she said later. ''Why would I give all the best ideas to a male?'' Download it:AmazoniTunes 26. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952) In Ellison's gut punch of a novel, a disaffected young man leaves behind the hypocrisies of the South only to discover violence and alienation on the streets of 1930s New York. Download it:AmazoniTunes