Fortnightly Book Distribution (June 2026)

In 2018, I did an experiment in seeing how the Fortnightly Books were distributed, globally. What I decided on was the country of the author. That's not always useful for ancient authors -- there's no real sense in which St. Maximus Confessor is an Israeli author, despite having been born within the modern borders of Israel. It also runs into problems with British literature, because the authors who contribute to what we think of as British literature are born all over -- Kipling and T. H. White were born in India, J. R. R. Tolkien was born in South Africa, etc. One can make sense of Kipling as an Indian author, but it's literally just happenstance that Tolkien was born in South Africa, and it has nothing to do with his literary work. Nonetheless, birthplace of author (sometimes probable birthplace), as determined by modenr borders, turned out to be the best way to do it, for the most part. I was thinking about it recently, so here I have updated it to the most recent Fortnightly Book, Flaubert's Sentimental Education.

Algeria

Augustine, Confessions

Suetonius, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars


Austria

Douglas, The South Wind

Canada

Davies, The Salterton Trilogy

China

Cao Xueqin & Gao E, A Dream of Red Mansions

Czech Republic

Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk

Werfel, The Song of Bernadette


Denmark

Undset, Saint Catherine of Siena, Ida Elisabeth

Egypt

--, The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Egyptian Poems, 1940-1640 BC


England

--, Beowulf

--, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo

--, The Complete Old English Poems

[Certain Members of the Detection Club: Chesterton, Whitechurch, Cole & Cole, Wade, Christie, Rhode, Kennedy, Sayers, Knox, Wills Crofts, Jepson, Dane, Berkeley], The Floating Admiral

Adams, Watership Down

Austen, Sanditon, The Watsons, Lady Susan, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Mansfield Park

Baring, The Coat Without a Seam, In My End Is My Beginning

Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People

Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

Brontë (A), The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Brontë (Ch), Villette

Burdekin, Swastika Night

Burney, Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla

Caldwell, Never Victorious, Never Defeated

Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

Christie, And Then There Were None, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, Appointment with Death, 13 at Dinner, The Tuesday Club Murders, What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!

Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Collins, The Moonstone

Cooper, The Dark Is Rising Sequence

Coward, Future Indefinite

Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, The Pickwick Papers, Hard Times; Bleak House; Sketches by Boz

Edgeworth, Belinda

Eliot, Romola

Gordon (Lord Byron), Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

Heyer, A Civil Contract

Jones, Dark Lord of Derkholm, Year of the Griffin

Julian, The Showings

Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe

King-Hall, The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765

Milton, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained

Newman, Loss and Gain

Plunkett (Lord Dunsany), The King of Elfland's Daughter

Renault, Fire from Heaven

Sayers, Have His Carcase, The Man Born to Be King, Murder Must Advertise; Striding Folly

Scruton, Notes from Underground

Sewell, Black Beauty

Shakespeare, Histories

Shelley (M), Frankenstein

Shelley (P), Prometheus Unbound

Stapledon, Odd John; Starmaker; Sirius

Waugh, Edmund Campion, Brideshead Revisited, Helena

Wells, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds

Williams, Many Dimensions, War in Heaven, The Place of the Lion, Shadows of Ecstasy, The Greater Trumps, Descent into Heaven, All Hallows' Eve

Yonge, The Heir of Redclyffe

Finland

Lönnrot, The Kalevala, The Kanteletar


France

--, The Quest of the Holy Grail

Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes

Balzac, Eugenie Grandet, The Wild Ass's Skin, The Quest of the Absolute

Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques

Bédier, The Romance of Tristan & Iseult

Dumas, The Three Musketeers (with Maquet)

Du Maurier, Peter Ibbetson

Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Sentimental Education

Hémon, Maria Chapdelaine

Hugo, Les Misérables

Huysmans, The Damned; En Route; The Cathedral

Leblanc, Arsene Lupin, Gentleman Burglar; Arsene Lupin vs Herlock Sholmes; The Hollow Needle; 813; The Crystal Stopper; The Confessions of Arsene Lupin; The Golden Triangle; The Secret of Sarek

Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera

Péguy, The Mystery of the Holy Innocents and Other Poems

Rambaud, The Battle

Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac

Stendhal, The Red and the Black

Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Mysterious Island, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, From the Earth to the Moon, Around the Moon, The Kip Brothers, Travel Scholarships, The Self-Propelled Island, A Castle in Transylvania, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Mighty Orinoco, Invasion of the Sea, Family Without a Name, 20000 Leagues Under the Sea, Paris in the Twentieth Century, The Lighthouse at the End of the World, Keraban the Inflexible, The Steam House

Georgia

Strugatsky (A & B), Hard to Be a God, Monday Starts on Saturday, The Doomed City; Roadside Picnic; The Inhabited Island


Germany

--, The Nibelungenlied

Ende, The Neverending Story

Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship; Faust

Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

Schiller, William Tell

von Aue, Arthurian Romances, Tales, and Lyric Poetry

Greece

Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

Euripides, Medea, Hippolytus; Helen

Homer, The Odyssey

Sophocles, The Theban Plays of Sophocles

Hungary

Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel; I Will Repay, The Elusive Pimpernel, The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel

Iceland

--, Eyrbyggja Saga

--, Faroe-Islander Saga

--,  Hrafnkel's Saga and Other Stories

--, Njal's Saga

--, Orkneyinga Saga

--, Saga of the Volsungs

--, Saga of Ragnar Lothbrok

--, The Poetic Edda

--, The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki

--, The Saga of the Jomsvikings

--, The Vinland Sagas

Sturluson, Heimskringla, Egil's Saga, The Prose Edda


India

--, The Song Celestial

Kipling, Kim

White, The Once and Future King

Iraq

--, The Epic of Gilgamesh

Ireland

Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat

Shaw, Two Plays for Puritans, Man and Superman

Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Stoker, Dracula, The Jewel of Seven Stars

Wilde, The Plays of Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, Short Stories

Israel

Josephus, The Jewish War

Maximus the Confessor, The Life of the Virgin


Italy

Danta, Purgatorio

Eco, The Island of the Day Before, The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, Baudolino, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

Manzoni, The Betrothed

Piccolomini, Secret Memoirs of a Renaissance Pope

Tomasi (di Lampedusa), The Leopard

Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters

Vida, Christiad


Japan

Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches

Endō, Silence

Ishiguro, The Buried Giant

Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

Sono, Watcher from the Shore

Jersey

Wace, The History of the Norman People; Roman de Brut

Nigeria

Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Northern Ireland

Lewis, Till We Have Faces, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Space Trilogy, The Screwtape Letters

O'Brien, The Third Policeman

Norway

Asbjornson & Moe, The Complete Norwegian Fairy Tales

Hamsun, Growth of the Soil

Undset, Gunnar's Daughter, Kristin Lavransdatter; Saga of Saints

Vesaas, The Ice Palace


Philippines

Joaquin, Cave and Shadows, May Day Eve and Other Stories

Poland

Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis


Russia

Asimov, The Foundation Series, The Complete Adventures of Lucky Starr, The End of Eternity, The Gods Themselves, The Complete Robot, Robot Dreams, Nightfall and Other Stories

Chekhov, Two Plays

Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

Rand, Anthem, Atlas Shrugged

Solzhenitsyn, August 1914, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Zamyatin, We


Scotland

Blind Harry, The Wallace

Brown, Magnus

Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Valley of Fear, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

Graham, The Wind in the Willows

MacDonald, Lilith, Phantastes

MacInnes, North from Rome

Scott, Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, Waverley; Old Mortality

Stevenson, The Master of Ballantrae, Kidnapped; Treasure Island

Taylor, Farewell to Valley Forge


South Africa

Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, Roverandom, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales

South Korea

Kim Man-Jung, The Nine-Cloud Dream


Spain

Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada (St. Teresa), The Life, The Interior Castle

Unamuno y Jugo, San Manuel Bueno, Mártir


Switzerland

Wyss, The Swiss Family Robinson

Syria

--, The Protevangelium of James


Turkey

Ahmet Midhat Efendi, Felâtun Bey and Râkım Efendi

Michael Psellos, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers

Morier, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan

Ukraine

Conrad, Nostromo


USA

Adler, Philosopher at Large

Alcott, A Long Fatal Love Chase 

Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima

Anderson, Three Hearts and Three Lions

Beagle, The Last Unicorn

Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin 

Brockden Brown, Wieland, Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist

Brown, Storming Heaven, Shadows of Steel 

Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes, Return of Tarzan 

Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop; My Ántonia, O Pioneers!

Cooper, The Deerslayer; The Spy 

Crichton, Jurassic Park 

Dodson, Away All Boats 

Donlon, Outpost of Freedom 

Douglas, Magnificent Obsession 

Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 

Ferber, Cimarron 

Flynn, In the Country of the Blind; In the Belly of the Whale

Gilman, Herland 

Goldman, The Princess Bride

Harte, Tales of the Gold Rush 

Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, Twice-Told Tales 

Haycox, The Adventurers 

Herbert, The Santaroga Barrier

Hodge (B), If You Can Get It

Hodge (C), Unstable Felicity

Howard, Conan the Barbarian

Howells, The Big Company Look 

Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Hyman, No Time for Sergeants 

Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

Klein, Triptych 

L'Amour, Sackett, The Sackett Brand; Hondo

Landey, Triptych 

L'Engle, The Time Quartet

London, The Sea-Wolf 

Lovecraft, The Whisperer in the Darkness 

Markle, The Teka Stone 

Marquand, Think Fast, Mr Moto 

Michener, Journey

McIntyre, The River Witch 

Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz 

Morrison, The Devious Way 

Mossiker, Napoleon and Josephine 

Nguyen, Things We Lost to the Water

Ormonde, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba 

Powers, Declare 

Price, The Beloved Invader 

Roark, The Lady and the Deep Blue Sea 

Slaughter, Sword and Scalpel 

Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events 

Steinbeck, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Court, The Grapes of Wrath 

Stone, Love Is Eternal 

Straczynski, Demon Night 

Tarkington, Monsieur Beaucaire 

Terry, Tom Northway 

Twain, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte, The Innocents Abroad 

Wangerin, The Book of the Dun Cow

Washington, Up from Slavery 

Wister, The Virginian


Vietnam

Nguyễn Du, The Song of Kiều

Wales

--, The Book of Taliesin

--, The Mabinogion

Unknown

First, Second, Third, and Fourth Maccabees

The Book of a Thousand Nights and A Night Volume I, Volume II