Ulysses

Nothing happens in Ulysses, technically — one day in Dublin, June 16, 1904 — and everything happens in it, because Joyce spends eighteen episodes reinventing what a novel is even allowed to do: interior monologue, mock-newspaper headlines, a chapter written as catechism. Sylvia Beach published the first edition out of her Paris bookshop in 1922, a thousand copies that now sell at auction for six figures each. It was banned in the United States until 1933, which meant early copies crossed the Atlantic hidden inside other books — smuggled contraband, and arguably still the most influential novel of the twentieth century.