What works of literature are perfect? Not the best necessarily but perfect, in that there is no fat, no scrimping. Everything is just right and the writer succeeds in everything they set out to do. Nothing messy here.
I'll start
>The Importance of Being Earnest
>Macbeth
>Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
>Stoner
Great Gatsby
Notes from Underground
Sorrows of Young Werther
As I Lay Dying
Read it again.
Emma
What Maisie Knew
I'd have Much Ado About Nothing as Shakespeare's tightest play
I feel Much Ado is quite baggy. The Don John stuff is fairly weak. Among the comedies, Midsummer seems the closest to perfect.
Lord Jim
Scifi edition:
Dune
Ubik
Day Of The Triffids
Neuromancer
The Death of Ivan Ilich
Proust: In search of lost time
Moby-Dick
Memoirs of Hadrian
Eliot Rodgers Manifesto senpai
TBK
These are the very definition of overstuffed. Brilliant but not perfect
Quite a few of Yeats poems are perfect. The Lake Isle of Innisfree, The Second Coming, He Wishes For the Clothes of Heaven are some of the more obvious ones that come to mind. He was a master of picking just the right word, just the right image and ending the poem just at the right time. I can't think of a single other poet who could rattle off so many perfect poems.
apparently Yeats absolutely agonized over the choice of words in his poetry and that's how they ended up being so striking
also I would nominate Pushkin
Cyrano de Bergerac putin
Ubu Roi
Robinson Crusoe
Faust
Thus Spoke Zarahustra
>Overwritten rant
> perfect
It's not overwritten. It's a very well written philosophical rant and that's all it tries to be and nothing more and succeeds perfectly.
It is purple prose gobbledygook fan fiction cringe. Literally the worst book Nietzsche wrote. Beyond Good and Evil is far closer to perfection.
De Profundis gets close
Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth.
Hamlet isn't perfect