Zazie dans le métro (1959)

Zazie in the Metro is the shortest route on this list to laughing out loud. Impish, foul-mouthed Zazie arrives in Paris from the country to stay with her uncle Gabriel, and all she wants is to ride the metro, which is shut by a strike. What follows is a single breathless weekend of chases, misunderstandings and adults out of their depth. Queneau wrote much of it in spelled-out street French, so translation matters enormously. Barbara Wright, who also translated his Exercises in Style, found English equivalents for the phonetic games rather than explaining them, and her version is the standard one. Louis Malle's 1960 film is a fine chaser once the book is done.