Short answers, pulled from the story.
Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century is a list of the hundred most memorable books of the twentieth century, compiled from a poll conducted in the spring of 1999 by the French newspaper Le Monde and the retailer Fnac. The survey asked 17,000 French participants which books had stayed in their memory, starting from a preliminary list of 200 titles.
Albert Camus's The Stranger, published in 1942, topped the list at number one. Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time came second, and Franz Kafka's The Trial placed third.
The survey was conducted jointly by the French newspaper Le Monde and the French retailer Fnac in the spring of 1999. Le Monde journalist Josyane Savigneau wrote about the list and clarified that it was meant to reflect emotional connections rather than rank the most distinguished French literary works.
Yes, five comic book albums appear on the list, one from each of five Francophone or Italian series: Asterix, Tintin, Blake and Mortimer, Gaston, and Corto Maltese. The highest-placed comic is Herge's The Blue Lotus at number eighteen.
The Modern Library's 100 Best Novels list, published in 1998, restricted eligibility to English-language works, making non-English titles ineligible. The Le Monde and Fnac poll had no language restriction, resulting in entries from Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Czech, Albanian, and Dutch literature alongside French and English works.
The list includes works from numerous languages, including John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls in English, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude in Spanish, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago in Russian, Anne Frank's diary in Dutch, Ismail Kadare's The General of the Dead Army in Albanian, and Selma Lagerlof's The Wonderful Adventures of Nils in Swedish.