Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

A soothing, flavourful bowl of spicy chilli, rich gumbo, blissful bisque, or steaming chowder is always welcome at mealtime. And Sunday is the perfect day to enjoy it, when you've had a chance to slow down a bit after a busy week and spend a little time in the kitchen, preparing a heart-warming meal for friends and family. "Sunday Soup" features 60 recipes (one for each Sunday and then some!) that take advantage... (more)

The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever

The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever

by David M. Friedman

He was one of the most famous men of the twentieth century, the subject of best–selling biographies and a hit movie, as well as the inspiration for a dance step – the Lindy Hop – he himself was too shy to try. But for all the attention lavished on Charles Lindbergh, one story has remained untold until now: his macabre scientific collaboration with Dr. Alexis Carrel. Together this oddest of couples – one a... (more)

Loving Frank

by Nancy Horan

I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current. So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house,... (more)

Remembering the Bones: A Novel

by Frances Itani

“Itani’s writing is merely breathtaking.” — Newsday The new novel from the award-winning author of Deafening is a poignant exploration of one eighty-year-old life, as its heroine lies at the bottom of a ravine where she has crashed en route to visit the queen. Born the same day as Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, Canadian Georgina Danforth Witley is one of ninety-nine privileged Commonwealth subjects invited... (more)

The Heroines: A Novel

by Eileen Favorite

Although a true lover of books, Anne-Marie Entwhistle prefers not to read to her spirited daughter, Penny, especially from the likes of Madame Bovary , Gone With the Wind , or The Scarlet Letter . These novels, devoted to the lives of the Heroines that make them so irresistible, have a way of hitting too close to home -- well, to the Homestead actually, where Anne-Marie runs the quaint family-owned bed and... (more)

Every Eye

by Isobel English

Isobel English, a novelist of the 1950s, wrote three brief books about adultery and damnation admired today by Muriel Spark and Beryl Bainbridge. Every Eye concerns Hattie, a woman not really at home anywhere, least of all among her manipulative family, which has assigned her the role of shabby-genteel London spinster. She has understood little about her existence, and about her strange, aborted love affair with a... (more)

Go With Me: A Novel

by Castle Freeman

The Vermont hill country is the stark, vivid setting for this gripping and entertaining story of bold determination. The local villain, Blackway, is making life hellish for Lillian, a young woman from parts elsewhere. Her boyfriend has fled the state in fear, and local law enforcement can do nothing to protect her. She resolves, however, to stand her ground, and to fight back. A pair of unlikely allies – Lester, a... (more)

Legends of Literature: The Best Articles, Interviews and Essays from the Archives of Writers Digest Magazine

Legends of Literature: The Best Articles, Interviews and Essays from the Archives of Writers Digest Magazine

by Phillip Sexton

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding

by Julia Strachey

“<Strachey's> sharp eye, playful language and perfect comic timing will not only have you laughing, it'll leave you wondering why the rom-com formula isn't imaginatively tweaked more often.”— NPR 's 'Books We Like' “A brilliant, bittersweet upstairs-downstairs comedy.”— Guardian Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style... (more)

State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America

State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America

by Matt Weiland, Sean Wilsey

From the bestselling editors of The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup comes an American road trip in book form: original writing on all 50 states by 50 of our finest novelists, journalists, and essayists Inspired by the example of the legendary WPA American Guide series of the 1930s and '40s, now 50 of our foremost writers have produced original pieces of reportage and memoir that capture the 50 states... (more)

My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro

My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro

"When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name . . . . It is perhaps only in reading a love... (more)

The Book of Totally Irresponsible Science: 64 Daring Experiments for Young Scientists

The Book of Totally Irresponsible Science: 64 Daring Experiments for Young Scientists

by Sean Connolly

What could be more fun for kids than to have the kind of rip-roaring good time that harkens back to pre-video game, pre-computer days? Introducing 64 valuable science experiments that snap, crackle, pop, ooze, crash, boom, and stink! From Marshmallows on Steroids to Home-Made Lightning, the Sandwich Bag Bomb to Giant Air Cannon, The Book of Totally Irresponsible Science awakens kids' curiosity while... (more)

The Science Book: Everything You Need to Know About the World and How It Works (National Geographic)

The Science Book: Everything You Need to Know About the World and How It Works (National Geographic)

by National Geographic

A delight for the casual reader, yet so complete and wide-ranging that science buffs and students will welcome it, The Science Book encapsulates centuries of scientific thought in one richly illustrated volume. Natural phenomena, revolutionary inventions, and the most up-to-date investigations are explained in detailed text, and 2,000 vivid illustrationsincluding 3-D graphics and pictogramsmake the information... (more)

Churchill by Himself: The Definitive Collection of Quotations

Churchill by Himself: The Definitive Collection of Quotations

“Never give in!” Winston Churchill is famous for admonishing: “This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never.” What most people don’t know is that when he said this he was addressing not a nation facing the threat of invasion, but a roomful of schoolboys at his old school. A powerful, persuasive speaker and notorious wit, Churchill is one of the twentieth century’s most oft-quoted... (more)

American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work

American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work

by Susan Cheever

The 1850s were heady times in Concord, Massachusetts: in a town where a woman's petticoat drying on an outdoor line was enough to elicit scandal, some of the greatest minds of our nation's history were gathering in three of its wooden houses to establish a major American literary movement. The Transcendentalists, as these thinkers came to be called, challenged the norms of American society with essays, novels, and... (more)

Let Me Finish

by Roger Angell

Widely known as an original and graceful writer, Roger Angell has developed a devoted following through his essays in the New Yorker. Now, in Let Me Finish, a deeply personal, fresh form of autobiography, he takes an unsentimental look at his early days as a boy growing up in Prohibition-era New York with a remarkable father; a mother, Katharine White, who was a founding editor of the New Yorker; and a famous... (more)

The Widow's War: A Novel

by Sally Gunning

Married for twenty years to Edward Berry, Lyddie is used to the trials of being a whaler's wife in the Cape Cod village of Satucket, Massachusetts—running their house herself during her husband's long absences at sea, living with the daily uncertainty that Edward will simply not return. And when her worst fear is realized, she finds herself doubly cursed. She is overwhelmed by grief, and her property and rights... (more)

The Oxford Murders

by Guillermo Marti?nez, Sonia Soto, Guillermo Martinez, Guillermo Martinez

Two mathematicians must join forces to stop a serial killer in this spellbinding international bestseller A paperback sensation in Argentina, Spain, and the United Kingdom, The Oxford Murders has been hailed as "a remarkable feat" ( Time Out London) and its author as "one of Argentina’s most distinctive voices" ( The Times Literary Supplement ). It begins on a summer day in Oxford, when a young... (more)

Red Lights (New York Review Books Classics)

Red Lights (New York Review Books Classics)

by Georges Simenon

It is Friday evening before Labor Day weekend. Americans are hitting the highways in droves; the radio crackles with warnings of traffic jams and crashed cars. Steve Hogan and his wife, Nancy, have a long drive ahead—from New York City to Maine, where their children are in camp. But Steve wants a drink before they go, and on the road he wants another. Soon, exploding with suppressed fury, he is heading into that... (more)

Dear James

by Jon Hassler

Agatha Magee, the feisty, quick-witted, fiercely Catholic doyenne of Staggerford, Minnesota, confronts crises large and small in her 70th year. She is forced to retire from her beloved teaching, she's crushed to learn that her Irish pen pal James is a priest, and she's faced with the evils of the world -- from Irish terrorism to the petty jealousies that tear apart life in a small town. Jon Hassler... (more)

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by Betty Rosbottom