Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Internationally renowned author Robert Coover returns with a major new novel set in Venice and featuring one of its most famous citizens, Pinocchio. The result is a brilliant philosophical discourse on what it means to be human; a hilarious, bawdy adventure; and a fitting tribute to the history, grandeur, and decay of Venice itself.

Gerald's Party: A Novel

by Robert Coover

Robert Coover's wicked and surreally comic novel takes place at a chilling, ribald, and absolutely fascinating party. Amid the drunken guests, a woman turns up murdered on the living room floor. Around the corpse, one of several the evening produces, Gerald's party goes on — a chatter of voices, names, faces, overheard gags, rounds of storytelling, and a mounting curve of desire. What Coover has in store for his... (more)

The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Directors' Cut (A Black cat book)

The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Directors' Cut (A Black cat book)

by Robert Coover, Joe Orton

A virtuosic performance, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre is a masterpiece. It is set in Cinecity, the frozen capital of an unnamed utopia - or is it dystopia? - where Lucky Pierre plies his trade. Part porn star, part clown, part everyman, Lucky has no life outside his films. Through the lenses of his nine female muse-directors, Lucky becomes a naive castaway, a submissive slave, a child star in a barnyard frolic,... (more)

Being There

by Jerzy Kosinski

A modern classic now available from Grove Press, Being There is one of the most popular and significant works from a writer of international stature. It is the story of Chauncey Gardiner - Chance, an enigmatic but distinguished man who emerges from nowhere to become an heir to the throne of a Wall Street tycoon, a presidential policy adviser, and a media icon. Truly "a man without qualities," Chance's... (more)

The Separation

by Christopher Priest

THE SEPARATION is the story of twin brothers, rowers in the 1936 Olympics (where they met Hess, Hitler's deputy); one joins the RAF, and captains a Wellington; he is shot down after a bombing raid on Hamburg and becomes Churchill's aide-de-camp; his twin brother, a pacifist, works with the Red Cross, rescuing bombing victims in London. But this is not a straightforward story of the Second World War: this is an... (more)

The Sunlight Dialogues

by John Gardner, John Champlin Gardner

Madman. Prophet. Magician. Hippie. Murderer. Who is the Sunlight Man? In The Sunlight Dialogues , John Gardner's vision of America in the turbulent 1960s embraces an unconventional cast of conventional citizens in the small rural town of Batavia, New York. Sheriff Fred Clumly is trying desperately to unravel mysteries surrounding a disorderly, nameless drifter called "The Sunlight Man," who has been jailed for... (more)

The Names (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Don Delillo

Takes place in the time of the Iranian revolution in Greece, the Middle East and India. An American risk analyst becomes obsessed by news of a ritual murder and is drawn to search for clues--a journey that takes over everything else in his life.

The Fan-Maker's Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis de Sade (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

The Fan-Maker's Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis de Sade (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

by Rikki Ducornet

"A fan is like the thighs of a woman: it opens and closes." And so begins this lush, historical novel--a mixture of imagination and conceit, passion and suspense. In a tense courtroom during the French Revolution, a young fan-maker, renowned all over Paris for her sensual and graphic objets d'art, is on trial because of her collaboration with the Marquis de Sade. Heads will roll unless the independent fan-maker,... (more)

The Athenian Murders

by José Carlos Somoza

Text: Spanish

Finnegans Wake

by James Joyce

Follows a man's thoughts and dreams during a single night. It is also a book that participates in the re-reading of Irish history that was part of the revival of the early 20th century. The author also wrote "Ulysses", "Dubliners" and "Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man".

The Castle of Crossed Destinies

by Italo Calvino

A series of short, fantastic narratives inspired by fifteenth-century tarot cards and their archetypical images. Full-color and black-and-white reproductions of tarot cards. Translated by William Weaver.A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Gun, with Occasional Music

A Novel

by Jonathan Lethem

Gumshoe Conrad Metcalf has problems-there's a rabbit in his waiting room and a trigger-happy kangaroo on his tail. Near-future Oakland is a brave new world where evolved animals are members of society, the police monitor citizens by their karma levels, and mind-numbing drugs such as Forgettol and Acceptol are all the rage. Metcalf has been shadowing Celeste, the wife of an affluent doctor. Perhaps he's falling a... (more)

Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

This marvellous book is one of the most ingenious works of modern fiction, an entire microcosm brought to life in a Paris apartment block. Serge Valene wants to create an elaborate painting of the building he has made his home for the last sixty years. As he plans his picture, he contemplates the lives of all the people he has ever known there. Chapter by chapter, the narrative moves around the building revealing... (more)

El Aleph

by Jorge L. Borges

El trabajo que da titulo a Historia de la eternidad se ocupa del tiempo y de su negacion y examina dos concepciones contrapuestas de eternidad: la alejandrina, de raiz platonica, y la cristiana, nacida con la doctrina trinitaria de Ireneo y formalizada por San Agustin. Otras dos penetrantes digresiones estudian la doctrina de Nietzsche sobre el eterno retorno y las concepciones basadas en el caracter recurrente... (more)

Days Between Stations: A Novel

by Steve Erickson

In a world of cataclysm and unraveled time, a young woman's face, a misbegotten childhood in a Parisian brothel, and the fragment of a lost movie masterpiece are the only clues in a man's search for his past. Steve Erickson's Days Between Stations is the stunning, now classic dream-spec of our precarious age -- by turns beautiful and obsessed, haunted and hallucinated, in which lives erotically collide, the past... (more)

Tours of the Black Clock: A Novel

by Steve Erickson

Cutting a terrifying path from a Pennsylvania farm to the Europe of the 1930s, Banning Jainlight becomes the private pornographer of the world's most evil man. In a Vienna window, he glimpses the face of a lost erotic dream, and from there travels to the Twentieth Century's darkest corner to confront its shocked and secret conscience. One of Steve Erickson's most acclaimed novels, Tours of the Black Clock ... (more)

Rubicon Beach: A Novel

by Steve Erickson

A prisoner with a haunted past is released into ravaged Los Angeles, where he pursues an elusive girl to the shores or Rubicon Beach and faces his lost destiny. In his second novel, Steve Erickson creates a decaying world filled with leftover passions and poetic vision that established him as one of the most original and evocative American writers of his generation.

YOU BRIGHT AND RISEN ANGELSWilliam T. Vollman

YOU BRIGHT AND RISEN ANGELS

by William T. Vollman

The Son of Laughter: A Novel

by Frederick Buechner

Rich in family drama, passion, and human affinity, critically acclaimed author Frederick Buechner's contemporary retelling of this captivating and timeless biblical saga revitalizes the ancient story of Jacob, delighted our senses and modern sensibilities and gracing us with his exceptional eloquence and wit.

Underworld: A Novel

by Don Delillo

Our lives, our half-century. Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence. Don DeLillo's mesmerizing novel opens with a legendary baseball game... (more)

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Browse Subjects: postmodern fiction

Top Books

by Robert Coover

by Robert Coover

by Robert Coover, Joe Orton

by Jerzy Kosinski

by Christopher Priest

by John Gardner, John Champlin Gardner

by Don Delillo

by Rikki Ducornet

by José Carlos Somoza

by James Joyce

by Italo Calvino

A Novel

by Jonathan Lethem

by Georges Perec

by Jorge L. Borges

by Steve Erickson

by Steve Erickson

by Steve Erickson

by William T. Vollman

by Frederick Buechner

by Don Delillo