Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

These mark the fifth and sixth Boll titles reprinted this year-impressive. First published in 1965, The Clown is typical Boll and is ripe with guilt and fear in its Nazi and post-Nazi Germany setting. Vennewitz's translation was dubbed "admirably smooth" (LJ 2/1/65). Katharina Blum (1975) was described by LJ's reviewer as a "powerful image of innocence betrayed, of measureless evil oozing quietly out from... (more)

The Piano Teacher: A Novel

by Joachim Neugroschel, Elfriede Jelinek

The Piano Teacher, the most famous novel of Elfriede Jelinek, who was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a shocking, searing, aching portrait of a woman bound between a repressive society and her darkest desires. Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the prestigious and formal Vienna Conservatory, who still lives with her domineering and possessive mother. Her life appears to be a seamless tissue of... (more)

A Partisan's Daughter

by Louis De Bernieres

Set in North London during the Winter of Discontent, A Partisan’s Daughter features the relationship between Chris, an unhappily married, middle-aged Englishman and Roza, a young Serbian woman who has recently moved to London. While driving through Archway in the course of his job as a medical rep, Chris is captivated by a young woman on a street corner. Clumsily, he engages her in conversation, and he secures... (more)

The Life And Death Of Adolph Hitler -Robert Payne

The Life And Death Of Adolph Hitler -

by Robert Payne

Winnie and Wolf

by A. N. Wilson

Winnie and Wolf is the story of the extraordinary relationship between Winifred Wagner and Adolf Hitler that took place during the years 1925–40, as seen through the eyes of the secretary at the Wagner house in Bayreuth. Winifred, an English girl, brought up in an orphanage in East Grinstead, married at the age of eighteen to the son of Germany’s most controversial genius, is a passionate Germanophile, a... (more)

Stalin's Nose - Across the Face of Europe

The Spanish Bow

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

**DEBUT FICTION** I was almost born Happy. Literally, Feliz was the Spanish name my mother wanted for me. Not a family name, not a local name, just a hope, stated in the farthest-reaching language she knew—a language that once reached around the world, to the Netherlands, Africa, the Americas, the Philippines. Only music has reached farther and penetrated more deeply. In a dusty, turn-of-the-century... (more)

Kaddish for a Child Not Born

by Imre Kertesz

Like its author, Hungarian novelist Kertesz (Fateless, LJ 10/15/92), the narrator in this disturbing yet lyrical novel is a writer/translator and Holocaust survivor. Middle-aged and out of harmony with everyone, including himself, he makes a final effort to explain his disconnectedness to life and his refusal to bring a child into a world where horrors like the Holocaust can occur. He recalls the pivotal events of... (more)

The Sorrow of Belgium (Tusk Ivories)

by Hugo Claus, Arnold J. Pomerans

A classic novel in the tradition of The Tin Drum , The Sorrow of Belgium is a searing, scathingly funny portrait of a wartime Belgium and one boy's coming of age-emotionally, sexually, and politically. Epic in scope, by turns hilarious and elegiac, The Sorrow of Belgium is the masterwork of one of the world's greatest contemporary authors.

Cheese

by Willem Elsschot

Cheese is a gentle, satirical fable of capitalism and wealth. A clerk in Antwerp suddenly becomes the chief agent in Belgium and Luxembourg for Edam cheese and is saddled with 10,000 wheels of the red-rinded delight. But he has no idea how to run a business or how to sell his goods, and what’s more, he doesn’t even like cheese. Steeped in the atmosphere of the 1930s, an era of smart operators and failed... (more)

Reunion

by Fred Uhlman

A daring novella about the loss of innocence in pre-war Germany. Reunion is the story of intense and innocent devotion between two young men growing up in "the soft, serene, bluish hills of Swabia," and the sinister (but all too mundane) forces that end both their friendship and their childhood. The year is 1932. Hans Schwartz is Jewish, the son of a Stuttgart doctor who asserts that the rise of the Nazis is... (more)

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

by Tadeusz Borowski

Tadeusz Borowski's concentration camp stories were based on his own experiences surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. In spare, brutal prose he describes a world where the will to survive overrides compassion and prisoners eat, work and sleep a few yards from where others are murdered; where the difference between human beings is reduced to a second bowl of soup, an extra blanket or the luxury of a pair of shoes with... (more)

The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays

The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays

by Albert Camus

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) From one of the most brilliant and influential thinkers of the twentieth century–two novels, six short stories, and a pair of essays in a single volume. In both his essays and his fiction, Albert Camus (1913—1960) de-ployed his lyric eloquence in defense against despair, providing an affirmation of the brave assertion of humanity in the face of a universe devoid of order or meaning.... (more)

For Whom the Bell Tolls

by Ernest Hemingway

In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight," For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat,... (more)

Dubliners

by James Joyce

The publication of James Joyce's Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years battling with publishers, resisting their demands to remove swear words, real place names and much else. Although only twenty-four when he signed his first publishing contract for the book, Joyce already knew its worth: to alter it in any way would "retard the course of civilization in Ireland." Joyce's aim was to tell the truth-- to... (more)

Blindness

by Jose Saramago

A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers-among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears-through the barren streets, and the procession... (more)

Atonement

by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan s symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from this master of English prose. On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant and Cecilia s childhood... (more)

All Quiet on the Western Front

by Susan Van Kirk, A. W. Wheen, Erich Maria Remarque, Erich M. Remarqu, A. W. Wheen

ONE OF TWELVE TITLES IN VINTAGE'S A FORMAT WAR PROMOTION The Greatest Novel about the First World War and an International Bestseller All Quiet on the Western Front is probably the most famous anti-war novel ever written. The story is told by a young 'unknown soldier' in the trenches of Flanders during the First World War. Through his eyes we see all the realities of war; under fire, on patrol, waiting in the... (more)

The Reader

by Bernhard Schlink, Carol Brown Janeway

Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany. When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover--then she inexplicably disappears. When... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: 20th century europe

The Clown (Penguin Classics)

by Heinrich Boll