Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

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In Our Time
by Ernest Hemingway
THIS COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES AND VIGNETTES MARKED ERNEST HEMINGWAY'S AMERICAN DEBUT AND MADE HIM FAMOUS When In Our Time was published in 1925, it was praised by Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald for its simple and precise use of language to convey a wide range of complex emotions, and it earned Hemingway a place beside Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein among the most promising... (more)
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The Temple of My Familiar
by Alice Walker
A visionary cast of characters weave together their past and present in a brilliantly intricate tapestry of tales.It is the story of the dispossessed and displaced, of peoples whose history is ancient and whose future is yet to come. Here we meet Lissie, a woman of many pasts; Arveyda the great guitarist and his Latin American wife who has had to flee her homeland; Suwelo, the history teacher, and his former wife... (more)
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Life of Pi
by Yann Martel
Life of Pi is a fantasy novel about a boy stranded in a lifeboat with a 450-pound Bengal Tiger after a shipwreck. Pi Patel's father runs a zoo in Pondicherry - a former French colony in India - but decides to migrate to Canada along with his family and assorted zoo animals due to political tensions. However, their voyage is abruptly cut short when Tsimtsum - their Japanese cargo ship - sinks in the Pacific during... (more)
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Siddhartha
by Hermann Hesse
A young Indian mystic, a contemporary of Buddha, sacrifices everything to search for the true meaning of life.
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The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker (Vintage)
by Eric Liu
Beyond black and white, native and alien, lies a vast and fertile field of human experience. It is here that Eric Liu, former speechwriter for President Clinton and noted political commentator, invites us to explore. In these compellingly candid essays, Liu reflects on his life as a second-generation Chinese American and reveals the shifting frames of ethnic identity. Finding himself unable to read a Chinese... (more)
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A History of Knowledge: Past, Present, and Future
by Charles Lincoln Van Doren, Charles Van Doren
A one-voume reference to the history of ideas that is a compendium of everything that humankind has thought, invented, created, considered, and perfected from the beginning of civilization into the twenty-first century. Massive in its scope, and yet totally accessible, A HISTORY OF KNOWLEDGE covers not only all the great theories and discoveries of the human race, but also explores the social conditions, political... (more)
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The Metamorphosis
by Franz Kafka
The Metamorphosis is a short story written by author Franz Kafka. Originally published in 1915, The Metamorphosis is considered to be the most famous of Kafka's works. It is the story of a traveling salesman, named Gregor Samsa, who transforms into a monstrous vermin while trying to find himself. The Metamorphosis is highly recommended for those who enjoy the writings of Franz Kafka, and for those who are... (more)
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Little Bee
(published as "The Other Hand" in the UK)
by Chris Cleave
The publishers of Chris Cleave's new novel "don't want to spoil" the story by revealing too much about it, and there's good reason not to tell too much about the plot's pivot point. All you should know going in to Little Bee is that what happens on the beach is brutal, and that it braids the fates of a 16-year-old Nigerian orphan (who calls herself Little Bee) and a well-off British couple — journalists trying to... (more)
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In Cold Blood
A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences
by Truman Capote
On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. Five years, four months and twenty-nine days later, on April 14, 1965, Richard Eugene Hickock, aged thirty-three, and Perry Edward Smith, aged thirty-six, were... (more)
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The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
One of the first questions people ask about The Things They Carried is this: Is it a novel, or a collection of short stories? The title page refers to the book simply as "a work of fiction," defying the conscientious reader's need to categorize this masterpiece. It is both: a collection of interrelated short pieces which ultimately reads with the dramatic force and tension of a novel. Yet each one of the... (more)
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Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was first published in 1899 in serial form in London’s Blackwood’s Magazine. Loosely based on Conrad’s firsthand experience of rescuing a company agent from a remote station in the heart of the Congo, the novel is considered a literary bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With its modern literary approach to questions such as the ambiguous nature of good and... (more)
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The Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway's last work published during his lifetime remains one of his most popular and best known. A man's symbolic quest to land the catch of a lifetime engages classic themes of the human struggle against nature as well as explores the intersection of expectation and desire.The story is told in minimalist style, perfectly crafted without sentimentality or bathos. Even if "fishing" isn't your 'thing',... (more)