Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

What if the Second Coming didn't quite come off as advertised? What if "the Corpse" on display in that funky roadside zoo is really who they say it is--what does that portent for the future of western civilization? And what if a young clairvoyant named Amanda reestablishes the flea circus as popular entertainment and fertility worship as the principal religious form of our high-tech age? Another Roadside... (more)

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

by Tom Stoppard

Acclaimed as a modern dramatic masterpiece, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" is the fabulously inventive tale of "Hamlet" as told from the worm's-eye view of the bewildered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters in Shakespeare's play. In Tom Stoppard's best-known work, this Shakespearean Laurel and Hardy finally get a chance to take the lead role, but do so in a world where echoes of "Waiting... (more)

The Third Policeman (John F. Byrne Irish Literature Series)

The Third Policeman (John F. Byrne Irish Literature Series)

by Flann O'Brien

The Third Policeman is Flann O'Brien's brilliantly dark comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where, through the theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he is introduced to "Atomic Theory" and its relation to bicycles, the existence of... (more)

No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories

No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories

by Miranda July

Award-winning filmmaker and performing artist Miranda July brings her extraordinary talents to the page in a startling, sexy, and tender collection. In these stories, July gives the most seemingly insignificant moments a sly potency. A benign encounter, a misunderstanding, a shy revelation can reconfigure the world. Her characters engage awkwardly -- they are sometimes too remote, sometimes too intimate. With... (more)

The Nimrod Flipout: Stories

by Etgar Keret, Institute for Translation of Hebrew Literature

From Israel’s most popular and acclaimed young writer—“Stories that are short, strange, funny, deceptively casual in tone and affect, stories that sound like a joke but aren’t” (Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi ) Already featured on This American Life and Selected Shorts and in Zoetrope: All Story and L.A. Weekly , these short stories include a man who finds equal pleasure in his beautiful girlfriend... (more)

The Girl on the Fridge: Stories

by Etgar Keret

A birthday-party magician whose hat tricks end in horror and gore; a girl parented by a major household appliance; the possessor of the lowest IQ in the Mossad—such are the denizens of Etgar Keret’s dark and fertile mind. The Girl on the Fridge contains the best of Keret’s first collections, the ones that made him a household name in Israel and the major discovery of this last decade.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

by Tom Robbins

Starring Sissy Hanshaw--flawlessly beautiful, almost. A small-town girl with big-time dreams and a quirk to match--hitchhiking her way into your heart, your hopes, and your sleeping bags... Featuring Bonanza Jellybean and the smooth-riding cowgirls of Rubber Rose Ranch. Chink, lascivious guru of yams and yang. Julian, Mohawk by birth; asthmatic esthete and husband by disposition. Dr. Robbins, preventive... (more)

Slaughterhouse-Five

Or, the Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death

by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simulta

The Crying of Lot 49

by Thomas Pynchon

The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self knowledge.

Waiting for Godot: Tragicomedy in 2 Acts

Waiting for Godot: Tragicomedy in 2 Acts

by Samuel Beckett

A classic of modern theatre and perennial favorite of colleges and high schools. "One of the most noble and moving plays of our generation . . . suffused with tenderness for the whole human perplexity . . . like a sharp stab of beauty and pain."--The London Times.

Breakfast of Champions

by Kurt Vonnegut

Breakfast Of Champions is vintage Vonnegut. One of his favorite characters, aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. The result is murderously funny satire as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.

Cat's Cradle

by Kurt Vonnegut

One of Vonnegut's major works, this is an apocalyptic tale of the planet's ultimate fate, featuring a cast of unlikely heroes.

Lullaby

by Chuck Palahniuk

Ever heard of a culling song? It’s a lullaby sung in Africa to give a painless death to the old or infirm. The lyrics of a culling song kill, whether spoken or even just thought. You can find one on page 27 of Poems and Rhymes from Around the World , an anthology that is sitting on the shelves of libraries across the country, waiting to be picked up by unsuspecting readers. Reporter Carl Streator discovers... (more)

The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989

by Samuel Beckett

Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett is one of the most profoundly original writers of our century. A tremendously influential poet and dramatist, Beckett spoke of his prose fiction as the "important writing, " the medium in which his ideas were most powerfully distilled. Here, for the first time, his short prose is gathered in a definitive, complete volume by leading Beckett scholar S.E.

The Bald Soprano and Other Plays: Bald Soprano/the Lesson/Jack or the Submission/the Chairs

The Bald Soprano and Other Plays: Bald Soprano/the Lesson/Jack or the Submission/the Chairs

by Eugene Ionesco

The leading figure of absurdist theater and one of the great innovators of the modern stage, Eugene Ionesco did not write his first play, The Bald Soprano, until 1950. He went on to become an internationally renowned master of modern drama, famous for the comic proportions and bizarre effects that allow his work to be simultaneously hilarious, tragic, and profound.

The Verificationist: A Novel

by Donald Antrim

With The Verificationist, Donald Antrim, acclaimed author of The Hundred Brothers, confirms his place as one of America's strangest and fiercely intelligent young writers. One April night, a group of psychologists from the Krakower Institute meet at a pancake house, where they order breakfast foods and engage in shop talk and the occasional flirtation. At the center of this maelstrom of pyschobabble and... (more)

Malone Dies

by Samuel Beckett

'Malone', writes Malone, 'is what I am called now'. On his deathbed, and wiling away the time with stories, the octogenarian Malone's account of his condition is intermittent and contradictory, shifting with the vagaries of the passing days: without mellowness, without elegiacs; wittier, jauntier, and capable of wilder rages than "Molloy". The sound I liked best had nothing noble about it. It was the barking of... (more)

Kockroach: A Novel

by Tyler Knox

It is the mid-1950s, and Kockroach, perfectly content with his life infesting a fleabag hotel off Times Square, awakens to discover that somehow he's been transformed into, of all things, a human. A tragic turn of events, yes, but cockroaches are awesome coping machines, so Kockroach copes. Step by step, he learns the ways of man—how to walk, how to talk, and how to wear a jaunty brown fedora. Led by his primitive... (more)

The Somnambulist

by Jonathan Barnes

Be warned. This book has no literary merit whatsoever. Needless to say, I doubt you'll believe a word of it. Once the toast of good society in Victoria's England, the extraordinary conjurer Edward Moon no longer commands the respect or inspires the awe that he did in earlier times. Despite having previously unraveled more than sixty perplexing criminal puzzles (to the delight of a grateful London... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: absurdist

by Tom Robbins

by Tom Stoppard

by Flann O'Brien

by Miranda July

by Etgar Keret, Institute for Translation of Hebrew Literature

by Etgar Keret

by Tom Robbins

Or, the Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death

by Kurt Vonnegut

by Thomas Pynchon

by Samuel Beckett

by Kurt Vonnegut

by Kurt Vonnegut

by Chuck Palahniuk

by Samuel Beckett

by Eugene Ionesco

by Donald Antrim

by Samuel Beckett

by Tyler Knox

by Jonathan Barnes