Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

In this literary tour de force, novelist Arthur Golden enters a remote and shimmeringly exotic world. For the protagonist of this peerlessly observant first novel is Sayuri, one of Japan's most celebrated geisha, a woman who is both performer and courtesan, slave and goddess. We follow Sayuri from her childhood in an impoverished fishing village, where in 1929, she is sold to a representative of a geisha house,... (more)

Glamorama

by Bret Easton Ellis

"Arguably the novel of the 1990s... Glamorama should establish Ellis as the most fearless and ambitious writer of his generation...A must read." -- The Seattle Times The author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero continues to shock and haunt us with his incisive and brilliant dissection of the modern world. In his most ambitious and gripping book yet, Bret Easton Ellis takes our celebrity obsessed... (more)

Los Perros Perseguidos/Plague Dogs

by 1920- Adams, Richard,EMPTY, Richard Adams

"Thousands and thousands of people will love this book!" THE BOSTON GLOBE A lyrical, engrossing tale, by the author of WATERSHIP DOWN, Richard Adams creates a lyrical and engrossing tale, a remarkable journey into the hearts and minds of two canine heroes, Snitter and Rowf, fugitives from the horrors of an animal research center who escape into the isolation--and terror--of the wilderness. From the Paperback... (more)

Any Human Heart

by William Boyd

William Boyd’s masterful new novel tells, in a series of intimate journals, the story of Logan Mountstuart—writer, lover, art dealer, spy—as he makes his often precarious way through the twentieth century.

Dog Soldiers

by Robert Stone

In Saigon during the waning days of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action - and profit - by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things go horribly wrong for him. Dog Soldiers perfectly captures the underground mood of America in the 1970s, when amateur drug dealers and hippies encountered profiteering cops and professional killers - and... (more)

Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

by Herbert P. Bix

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize In this groundbreaking biography of the Japanese emperor Hirohito, Herbert P. Bix offers the first complete, unvarnished look at the enigmatic leader whose sixty-three-year reign ushered Japan into the modern world. Never before has the full life of this controversial figure been revealed with such clarity and vividness. Bix shows what it was like to be trained from birth for a lone... (more)

Remembering Babylon: A Novel (Vintage International)

Remembering Babylon: A Novel (Vintage International)

by David Malouf

In the mid-1840s, a 13-year-old British cabin boy is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by aborigines. Sixteen years later, he moves back into the world of Europeans. "Wonderfully wise and moving . . . a dazzling fable of human hope and imperfection."--The New York Times.

A Death in Brazil: A Book of Omissions

by Peter Robb

Deliciously sensuous and fascinating, Robb renders in vivid detail the intoxicating pleasures of Brazil’s food, music, literature, and landscape as he travels not only cross country but also back in time—from the days of slavery to modern day political intrigue and murder. Spellbinding and revelatory, Peter Robb paints a multi-layered portrait of Brazil as a country of intoxicating and passionate extremes.

We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance

We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance

by David Armine Howarth

A World War II chronicles of Jan Baalsrud's escape from Nazi-occupied arctic Norway.

The StandStephen King

The Stand

by Stephen King

This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death. And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky survivors choose sides -- or are chosen. A world in which good rides... (more)

Takeshi Kovacs: Book 2

Broken Angels

by Richard K. Morgan

Welcome back to the brash, brutal new world of the twenty-fifth century: where global politics isn’t just for planet Earth anymore; and where death is just a break in the action, thanks to the techno-miracle that can preserve human consciousness and download it into one new body after another. Cynical, quick-on-the-trigger Takeshi Kovacs, the ex-U.N. envoy turned private eye, has changed careers, and bodies,... (more)

The Thief's Journal

by Jean Genet, Bernard Frechtman

The Thief's Journal is perhaps Jean Genet's most authentically autobiographical novel, personifying his quest for spiritual glory through the pursuit of evil. Writing in the intensely lyrical prose style that is his trademark, the man Jean Cocteau dubbed France's "Black Prince of Letters" here reconstructs his early adult years -- time he spent as a petty criminal and vagabond, traveling through Spain and Antwerp,... (more)

M : The Man Who Became Caravaggio

by Peter Robb

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year As vividly and unflinchingly presented herein with "blood and bone and sinew" ( Times Literary Supplement ) by Peter Robb, Caravaggio's wild and tempestuous life was a provocation to a culture in a state of siege. The end of the sixteenth century was marked by the Inquisition and Counter-Reformation, a background of ideological war against which, despite all odds,... (more)

One Hand Clapping

by Anthony Burgess

Used car salesman Howard Shirley is watching England's most popular high-stakes TV quiz show with his wife, Janet, in their modest provincial house when it strikes him that his freakish "photographic brain" might make them an easy fortune. It also leads to first-class travel, luxury hotels, mink coats, some misguided philanthropy, and ultimately, outrageously, and comically, not entirely accidental death.... (more)

Smilla's Sense of Snow

by Peter Hoeg

She thinks more highly of snow and ice than she does of love. She lives in a world of numbers, science and memories--a dark, exotic stranger in a strange land. And now Smilla Jaspersen is convinced she has uncovered a shattering crime... It happened in the Copenhagen snow. A six-year-old boy, a Greenlander like Smilla, fell to his death from the top of his apartment building. While the boy's body is still... (more)

Out of Africa

by Isak Dinesen

In this book, the author of Seven Gothic Tales gives a true account of her life on her plantation in Kenya. She tells with classic simplicity of the ways of the country and the natives: of the beauty of the Ngong Hills and coffee trees in blossom: of her guests, from the Prince of Wales to Knudsen, the old charcoal burner, who visited her: of primitive festivals: of big game that were her near neighbors--lions,... (more)

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

by Philip K. Dick

Stunningly plausible in its portrayal of a neo-fascist America, where everyone informs on everyone else, this Orwellian novel bores deeply into the bedrock of the self--and plants dynamite at its center. "Fifty or a hundred years from now, (Dick's) world will stand alone on its own terms."--Norman Spinrad.

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

Paul Bowles Reads A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard

Paul Bowles Reads A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard

by Paul Bowles, Jack Bowles

These are four tales of contemporary life in a land where cannabis, rather than alcohol, customarily provides a way out of the phenomenological world. Thus, of the men in these stories, Salam uses suggestions supplied by smoking kif to rid himself of a possible enemy. He of the Assembly catches himself up in the mesh of his own kif-dream and begins to act it out in reality; Idir's victory over Lahcen is the... (more)

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

by Junot Diaz

This is the long-awaited first novel from one of the most original and memorable writers working today. Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: brutal reality

by Arthur Golden

by Bret Easton Ellis

by 1920- Adams, Richard,EMPTY, Richard Adams

by William Boyd

by Robert Stone

by Herbert P. Bix

by David Malouf

by Peter Robb

by David Armine Howarth

by Stephen King

by Richard K. Morgan

by Jean Genet, Bernard Frechtman

by Peter Robb

by Anthony Burgess

by Peter Hoeg

by Isak Dinesen

by Philip K. Dick

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

by Kurt Vonnegut

by Paul Bowles, Jack Bowles

by Junot Diaz