Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

by Ken Kesey

An inmate of a mental institution tries to find the freedom and independence denied him in the outside world.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores

A New York Times Notable Book On the eve of his ninetieth birthday a bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. As is his habit–he has purchased hundreds of women–he asks a madam for her assistance. The fourteen-year-old girl who is procured for him is enchanting, but exhausted as she is from caring for siblings and her job sewing buttons, she can do little but sleep. Yet with this... (more)

The Asian Saga The books in narrative order are:

Shogun

by James Clavell

An explorer in seventeenth-century Japan, ambitious Englishman Blackthorne encounters the powerful and power-hungry Lord Toranaga and Catholic convert Lady Mariko. Reissue.

Lust for Life

by Irving Stone

No artist has been more ruthlessly driven by his creative urge, nor more isolated by it from most ordinary sources of human happiness, than Vincent Van Gogh. A painter of genius, his life was an incessant struggle against poverty, discouragement, madness and despair. Lust for Life skilfully captures the exciting atmosphere of the Paris of the Post-Impressionists and reconstructs with great insight the development... (more)

The Invention of Morel

by Adolfo Bioy Casares

The Island of Doctor Moreau inspired this 1940 novella. Set on a mysterious island, The Invention of Morel is a story of suspense and exploration as well as an unlikely romance, where every detail is both crystal clear and deeply mysterious. Susan Jill Levine's revision of Ruth Simm's translation offers a new experience of an uncanny work of genius.

The Story of San Michele

by Axel Munthe

This 'dream-laden and spooked' (Marina Warner, London Review of Books) story is to many one of the best-loved books of the twentieth century. Munthe spent many years working as a doctor in Southern Italy, labouring unstintingly during typhus, cholera and earthquake disasters. It was during this period that he came across the ruined Tiberian villa of San Michele, perched high above the glittering Bay of Naples on... (more)

The Life Before Us ("Madame Rosa")

by Romain Gary

Text: English (translation)

The Following Story

by Cees Nooteboom, Ina Rilke

Herman Mussert, a former teacher of Latin and Greek, falls asleep in Amsterdam one evening, only to wake up in a hotel room in Lisbon with the fear that he is dead. Reprint. NYT.

Christ recrucified: A novel

by Nikos Kazantzakis

The inhabitants of a Greek village, ruled by the Turks, plan to enact the life of Christ in a mystery play but are overwhelmed by their task. A group of refugees, fleeing from the ruins of their plundered homes, arrive asking for protection - and suddenly the drama of the Passion becomes reality.

Bartleby and Co

by Enrique Vila-Matas

A marvelous novel by one of Spain's most important contemporary authors, in which a clerk in a Barcelona office takes us on a romping tour of world literature. In Bartleby & Co. , an enormously enjoyable novel, Enrique Vila-Matas tackles the theme of silence in literature: the writers and non-writers who, like the scrivener Bartleby of the Herman Melville story, in answer to any question or demand, replies:... (more)

The Stone Raft

by Jose Saramago, Giovanni Pontiero

When the Iberian Peninsula breaks free of Europe and begins to drift across the North Atlantic, five people are drawn together on the newly formed island-first by surreal events and then by love. “A splendidly imagined epic voyage...a fabulous fable” (Kirkus Reviews). Translated by Giovanni Pontiero.

Conversations à Buenos Aires

by Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Sabato, Michel Bibard

Men of Maize (Pittsburgh Editions of Latin American Literature)

Men of Maize (Pittsburgh Editions of Latin American Literature)

by Miguel Angel Asturias

This critical edition of Asturias's 1967 Nobel prize-winning work includes the full text of the novel and several essays on the book by noted scholars plus a bibliography. Academic libraries should consider. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.