Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

The First Circle (European Classics)

by Thomas P. Whitney, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

*Starred Review* Even the title was truncated when The First Circle, an expurgated English translation of Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet-censored masterpiece In the First Circle, was published to acclaim in the West in 1968. Written in the mid-1950s just after Solzhenitsyn’s eight years in the gulag, his nearly fatal bout with cancer, and his sentence to “perpetual” exile in Kazakhstan, this novel of tyranny and... (more)

I Served the King of England (Vintage International)

I Served the King of England (Vintage International)

by Bohumil Hrabal

A comic, picaresque novel set against the backdrop of twentieth-century Czech history, about the rise and fall of an ambitious busboy in Prague.

The Good Soldier Svejk: and His Fortunes in the World War (Penguin Classics)

The Good Soldier Svejk: and His Fortunes in the World War (Penguin Classics)

by Jaroslav Hasek

In The Good Soldier Svejk , celebrated Czech writer and anarchist Jaroslav Hasek combined dazzling wordplay and piercing satire in a hilariously subversive depiction of the futility of war. Good-natured and garrulous, Svejk becomes the Austrian army’s most loyal Czech soldier when he is called up on the outbreak of World War I—although his bumbling attempts to get to the front serve only to prevent him from... (more)

Prague Tales (Central European Classics)

Prague Tales (Central European Classics)

by Jan Neruda, Michael Henry Heim

A collection of Neruda's intimate, bitter-sweet stories of life among the inhabitants of Mala Strana, the Little Quarter of nineteenth century Prague. These vignettes established Neruda as the quintessential Czech nineteenth century realist.

Lovely Green Eyes

by Arnos?t Lustig

Fifteen-year-old Hanka Kaudersova has ginger hair and clear, green eyes. When her family is deported to Auschwitz, her mother, father and younger brother are sent to the gas chamber. By a twist of fate, Hanka is faced with a simple alternative: follow her family, or work in an SS brothel behind the eastern front. She chooses to live, her Aryan looks allowing her to disguise the fact that she is Jewish. As the... (more)

Requiem for the East

by Andrei Makine

Amid the ashes of the Soviet Union a Russian army doctor turned spy addresses the woman he loves -- a fellow spy who has shared his shadowy life in Africa, Europe and the Middle East, but who has disappeared. The tale he unfolds spans three generations of his family, ordinary people caught up in the convulsions of the Russian empire in the twentieth century, from the civil war through the Second World War to... (more)

Vain Art of the Fugue

by Dumitru T?epeneag

Clutching a bouquet of flowers, hurrying to catch his bus, and arguing with the driver once he's on, a man rushes to a train station platform to meet a woman. This sequence of events occurs and recurs in remarkably different variations in Vain Art of the Fugue . In one version, the bus driver ignores the traffic signals and is killed in the ensuing crash. In another, the protagonist is thrown off the bus, and as... (more)