Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you’re not superior to sex. With these words our most unflaggingly energetic and morally serious novelist launches perhaps his fiercest book. The speaker is David Kepesh, white-haired and over sixty, an eminent cultural critic and star lecturer at a New York college–as well as an articulate... (more)

Four Meals

by Meir Shalev

Four Meals is the extraordinary story of Zayde; his enigmatic mother, Judith; and her three lovers, Globerman, Jacob, and Moshe. Over the course of four meals, which take place intermittently over several decades, Zayde slowly comes to understand why these three men consider him their son and why all three participate in raising him. A virtuoso performance of spellbinding storytelling, Shalev's novel is a deeply... (more)

The Trial

by Franz Kafka

Written in 1914, The Trial is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century: the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism,... (more)

The Fixer: A Novel

by Bernard Malamud

A classic that won Malamud both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award The Fixer (1966) is Bernard Malamud's best-known and most acclaimed novel -- one that makes manifest his roots in Russian fiction, especially that of Isaac Babel. Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young... (more)

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