Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

The biography sensitive to the tragic pattern of the story of a great subject: Oscar Wilde - psychologically and sexually complicated, enormously quotable, central to a alluring cultural world and someone whose life assumed an unbearably dramatic shape.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

by William Shakespeare

This complete and unabridged edition contains every word that Shakespeare wrote — all 37 tragedies, comedies, and histories, plus the sonnets. You’ll find such classics as The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew . This Library of Literary Classics edition is bound in padded leather with luxurious gold-stamping on the front and spine, satin ribbon marker and gilded edges. Other titles... (more)

Men at Arms (Sword of honour)

by Evelyn Waugh

Guy Crouchback begins his career as an officer in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. Despite his high spirits and chivalry, he sees only the trimmings and none of the action. His idealism undaunted, Guy finds himself in West Africa and, in his first campaign, manages to blot his copybook.

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 Woman in White

by Wilkie Collins

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Matthew Sweet.Walter Hartright's mysterious midnight encounter with the woman in white draws him into a vortex of crime, poison, kidnapping, and international intrigue.

Snow

by Orhan Pamuk

Dread, yearning, identity, intrigue, the lethal chemistry between secular doubt and Islamic fanaticism–these are the elements that Orhan Pamuk anneals in this masterful, disquieting novel. An exiled poet named Ka returns to Turkey and travels to the forlorn city of Kars. His ostensible purpose is to report on a wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden to wear their head-scarves. But Ka is also drawn by his... (more)

The Shadow Lines: A Novel

by Amitav Ghosh

Opening in Calcutta in the 1960s, Amitav Ghosh's radiant second novel follows two families -- one English, one Bengali -- as their lives intertwine in tragic and comic ways. The narrator, Indian born and English educated, traces events back and forth in time, from the outbreak of World War II to the late twentieth century, through years of Bengali partition and violence, observing the ways in which political... (more)

The Glass Palace: A Novel

by Amitav Ghosh

Set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885, this masterly novel by Amitav Ghosh tells the story of Rajkumar, a poor boy lifted on the tides of political and social chaos, who goes on to create an empire in the Burmese teak forest. When soldiers force the royal family out of the Glass Palace and into exile, Rajkumar befriends Dolly, a young woman in the court of the Burmese Queen, whose love will shape his... (more)

Our Lady of the Forest

by David Guterson

From the best-selling author of Snow Falling on Cedars —an emotionally charged, provocative new novel about a teenage girl who claims to see the Virgin Mary. Ann Holmes seems an unlikely candidate for revelation. A sixteen-year-old runaway, she is an itinerant mushroom picker who lives in a tent. But on a November afternoon, in the foggy woods of North Fork, Washington, the Virgin comes to her, clear as day. ... (more)

A Bend in the River

by V. S. Naipaul

'Brilliant and terrifying' - "Observer". I had to be the man who was doing well and more than well, the man whose drab shop concealed some bigger operation that made millions. I had to be the man who had planned it all, who had come to the destroyed town at the bend in the river because he had foreseen the rich future. 'Salim, the narrator, is a young man from an Indian family of traders long resident on the coast... (more)

Sons and Lovers

by D. H. Lawrence

With a new Introduction by Geoff Dyer Commentary by Anthony Burgess, Jessie Chambers, Frieda Lawrence, V.S. Pritchett, Kate Millett, and Alfred Kazin Of all Lawrence's work, Sons and Lovers tells us most about the emotional source of his ideas," observed Diana Trilling. "The famous Lawrence theme of the struggle for sexual power--and he is sure that all the struggles of civilized life have their root in this... (more)

Breath, Eyes, Memory

by Edwidge Danticat

At an astonishingly young age, Edwidge Danticat has become one of our most celebrated new novelists, a writer who evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache of her native Haiti--and the enduring strength of Haiti's women--with a vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people's suffering and courage. At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to... (more)

The Voyage of the Beagle: Charles Darwin's Journal of Researches (Penguin Classics)

The Voyage of the Beagle: Charles Darwin's Journal of Researches (Penguin Classics)

by Charles Darwin

In 1831, Charles Darwin embarked on an expedition that, in his own words, determined my whole career. The Voyage of the Beagle chronicles his five-year journey around the world and especially the coastal waters of South America as a naturalist on the H.M.S. Beagle. While traveling through these unexplored countries collecting specimens, Darwin began to formulate the theories of evolution and natural selection... (more)

Brick Lane: A Novel

by Monica Ali

After an arranged marriage to Chanu, a man twenty years older, Nazneen is taken to London, leaving her home and heart in the Bangladeshi village where she was born. Her new world is full of mysteries. How can she cross the road without being hit by a car (an operation akin to dodging raindrops in the monsoon)? What is the secret of her bullying neighbor Mrs. Islam? What is a Hell's Angel? And how must she comfort... (more)

Fury: A Novel (Modern Library Paperbacks)

Fury: A Novel (Modern Library Paperbacks)

by Salman Rushdie

Malik Solanka, historian of ideas and world-famous dollmaker, steps out of his life one day, abandons his family in London without a word of explanation, and flees for New York. There's a fury within him, and he fears he has become dangerous to those he loves. He arrives in New York at a time of unprecedented plenty, in the highest hour of America's wealth and power, seeking to "erase" himself. But fury is all... (more)

Drop City

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

It is 1970, and a down-at-the-heels California commune devoted to peace, free love, and the simple life has decided to relocate to the last frontier—the unforgiving landscape of interior Alaska—in the ultimate expression of going back to the land. Armed with the spirit of adventure and naïve optimism, the inhabitants of "Drop City" arrive in the wilderness of Alaska only to find their utopia already populated by... (more)

Memories of My Ghost Brother

by Heinz Insu Fenkl

Heinz Insu Fenkl is the son of a German-American soldier who married a Korean woman when he was stationed near Seoul. In this haunting novel he explores the coming-of-age of an Amerasian in Korea, torn between his mother's worldhaunted by ghosts, fox demons, and the specter of Japanese occupationsand his father's transplanted America. Young Insu grows up in the chaotic streets of Pupyong, a district in the city... (more)

Heat and Dust

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

A profound and powerful novel, winner of the Booker Prize Set in colonial India during the 1920s, Heat and Dust tells the story of Olivia, a beautiful woman suffocated by the propriety and social constraints of her position as the wife of an important English civil servant. Longing for passion and independence, Olivia is drawn into the spell of the Nawab, a minor Indian prince deeply involved in gang raids and... (more)

The Complete English Poems (Everyman's Library Classics)

The Complete English Poems (Everyman's Library Classics)

by John Donne

No poet has been more wilfully contradictory than John Donne, whose works forge unforgettable connections between extremes of passion and mental energy. From satire to tender elegy, from sacred devotion to lust, he conveys an astonishing range of emotions and poetic moods. Constant in his work, however, is an intensity of feeling and expression and complexity of argument that is as evident in religious meditations... (more)

Maurice: A Novel

by E. M. Forster

Written during 1913 and 1914, Maurice deals with the then unmentionable subject of homosexuality. More unusual, it concerns a relationship that ends happily.

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: lib:main

by Richard Ellmann

by William Shakespeare

by Evelyn Waugh

by Tom Stoppard

by Wilkie Collins

by Orhan Pamuk

by Amitav Ghosh

by Amitav Ghosh

by David Guterson

by V. S. Naipaul

by D. H. Lawrence

by Edwidge Danticat

by Charles Darwin

by Monica Ali

by Salman Rushdie

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

by Heinz Insu Fenkl

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

by John Donne

by E. M. Forster