Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America’s greatest writers and cultural figures. We have begun publishing his many works for the first time as blackspine Penguin Classics featuring eye-catching, newly commissioned art. This season we continue with the seven spectacular and influential books East of Eden, Cannery Row, In Dubious Battle, The Long... (more)

Landlocked (The Children of Violence, Book 4)

Children of Violence: Book 4

Landlocked (The Children of Violence, Book 4)

by Doris Lessing

In the aftermath of World War II, Martha Quest finds herself completely disillusioned. She is losing faith with the communist movement in Africa, and her marriage to one of the movement's leaders is disintegrating. Determined to resist the erosion of her personality, she engages in the first satisfactory love affair and breaks free, if only momentarily, from her suffocating unhappiness. Landlocked is the... (more)

July's People

by Nadine Gordimer

When South Africa is riven by war and the Smales, a white couple, take refuge in the village of their former servant July, their relationships are completely transformed.

The Pearl

by John Steinbeck

A fisherman finds the great pearl, only to lose it again.

Watt

by Samuel Beckett

In prose possessed of the radically stripped-down beauty and ferocious wit that characterize his work, this early novel by Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett recounts the grotesque and improbable adventures of a fantastically logical Irish servant and his master. Watt is a beautifully executed black comedy that, at its core, is rooted in the powerful and terrifying vision that made Beckett one of the most... (more)

The Power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

In a poor, remote section of southern Mexico, the Red Shirts have taken control. God has been outlawed, and the priests have been systematically hunted down and killed. Now, the last priest strives to overcome physical and moral cowardice in order to find redemption. Introduction by John Updike

Four Gated City

by Doris Lessing

Dorris Lessing's classic series of autobiographical novels is the fictional counterpart to Under My Skin. In these five novels, first published in the 1950's and 60s, Doris Lessing transformed her fascinating life into fiction, creating her most complex and compelling character, Martha Quest.

The Grass Is Singing (Penguin Reading Lab Level 5)

The Grass Is Singing (Penguin Reading Lab Level 5)

by Doris Lessing

Set in South Africa under white rule, Doris Lessing's first novel is both a riveting chronicle of human disintegration and a beautifully understated social critique. Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little the ennui of years on the farm work their slow poison, and Mary's despair progresses until the... (more)

Babbitt by Lewis, Sinclair

by Sinclair Lewis

Naked Lunch

by William S. Burroughs

The Crucible

by Arthur Miller

Based on historical people and real events, Arthur Miller's play uses the destructive power of socially sanctioned violence unleashed by the rumors of witchcraft as a powerful parable about McCarthyism. Introduction by Christopher Bigsby

Grendel

by John Gardner

The Natural

by Bernard MALAMUD

In The Natural, Bernard Makamud has raised all the passion and craziness and fanaticism of baseball to its ordained place in mythology. This is one of the few American novels that uses popular folk material in the interest of serious fiction, and the reverberations of the book carry far beyond the baseball park. This novel, first published in 1952, has since become an American classic.