Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

A Confederacy of Dunces

by John Kennedy Toole

A popular Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy follows the adventures of New Orlean's lower denizens of the French Quarter.

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things

"Its publication should be a major event for cognitive linguistics and should pose a major challenge for cognitive science. In addition, it should have repercussions in a variety of disciplines, ranging from anthropology and psychology to epistemology and the philosophy of science. . . . Lakoff asks: What do categories of language and thought reveal about the human mind? Offering both general theory and minute... (more)

Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

by Ariel Levy

Meet the Female Chauvinist Pig -- the new brand of "empowered woman" who embraces "raunch culture" wherever she finds it. In her groundbreaking book, New York magazine writer Ariel Levy argues that, if male chauvinist pigs of years past thought of women as pieces of meat, Female Chauvinist Pigs of today are doing them one better, making sex objects of other women -- and of themselves. Irresistibly witty and... (more)

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

by James Tiptree Jr.

These 18 darkly complex short stories and novellas touch upon human nature and perception, metaphysics and epistemology, and gender and sexuality, foreshadowing a world in which biological tendencies bring about the downfall of humankind. Revisions from the author's notes are included, allowing a deeper view into her world and a better understanding of her work. The Nebula Award–winning short story Love Is the... (more)

Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway

Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway

by Clifford Stoll

In Silicon Snake Oil , Clifford Stoll, the best-selling author of The Cuckoo's Egg and one of the pioneers of the Internet, turns his attention to the much-heralded information highway, revealing that it is not all it's cracked up to be. Yes, the Internet provides access to plenty of services, but useful information is virtually impossible to find and difficult to access. Is being on-line truly useful? "Few... (more)

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

by Dave Eggers

The literary sensation of the year, a book that redefines both family and narrative for the twenty-first century. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the moving memoir of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. Here is an exhilarating debut that manages to be simultaneously hilarious and wildly inventive as well as a... (more)

Maximum Bob

by Elmore Leonard

Hard-ass Palm Beach County judge Bob Isom Gibbs enjoys sending even petty offenders away to do hard time -- which has made the list of miscreants who want him dead longer than a fully grown Florida gator's tail. And a good number of his illwishers are probation officer Kathy Baker's clients, including young Dale Crowe and his psycho uncle Elvin. Now, Kathy's got an even more daunting task than keeping BIG's horny... (more)

Motel of the Mysteries

by David MacAulay

It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO... (more)

A Hell of a Woman (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)

A Hell of a Woman (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)

by Jim Thompson

Young, beautiful, and fearfully abused, Mona was the kind of girl even a hard man like Dillon couldn't bring himself to use. But when Mona told him about the vicious aunt who had turned her into something little better than a prostitute--and about the money the old lady has stashed away--Dillon found it surprisingly easy to kill for her.

Assassination Vacation

by Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell exposes the glorious conundrums of American history and culture with wit, probity, and an irreverent sense of humor. With Assassination Vacation , she takes us on a road trip like no other -- a journey to the pit stops of American political murder and through the myriad ways they have been used for fun and profit, for political and cultural advantage. From Buffalo to Alaska, Washington to the Dry... (more)

Briefing for a Descent into Hell

by Doris Lessing

A fascinating look inside the mind of a man who is supposedly “mad.” Professor Charles Watkins of Cambridge University is a patient at a mental hospital where the doctors try with increasing drugs to bring his mind under control. But Watkins has embarked on a tremendous psychological adventure where, after spinning endlessly on a raft in the Atlantic, he lands on a tropical island inhabited by strange creatures... (more)

The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People

The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People

by Susan Orlean

The bestselling author of The Orchid Thief is back with this delightfully entertaining collection of her best and brightest profiles. Acclaimed New Yorker writer Susan Orlean brings her wry sensibility, exuberant voice, and peculiar curiosities to a fascinating range of subjects—from the well known (Bill Blass) to the unknown (a typical ten-year-old boy) to the formerly known (the 1960s girl group the Shaggs). ... (more)

THE MILAGRO BEANFIELD WAR

by John Treadwell Nichols

Joe Mondragon, a feisty hustler with a talent for trouble, slammed his battered pickup to a stop, tugged on his gumboots, and marched into the arid patch of ground. Carefully (and also illegally), he tapped into the main irrigation channel. And so began-though few knew it at the time-the Milagro beanfield war. But like everything else in the dirt-poor town of Milagro, it would be a patchwork war, fought more by... (more)

The DREAMS OUR STUFF IS MADE OF: How Science Fiction Conquered the World

The DREAMS OUR STUFF IS MADE OF: How Science Fiction Conquered the World

by Thomas M. Disch

From one of science fiction's most acclaimed novelists comes this engrossing journey through the books, movies, and television programs that have shaped our perspective of both the present and the future. In an uncompromising, often irreverent survey of the genre from Edgar Allan Poe to Philip K. Dick to Star Trek, Thomas M. Disch analyzes science fiction's impact on technological innovation, fashion, lifestyle,... (more)

Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales

Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales

by VANCE RANDOLPH

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition

by Mark Reisner, Marc Reisner

Newly updated, this timely history of the struggle to discover and control water in the American West is a tale of rivers diverted and damned, political corruption and intrigue, billion-dollar battles over water rights, and economic and ecological disaster. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Fade To Blonde (Hard Case Crime (Paperback))

Fade To Blonde (Hard Case Crime (Paperback))

by Max Phillips

Best known for his poetry and literary fiction ( The Artist's Wife , etc.), Phillips contributes to a new crime imprint a hard-boiled whodunit sure to thrill fans of such Golden Age masters as James M. Cain. Ex-boxer/failed screenwriter Ray Corson is as tough talking—and as vulnerable to a pretty face—as any 1940s gumshoe. And terrified blonde bombshell Rebecca LaFontaine looks like a classic damsel in distress... (more)

The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens

The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens

by Eva C. Keuls

At once daring and authoritative, this book offers a profusely illustrated history of sexual politics in ancient Athens, where the phallus dominated almost every aspect of public life. Complementing the text are 345 reproductions of Athenian vase paintings depicting the phallus.

Croutons on a Cow Pie

by Baxter Black

How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir

by Phyllis Barber

A beautifully written memoir of a Mormon girl growing up with a hunger for high-culture within the confines of Las Vegas, the indisputable bathysmal depths of American low-culture. Winner of the Associated Writing Program Award for Creative Non-Fiction, and deservedly compared by other critics to Annie Dillard's exquisitely crafted An American Childhood , one of my very favorite autobiographies.

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