Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Acclaimed graphic artist Peter Kuper presents a brilliant, darkly comic reimagining of Kafka’s classic tale of family, alienation, and a giant bug. Kuper’s electric drawings—which merge American cartooning with German expressionism—bring Kafka’s prose to vivid life, reviving the original story’s humor and poignancy in a way that will surprise and delight readers of Kafka and graphic novels alike. “A brilliant... (more)

Kissed by an angel: Book 1

Kissed by an Angel

by Elizabeth Chandler

A love beyond life...a danger beyond doubt. In a romantic and suspenseful collection of the New York Times bestselling trilogy, love's unbreakable bonds are put to the test. When her boyfriend, Tristan, died, Ivy thought she'd lost everything, even her faith in angels. But now she's discovered that he's her guardian angel -- his presence so strong that she can feel the touch of his hand, the beat of his heart.... (more)

Don Quixote

by Miguel de Cervantes

Edith Grossman 's definitive English translation of the Spanish masterpiece. Widely regarded as one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the adventures of the self-created knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. You haven't experienced Don Quixote in English until you've read this... (more)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

by Ken Kesey

An inmate of a mental institution tries to find the freedom and independence denied him in the outside world.

Wide Sargasso Sea

by Jean Rhys

The fortieth anniversary reissue of the best-selling "tour de force" (Walter Allen, New York Times Book Review ). Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon the publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of fiction's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. A sensual and protected young woman, Antoinette Cosway... (more)

A Reliable Wife

by Robert Goolrick

Rural Wisconsin, 1909. In the bitter cold, Ralph Truitt, a successful businessman, stands alone on a train platform waiting for the woman who answered his newspaper advertisement for "a reliable wife." But when Catherine Land steps off the train from Chicago, she's not the "simple, honest woman" that Ralph is expecting. She is both complex and devious, haunted by a terrible past and motivated by greed. Her plan is... (more)

Just In Case

by Meg Rosoff

Justin Case is convinced fate has in for him. And he's right. After finding his younger brother teetering on the edge of his balcony, fifteen-year-old David Case realizes the fragility of life and senses impending doom. Without looking back, he changes his name to Justin and assumes a new identity, new clothing and new friends, and dares to fall in love with the seductive Agnes Day. With his imaginary dog Boy in... (more)

The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

by Franz Kafka

"Had one to name the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relations to our age as Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of."-- W. H. Auden Packaged with French flaps, acid-free paper, and rough front.

The Wasp Factory

by Iain Banks

Meet Frank Cauldhame. Just sixteen, and unconventional to say the least: Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again. It was... (more)

The Island of Dr. Moreau

by H. G. Wells

An English traveler, shipwrecked on a remote Pacific island, meets notorious vivisectionist Dr. Moreau and the creatures that have resulted from his experiments in turning animals into human beings. Reprint.

Requiem for a Dream

by Jr. Selby, Hubert, Hubert Selby

In this searing novel first published in 1978, two young hoods, Harry and Tyrone, and a girlfriend fantasize about scoring a pound of heroin and getting rich. But their heroin habit gets the better of them, and Harry's mother's addiction to diet pills lands her in a state mental hospital.

Jane Eyre

by Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre is a first-person narrative of the title character, a small, plain-faced, intelligent and honest English orphan. The novel goes through five distinct stages: Jane's childhood at Gateshead, where she is abused by her aunt and cousins; her education at Lowood School, where she acquires friends and role models but also suffers privations; her time as the governess of Thornfield Manor, where she falls in... (more)

King Lear

by William Shakespeare

The Oxford School Shakespeare is a well-established series which helps students understand and enjoy Shakespeare's plays. As well as the complete and unabridged text, each play in this series has an extensive range of students' notes. These include detailed and clear explanations of difficult words and passages, a synopsis of the plot, summaries of individual scenes, and notes on the main characters. This work... (more)

The Haunting of Hill House (Penguin Classics)

The Haunting of Hill House (Penguin Classics)

by Shirley Jackson

The classic supernatural thriller by an author who helped define the genre First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a "haunting"; Theodora, his lighthearted... (more)

Lust for Life

by Irving Stone

No artist has been more ruthlessly driven by his creative urge, nor more isolated by it from most ordinary sources of human happiness, than Vincent Van Gogh. A painter of genius, his life was an incessant struggle against poverty, discouragement, madness and despair. Lust for Life skilfully captures the exciting atmosphere of the Paris of the Post-Impressionists and reconstructs with great insight the development... (more)

Restoration: Tie-In Edition

by R. Tremain

Restoration is a dazzling romp through 17th-century England. The main character Robert Merivel not only embodies the contradictions of his era, but ours as well. He is trapped between the longing for wealth and power and the realization that the pursuit of these trappings can leave one's life rather empty.

Cockroach

by Rawi Hage

A bold, razor-sharp novel about a shadowy antihero navigating Montreal’s immigrant underworld. One of the most highly anticipated novels of the year, Cockroach is as urgent, unsettling, and brilliant as Rawi Hage’s critically acclaimed first book, De Niro’s Game . The novel takes place during one month of a bitterly cold winter in Montreal’s restless immigrant community, where a self-described “thief” has... (more)

A Mad Desire to Dance

by Elie Wiesel

From Elie Wiesel, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and one of our fiercest moral voices, a provocative and deeply thoughtful new novel about a life shaped by the worst horrors of the twentieth century and one man’s attempt to reclaim happiness. Doriel, a European expatriate living in New York, suffers from a profound sense of desperation and loss. His mother, a member of the Resistance, survived World War II... (more)

I Just Hope It's Lethal: Poems of Sadness, Madness, and Joy

I Just Hope It's Lethal: Poems of Sadness, Madness, and Joy

The teenage years are a time filled with sadness, madness, joy, and all the messy stuff in between. Sometimes it feels that every day brings a new struggle, a new concern, a new reason to stay in bed with the shades drawn. But between moments of despair and confusion often come times of great clarity and insight, when you might think, like the poet Rumi, “Whoever’s calm and sensible is insane!” It is moments like... (more)

Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin

Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin

by Norah Vincent

The journalist who famously lived as a man commits herself— literally Norah Vincent’s New York Times bestselling book, Self-Made Man , ended on a harrowing note. Suffering from severe depression after her eighteen months living disguised as a man, Vincent felt she was a danger to herself. On the advice of her psychologist she committed herself to a mental institution. Out of this raw and overwhelming... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: madness

by Franz Kafka

by Elizabeth Chandler

by Miguel de Cervantes

by Ken Kesey

by Jean Rhys

by Robert Goolrick

by Meg Rosoff

by Franz Kafka

by Iain Banks

by H. G. Wells

by Jr. Selby, Hubert, Hubert Selby

by Charlotte Bronte

by William Shakespeare

by Shirley Jackson

by Irving Stone

by R. Tremain

by Rawi Hage

by Elie Wiesel

by Norah Vincent