Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death. And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky survivors choose sides -- or are chosen. A world in which good rides... (more)

The Fuck-Up

by Arthur Nersesian

Arthur Nersesian's underground literary treasure is an unforgettable slice of gritty New York City life...and the darkly hilarious odyssey of an anonymous slacker. He's a perennial couch-surfer, an aspiring writer searching for himself in spite of himself, and he's just trying to survive. But life has other things in store for the fuck-up. From being dumped by his girlfriend to getting fired for asking for a... (more)

Our Lady of the Flowers

by Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean Genet's first, and arguably greatest, novel was written while he was in prison. As Sartre recounts in his introduction, Genet penned this work on the brown paper which inmates were supposed to use to fold bags as a form of occupational therapy. The masterpiece he managed to produce under those difficult conditions is a lyrical portrait of the criminal underground of Paris and the thieves, murderers and pimps... (more)

Empress Orchid: Book 2

The Last Empress

by Anchee Min

The last decades of the nineteenth century were a violent period in China’s history marked by humiliating foreign incursions and domestic rebellion, ultimately ending in the demise of the Ch’ing dynasty. The only constant during this tumultuous time was the power wielded by one person, the resilient, ever-resourceful Tzu Hsi, Lady Yehonala -- or Empress Orchid, as readers came to know her in Anchee Min’s... (more)

Complete Stories of Franz Kafka

by Arthur Samuelson, Nahum Norbert Glatzer, Franz Kafka

In nonstop color photos Burns takes readers on a voyeuristic journey through a bygone world, illustrating the precious pieces that antique dealers and fleamarketers hotly compete for today. A must for lovers of Americana and nostalgia. 100 four-color photos.

Chicago: A Modern Arabic Novel

by Alaa Al Aswany

The Dying Ground (Unabridged)

by Nichelle D. Tramble

Billy: dead. Felicia: missing. None of the words made sense together, but the doom I'd expected announced itself. I felt iron in my mouth, like I'd gargled with pennies, a taste like blood, a bitter taste that always followed bad news. The setting is Oakland, 1989; the crack epidemic is at its height and turf wars are brewing. Maceo Redfield, currently on hiatus from college, is walking a fine line between... (more)

TerraStefano Benni

Terra

by Stefano Benni

Trying to escape desert heat, a mouse crawls inside a nuclear command center and falls onto the doomsday button. ``And this is how W.W. III started. Three more followed.'' Thus opens this satire by an Italian journalist/humorist. The time is 2157. The earth is now sunless and people live underground. Report of a planet that is everything ours once was provokes an exploration ship from the Sinoeuropean Federation,... (more)

Johanna: A Novel of the Van Gogh Family

by Claire Cooperstein

A carefully researched historical novel tells the story of the sister-in-law of Vincent van Gogh, who saved his art and letters to Theo for posterity, in a series of real and imaginary letters and excerpts from Johanna's diary. A first novel. 35,000 first printing.

The Book of Not: A Sequel to Nervous Conditions

The Book of Not: A Sequel to Nervous Conditions

by Tsitsi Dangarembga

This sequel to the award-winning Nervous Conditions traces Tambu s continuing quest to redefine the personal, political, and historical forces at work in her complex world.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

by Junot Diaz

This is the long-awaited first novel from one of the most original and memorable writers working today. Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never... (more)

Transition 96

by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Ph.D. K. Anthony Appiah

This new issue of the award-winning journal on black and multicultural studies spotlights the first published excerpt from Tambu’s Choice, Tsitsi Dangarembga's first novel since her 1989 Commonwealth Prize-winning Nervous Conditions. There's also an interview with the reclusive author. Other features in this long-awaited issue include Caine Prize-winner Binyavanga Wainaina on "How to Be an African," and a... (more)

The Portable Charles W. Chesnutt (Penguin Classics)

The Portable Charles W. Chesnutt (Penguin Classics)

by Charles W. Chesnutt

Collections from two of our most influential African American writers—under the general editorship of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. An icon of nineteenth-century American fiction, Charles W. Chesnutt—an incisive storyteller of the aftermath of slavery in the South—is widely credited with almost single-handedly inaugurating the African American short story tradition and was the first African American novelist to... (more)

New Negro

An interpretative anthology that acted as a manifesto for the Harlem Renaissance defines the artistic and social goals of the New Negro Movement of the 1920s.

African Women Playwrights (None)

This anthology consists of nine plays by a diverse group of women from throughout the African continent. The plays focus on a wide range of issues, such as cultural differences, AIDS, female circumcision, women's rights to higher education, racial and skin color identity, prostitution as a form of survival for young girls, and nonconformist women resisting old traditions. In addition to the plays themselves, this... (more)

Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World's Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her

Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World's Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her

by Robin Gerber

The tragic and redeeming story of how one visionary woman built the biggest toy company in the world and created a global icon. Barbie and Ruth is the entwined story of two exceptional women. There's Barbie: the diminutive yet arrestingly voluptuous doll unveiled at the 1959 Toy Fair who became the treasure of 90 percent of American girls and their counterparts in 150 countries. She went on to compete as... (more)

Amerika

by Franz Kafka

Text: English (translation) Original Language: German

Nefertiti : the book of the dead

by Nick Drake

She is Nefertiti—beautiful and revered. With her husband, Akhenaten, she rules over Egypt, the most affluent, formidable, sophisticated empire in the ancient world. But an epic power struggle is afoot, brought on by the royal couple's inauguration of an enlightened new religion and the construction of a magnificent new capital. The priests are stunned by the abrupt forfeiture of their traditional wealth and... (more)

The Magician (Penguin Classics)

by Somerset Maugham

Maugham’s enchanting tale of secrets and fatal attraction The Magician is one of Somerset Maugham’s most complex and perceptive novels. Running through it is the theme of evil, deftly woven into a story as memorable for its action as for its astonishingly vivid characters. In fin de siècle Paris, Arthur and Margaret are engaged to be married. Everyone approves and everyone seems to be enjoying... (more)

Beloved

by Toni Morrison

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: modern lit/fiction

The Stand

by Stephen King