Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Life Is Elsewhere.

by Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher, Peter Kussi

The author intially intended to call this noel, The Lyrical Age . The lyrical age, according to Kundera, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderlyerodes scarosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made hima poet and accompanies him (figuratively) to his love bed and (literally) to his deathbed. A... (more)

Other Hand

by Cleave Chris

We don't want to tell you too much about this book. It is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it. Nevertheless, you need to know something, so we will just say this: It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific. The story starts there, but the book doesn't. And it's what happens afterwards that is most important. Once you have read it, you'll want to tell everyone about it. When... (more)

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

by Hamid Mohsin

Hamid's second book (after Moth Smoke) is an intelligent and absorbing 9/11 novel, written from the perspective of Changez, a young Pakistani whose sympathies, despite his fervid immigrant embrace of America, lie with the attackers. The book unfolds as a monologue that Changez delivers to a mysterious American operative over dinner at a Lahore, Pakistan, cafe. Pre-9/11, Princeton graduate Changez is on top of the... (more)

Back When We Were Grownups (Random House Large Print)

Back When We Were Grownups (Random House Large Print)

by Anne Tyler

“A WONDERFUL NOVEL . . . Tyler’s eye and ear for familial give and take is unerring, her humanity irresistible. You’ll want to turn back to the first chapter the moment you finish the last.” – People (Page-Turner of the Week) “STUNNING . . . ‘Once upon a time,’ the story begins, ‘there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.’ . . . With Rebecca Davitch, Tyler has created a character who... (more)

The Memory Keeper's Daughter

A Novel

by Kim Edwards

Kim Edwards’s stunning family drama evokes the spirit of Sue Miller and Alice Sebold, articulating every mother’s silent fear: what would happen if you lost your child and she grew up without you? In 1964, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins, he immediately recognizes that one of them has Down Syndrome and makes a split-second decision that will haunt all their lives forever. He... (more)

Angela's Ashes

A Memoir

by Frank McCourt

"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and... (more)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

by James Joyce

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man portrays Stephen Dedalus's Dublin childhood and youth, providing an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce. At its center are questions of origin and source, authority and authorship, and the relationship of an artist to his family, culture, and race. Exuberantly inventive, this coming-of-age story is a tour de force of style and technique.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera, Michael Henry Heim

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.

The Weight of Water

by Anita Shreve

Enthusiastically embraced by critics, readers, and booksellers across the country, this powerful novel of obsession and betrayal is now available in paperback. When a photographer researches a legendary crime that took place a century earlier, she immerses herself in the details of the case--and finds herself caught in the grip of an uncontrollable emotion.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

by Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher

Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined,... (more)

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

by John Berendt

Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty,early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. John Berendt's sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative reads like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and yet it is a work of nonfiction.... (more)

A Painted House

by John Grisham

The hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same day. It was a Wednesday, early in September 1952. The Cardinals were five games behind the Dodgers with two weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless. The cotton, however, was waist high to my father, almost over my head, and he and my grandfather could be heard before supper whispering words that were seldom heard. It could be a "good crop." Thus begins the... (more)

Fahrenheit 451

A Novel

by Ray Bradbury

Nowadays firemen start fires. Fireman Guy Montag loves to rush to a fire and watch books burn up. Then he met a seventeen-year old girl who told him of a past when people were not afraid, and a professor who told him of a future where people could think. And Guy Montag knew what he had to do....

To the Lighthouse

by Virginia Woolf

As I Lay Dying

by William Faulkner

The Bundren family try to give their deceased matriarch her desired burial in neighboring town Jefferson, but the trip is fueled by selfish desires from each family member as secrets are unravelled in this multi-narrated portrait of a disturbing family.

The City of Falling Angels (Unabridged)

by John Berendt

The author of the record-breaking bestseller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil unveils the enigmatic Venice as only he can Twelve years ago, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil exploded into a monumental success, residing a record-breaking four years on the New York Times bestseller list (longer than any work of fiction or nonfiction had before) and turning John Berendt into a ... (more)

The Awakening

by John Collier, Kate Chopin, Maureen Kelly, Nancy A. Walker

"She grew daring and reckless. Overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out. Where no woman had swum before."

Mrs. Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf

Heralded as Virginia Woolf's greatest novel, this is a vivid portrait of a single day in a woman's life. When we meet her, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party preparation while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house, she is flooded with remembrances of faraway times. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa... (more)

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: A Novel

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: A Novel

by Rebecca Wells

When Siddalee Walker, oldest daughter of Vivi Abbott Walker, Ya-Ya extraordinaire, is interviewed in the New York Times about a hit play she's directed, her mother gets described as a "tap-dancing child abuser." Enraged, Vivi disowns Sidda. Devastated, Sidda begs forgiveness, and postpones her upcoming wedding. All looks bleak until the Ya-Yas step in and convince Vivi to send Sidda a scrapbook of their girlhood... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: modern novel

by Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher, Peter Kussi

by Cleave Chris

by Hamid Mohsin

by Anne Tyler

A Novel

by Kim Edwards

A Memoir

by Frank McCourt

by James Joyce

by Milan Kundera, Michael Henry Heim

by John Kennedy Toole

by Anita Shreve

by Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher

by John Berendt

by John Grisham

A Novel

by Ray Bradbury

by Virginia Woolf

by William Faulkner

by John Berendt

by John Collier, Kate Chopin, Maureen Kelly, Nancy A. Walker

by Virginia Woolf

by Rebecca Wells