Shelfari Book Activity

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  Stoner

  by John Edward Williams

  William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from... (more)
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  Red Lights

  by Georges Simenon

  It is Friday evening before Labor Day weekend. Americans are hitting the highways in droves; the radio crackles with warnings of traffic jams and crashed cars. Steve Hogan and his wife, Nancy, have a long drive ahead—from New York City to Maine, where their children are in camp. But Steve wants a drink before they go, and on the road he wants another. Soon, exploding with suppressed fury, he is heading into that... (more)
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  A High Wind in Jamaica

  by Richard Hughes

  Also published as The Innocent VoyageAfter a terrible hurricane levels their Jam aican estate, the Bas-Thorntons decide to send their children back to the safety and comfort of England. On the way their ship is set upon by pirates, and the children are accidentally transferred to the pirate vessel. Jonsen, the well-meaning pirate c aptain, doesn't know how to dispose of his new cargo, while the... (more)
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  Rock Crystal

  by Adalbert Stifter

  Seemingly the simplest of stories—a passing anecdote of village life— Rock Crystal opens up into a tale of almost unendurable suspense. This jewel-like novella by the writer that Thomas Mann praised as "one of the most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world literature" is among the most unusual, moving, and memorable of Christmas stories. Two... (more)
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  Memories of the Future (New York Review Books Classics)

  by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii?

  A man lives in a tiny apartment, engulfed in the noise of his neighbors’ lives, squeezed in among his few possessions, hardly able to move. A mysterious figure turns up at his door, offering a tube of a substance that will, he assures our hero, allow him to enlarge–“biggerize”–his living space. “Why not?”–but clumsily he spills the stuff on the floor. When he wakes the next morning his apartment has begun to grow... (more)
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  Fortunes of War

  The Balkan Trilogy

  by Olivia Manning

  The Fortunes of War is a teeming, complex, and rich novel, alive with the uncertainty and adventure of civilian life during wartime. Olivia Manning has filled the pages of this epic work with vivid characters who, over the course of nearly a thousand pages, tell the larger story of Europe during the trauma of the Second World War. Harriet and Guy Pringle are young newlyweds when they arrive in Bucharest from... (more)
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  In Hazard

  by Richard Hughes

  The Archimedes is a modern merchant steamship in tip-top condition, and in the summer of 1929 it has been picking up goods along the eastern seaboard of the United States before making a run to China. A little overloaded, perhaps — the oddly assorted cargo includes piles of old newspapers and heaps of tobacco—the ship departs for the Panama Canal from Norfolk, Virginia, on a beautiful autumn day. Before... (more)
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  The True Deceiver

  by Tove Jansson

  A New York Review Books Original Deception–the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell others –is the subject of The True Deceiver , Tove Jansson’s most unnerving and unpredictable novel. Here Jansson takes a darker look at the subjects that animate the best of her work: solitude and community, art and life, love and hate. All winter long the snow has been falling on the village. The sun rises late in the... (more)
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  Violence and Derision

  by Albert Cossery

  Who are the jokers? The jokers are the government, and the biggest joker of all is the governor, a bug-eyed, strutting, rapacious character of unequaled incompetence who presides over the nameless Middle Eastern city where this effervescent comedy by Albert Cossery is set. The jokers are also the revolutionaries, no less bumbling and no less infatuated with the trappings of power than the government they oppose.... (more)
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  The Winners

  by Julio Cortázar

  The winners of a state lottery, a cross sec tion of the citizens of Buenos Aires, have received tickets for a mysterious luxury cruise. Summoned to meet in a popular caf and escorted under the cover of darkness to the secret location of their ship, they embark without knowing where they are headed. Within hours the ship stops; the passengers are informed that a disease has bro ken out among the crew and that... (more)
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  Contempt

  by Alberto Moravia

  Molteni, the narrator, aspires to be a man of letters, but has taken a job as a screenwriter in order to support his beautiful wife, Emilia. Frustrated by his work, he becomes convinced that Emilia no longer loves him - that in fact she despises him - and as he relentlessly interrogates her about the true nature of her feelings, he makes his deepest fear (or secret desire) come true. Contempt is a picture,... (more)
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  A Way of Life, Like Any Other (New York Review Books Classics)

  by Darcy O'Brien

  Growing up in Hollywood as the son of former stars isn't easy. Once a glamorous movie queen, the mother is now an aging divorced femme fatale whose hobbies are heavy drinking and seducing men. The father, a silver screen cowboy in better days, spends his time answering fan mail, reliving his days in the navy, and pining for his ex-wife. As told by the son, A Way of Life, Like Any Other is the story of a boy's... (more)
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  Inverted World

  by Christopher Priest

  The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city’s engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the “optimum” into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life... (more)
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  Dirty Snow

  by Georges Simenon

  Dirty Snow, widely acknowledged as one of Simenon's finest books, is a study of the criminal mind comparable to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me. It tells the story of Frank, a pimp, a petty thief, and collaborator in occupied France. Through the long and unrelenting cold and darkness of a long winter Frank pursues all the possibilites of perdition until at last there is nowhere left to go. Hans Koning has... (more)
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  The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll

  by Alvaro Mutis

  Winner of the 2002 Neustadt Prize for World Literature, these seven novellas follow Maqroll's adventures and love affairs from Amazon jungles to Andean peaks. In a world threatened by violence and given over to dirty deals, Maqroll strives at all costs to preserve his honor and maintain his independence. "One of the greatest writers of our time." -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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  The Empire Trilogy: Book 3

  The Singapore Grip

  by J. G. Farrell

  Singapore, 1939: life on the eve of World War II just isn’t what it used to be for Walter Blackett, head of British Singapore’s oldest and most powerful firm. No matter how forcefully the police break one strike, the natives go on strike somewhere else. His daughter keeps entangling herself with the most unsuitable beaus, while her intended match, the son of Blackett’s partner, is an idealistic sympathizer with... (more)
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  Summer Will Show

  by Sylvia Townsend Warner

  Sophia Willoughby, a young Englishwoman from an aristocratic family and a person of strong opinions and even stronger will, has packed her cheating husband off to Paris. He can have his tawdry mistress. She intends to devote herself to the serious business of raising her two children in proper Tory fashion. Then tragedy strikes: the children die, and Sophia, in despair, finds her way to Paris, arriving just... (more)
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  The Fox in the Attic

  by Richard Hughes

  A tale of enormous suspense and growing horror, The Fox in the Attic is the widely acclaimed first part of Richard Hughes's monumental historical fiction, "The Human Predicament." Set in the early Twenties, the book centers on Augustine, a young man from an aristocratic Welsh family, and on his struggle to make sense of the world, devastated by the Great War, in which he is condemned to come to maturity. Unjustly... (more)
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  The Company They Kept

  Writers on Unforgettable Friendships

  Our most remarkable writers share what has influenced them the most: each other. Many of the illustrious contributors to The New York Review of Books have had deep and abiding relationships–both personal and intellectual–with other poets, writers, artists, composers, and scientists of equal stature. The Company They Kept is a collection of twenty-seven accounts of these varied... (more)
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  Chess Story

  by Stefan Zweig

  Chess Story, also known as The Royal Game, is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig’s final achievement, completed in his Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942. It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does so with characteristic emphasis on its psychological damage. He dramatizes the internal destruction inflicted by tyranny. The work is also one... (more)