Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

The Island of Doctor Moreau inspired this 1940 novella. Set on a mysterious island, The Invention of Morel is a story of suspense and exploration as well as an unlikely romance, where every detail is both crystal clear and deeply mysterious. Susan Jill Levine's revision of Ruth Simm's translation offers a new experience of an uncanny work of genius.

Letters, Summer 1926

by Rainer Maria Rilke

The summer of 1926 was a time of trouble and uncertainty for each of the three poets whose correspondence is collected in this moving volume. Marina Tsvetayeva was living in exile in France and struggling to get by. Boris Pasternak was in Moscow, trying to come to terms with the new Bolshevik regime. Rainer Maria Rilke, in Switzerland, was dying. Though hardly known to each other, they began to correspond,... (more)

Monsieur Proust

by Ce?leste Albaret

Celeste Albaret was Marcel Proust's housekeeper in his last years, when he retreated from the world to devote himself to his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time. She could imitate his voice to perfection, and Proust himself admitted to her, "You know everything about me." Her reminiscences of her employer present a fond and winning picture of the daily life of a great writer, including his foibles, worries, and... (more)

Miserable miracle;: Mescaline

by Henri Michaux

In this collection of short pieces and drawings, Henri Michaux, one of 20th-century France’s finest poets and artists, describes the anguish and the ecstasy of his encounter with the hallucinogen mescaline. First published in 1956, Miserable Miracle is an early exploration of the connection between drugs and creativity. “Michaux is the poet laureate of our insomnia.” — The New York Times Book Review

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)

An African in Greenland (New York Review Books Classics)

An African in Greenland (New York Review Books Classics)

by Te?te?-Michel Kpomassie

A chance encounter with a picture book about Greenland inspires the young Tete-Michel Kpomassie to embark on a life-changing journey that would last ten years. Leaving his native Togo, he travels to the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mauritania, Paris, and Copenhagen before reaching his ultimate destination. The author's distinctly African voice and perspective create a narrative that is refreshingly free of Western... (more)

The World of Odysseus (New York Review Books Classics)

The World of Odysseus (New York Review Books Classics)

by M. I. Finley

The World of Odysseus is a concise and fascinating account of the society that gave birth to The Iliad and The Odyssey. A pioneering work of social history first published in 1954, Finley's brilliant study is a fundamental companion for any student of Homer or ancient Greece. "As indispensable to the professional as it is accessible to the general reader." - Bernard Knox

We Think the World of You (New York Review Books Classics)

We Think the World of You (New York Review Books Classics)

by J. R. Ackerley

This powerful short novel, with its extraordinary mixture of acute social realism and dark fantasy, was described by J. R. Acke rley himself as a fairy tale for adults." Frank, the narrator, is a middle-aged civil servant, intelligent, acerbic, self-righteous, angry. He is in love with Joh nny, a young, married, working-class man with a sweetly easy-going nature. When John ny is sent to prison for ... (more)

Chess Story (New York Review Books Classics)

Chess Story (New York Review Books Classics)

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)

To Be a Pilgrim (New York Review Books Classics)

To Be a Pilgrim (New York Review Books Classics)

by Joyce Cary

People lie to themselves and lie to each ot her, and the lies they tell become their lives. Tom Wilcher, the hero of the second volume of Joyce Cary's First Trilogy, has been at various times a political activist , a closefisted lawyer, a self-sacrificing brother, and a dirty old man. But as he f aces death his unfulfilled spiritual yearnings are uppermost in his mind. Each volume of Cary's trilogy, which... (more)

Herself Surprised (New York Review Books Classics)

Herself Surprised (New York Review Books Classics)

by Joyce Cary

Herself Surprised, the first volume of Joyc e Cary's remarkable First Trilogy, introduces Sara Monday, a woman at once dissolute and devout, passionate and sly. With no regrets, Sara reviews her changing fortunes , remembering the drudgery of domestic servitude, the pleasures of playing the great lady in a small provincial town, and the splendors and miseries of life as the mode l, muse, and mistress of the... (more)

Ward Number Six and Other Stories

by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Taken from ^IThe Oxford Chekhov^R, the stories in this collection include "The Butterfly," "Ariadne," "A Dreary Story," "Neighbours," "An Anonymous Story," and "Doctor Startsev," as well as the title story.

The living thoughts of Kierkegaard, (A Midland book, MB 47)

The living thoughts of Kierkegaard, (A Midland book, MB 47)

by Søren Kierkegaard, W. H. Auden

The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard is one o f the master thinkers of the modern age, a defining influence on existentialism and on twentieth-century theology, and this brilliantly tailored selection from his vast and varied writings is a perfect introduction to his work. W.H. Auden, who was deeply influenced by Kierkegaard, made this selection by drawing on the full range of his published writings as ... (more)

The Outcry (New York Review Books Classics)

The Outcry (New York Review Books Classics)

by Henry James

The Outcry, Henry James’s last published novel, is an effervescent comedy of money and manners. An impoverished English lord and an American plutocrat clash when a young art connoisseur, out to make a splash, declares the prize painting from the lord’s collection to be in fact an even rarer, and pricier, painting than anyone had ever thought. Featuring characters based on J. P. Morgan and Bernard Berenson, The... (more)

Moravagine

by Blaise Cendrars

At once appalling and appallingly funny, Moravagine bears comparison with Naked Lunch, except that it is more entertaining to read. Heir to an immense fortune, Moravagine is a monster, a man in pursuit of a theorem that will justify his every desire. Released from a hospital for the criminally insane by his star struck psychiatrist (the narrator of the book) who foresees a companionship in crime, Moravagine... (more)

Envy (New York Review Books Classics)

by Iurri Karlovich Olesha, Marian Schwartz

Yuri Olesha's novella combines social satire, effervescent humor, and a wild visionary streak in the story of a Soviet Babbitt, a hero of industry who presides over an unheard-of increase in the production of sausage. But beside this man with the unshakable self-regard is the bitter sponger who, consumed with resentment, sees through him.

The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse (New York Review Books Classics)

The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse (New York Review Books Classics)

by D. B. Wyndham Lewis

The editors of this legendary and hilarious anthology write: "Bad Verse has its canons, like Good Verse. There is bad Bad Verse and good Bad Verse. It has been the preoccupation of the compilers to include in this book chiefly good Bad Verse." Here one finds bad masterpieces by the greatest poets of the English language, including works by Dryden, Wordsworth, and Keats, among many others, together with an index... (more)

The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography

The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography

by A. J. A. Symons

One day in 1925 a friend asked A. J. A. Symons if he had read Fr. Rolfe’s Hadrian the Seventh. He hadn’t, but soon did, and found himself entranced by the novel—“a masterpiece”—and no less fascinated by the mysterious person of its all-but-forgotten creator. The Quest for Corvo is a hilarious and heartbreaking portrait of the strange Frederick Rolfe, self-appointed Baron Corvo, an artist, writer, and frustrated... (more)

The Lord Chandos Letter

by Hugo von Hofmannsthal

In The Lord Chandos Letter, the author conjures a figure from the English Renaissance in order to write about a peculiarly modern crisis of the spirit. In this cryptic, haunting, at times hallucinated document, a young lord writes for the last time to his patron, Sir Francis Bacon, the founding father of modern scientific empiricism. The lord describes a mysterious affliction which has left him entirely bereft... (more)

To the Finland Station (New York Review Books Classics)

To the Finland Station (New York Review Books Classics)

by Edmund Wilson

To the Finald Station is one of the greatest works by 20th-century America’s heralded man of letters. This magisterial study of the revolutionary dream reaches from the French Revolution through the Paris Commune to Russia in 1917, and features brilliant portraits of such figures as Jules Michelet, the great historian of the French people; the utopians Robert Owen and Charles Fourier; the anarchist Mikhail... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: nyrb classics

by Adolfo Bioy Casares

by Rainer Maria Rilke

by Ce?leste Albaret

by Henri Michaux

by Julio Cortázar

by Te?te?-Michel Kpomassie

by M. I. Finley

by J. R. Ackerley

by Stefan Zweig

by Joyce Cary

by Joyce Cary

by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

by Søren Kierkegaard, W. H. Auden

by Henry James

by Blaise Cendrars

by Iurri Karlovich Olesha, Marian Schwartz

by D. B. Wyndham Lewis

by A. J. A. Symons

by Hugo von Hofmannsthal

by Edmund Wilson