Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Little Women

by Louisa May Alcott

In picturesque nineteenth-century New England, tomboyish Jo, beautiful Meg, fragile Beth, and romantic Amy come of age while their father is off to war.

While jailed for homosexual offenses, Wilde wrote this long, bitter letter of recrimination to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. It offers fascinating insights into Wilde’s life in prison and the background and psychology of a notorious affair, but its eloquence, passion and literary excellence make it a universal statement about love, injustice and suffering.

Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

A number one bestseller in Britain that topped the lists there for months, Stephen Fry's astonishingly frank, funny, wise memoir is the book that his fans everywhere have been waiting for. Since his PBS television debut in the Blackadder series, the American profile of this multitalented writer, actor and comedian has grown steadily, especially in the wake of his title role in the film Wilde, which earned him a... (more)

Kartography

by Kamila Shamsie

Raheen and her best friend, Karim, share an idyllic childhood in upper-class Karachi. Their parents were even once engaged to each others' partners until they rematched in what they call "the fiancée swap." But as adolescence distances the friends, Karim takes refuge in maps while Raheen searches for the secret behind her parents' exchange. What she uncovers reveals not just a family's but a country's turbulent... (more)

Life, letters and essays of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Volume 1. Letters of Elizabeth Barret Browning addressed to Richard Hengist Horne

Life, letters and essays of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Volume 1. Letters of Elizabeth Barret Browning addressed to Richard Hengist Horne

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1877 edition by John W. Lovell Co., New York.

Four Weddings and a Funeral: The Screenplay for the Smash Hit Comedy

Four Weddings and a Funeral: The Screenplay for the Smash Hit Comedy

by Richard Curtis

Curtis's poignant, irreverent, and laugh-out-loud screenplay grossed more than $200 million wordwide and garnered Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. This book includes the complete script, plus scenes that were cut from the film, anecdotes, and observations from the author. Photographs.

Much Ado About Nothing

by David Bevington, William Shakespeare, Louva Elizabeth Irvine, Roma Gill, A. R. Humphreys, A. L. Rowse, Barbara A. Mowat, Paul Werstine, Peter Holland, R. A. Foakes

"Much Ado About Nothing" is the story of Leonato, an Italian nobleman, his daughter, Hero, and his niece, Beatrice. Following a war Leonato welcomes into his house Don Pedro, his good friend; fellow soldiers of Don Pedro, Claudio and Benedick; as well as Don Pedro's illegitimate brother, Don John. Quickly amorous relations develop between Claudio and Hero and later between Benedick and Beatrice. As wedding plans... (more)

Pride and Prejudice (Audio Education Study Guides)

Pride and Prejudice (Audio Education Study Guides)

by Jane Austen

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Next to the exhortation at the beginning of Moby-Dick , "Call me Ishmael," the first sentence of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice must be among the most quoted in literature. And certainly what Melville did for whaling Austen does for marriage--tracing the intricacies (not to mention the... (more)

I Capture the Castle

by Dodie Smith

Now a major motion picture from the Academy Award-winning producer of Shakespeare in Love I Capture the Castle tells the story of seventeen-year-old Cassandra and her family, who live in not-so-genteel poverty in a ramshackle old English castle. Here she strives, over six turbulent months, to hone her writing skills. She fills three notebooks with sharply funny yet poignant entries. Her journals candidly... (more)

Oprah's Book Club

The House of Sand and Fog

by Andre Dubus III

"Elegant and powerful...an unusual and volatile...literary thriller." -- Washington Post Book World In this riveting novel of almost unbearable suspense, three fragile yet determined people become dangerously entangled in a relentlessly escalating crisis. Colonel Behrani, once a wealthy man in Iran, is now a struggling immigrant willing to bet everything he has to restore his family's dignity. Kathy... (more)

The French Lieutenant's Woman

by John Fowles

As part of Back Bay's ongoing effort to make the works of John Fowles available in uniform trade paperback editions, two major works in the Fowles canon are reissued to coincide with the publication of Wormholes, the author's long-awaited new collection of essays and occasional writings. Perhaps the most beloved of Fowles's internationally bestselling works, The French Lieutenant's Woman is a feat of seductive... (more)

To the Hermitage

by Malcolm Bradbury

In October 1993, a novelist is invited to go to Stockholm and Russia to take part in what is enigmatically referred to as the Diderot Project. In Stockholm he is joined by various other members of the project-including an academic, a lustful opera singer, and a Swedish diplomat. On the journey to Russia more is revealed about the great Enlightenment writer Denis Diderot-the son of a knife maker in Langres, who... (more)

Abandon (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer’s intoxicating new novel is at once a stylish intellectual mystery and a pulse-quickening love story—the love in question being at once sacred and profane. John Macmillan, a classically reticent Englishman who has moved to California to study the poems of the Sufi mystic Rumi, unexpectedly becomes involved in two equally absorbing quests. The first is for a mysterious Rumi manuscript that may have been... (more)

Rates of Exchange

by Malcolm Bradbury

Welcome to Slaka! A land of lake and forest, of beetroot and tractor, of cultural riches and bloody battlefields. Malcolm Bradbury's hilariously entertaining and witty novel, RATES OF EXCHANGE, introduces the small, eastern European country of Slaka. In less than two short weeks there, first-time visitor Dr Petworth manages to give a rather controversial lecture, get embroiled in the thorny thickets of sexual and... (more)

Sense and Sensibility

by Jane Austen

'Young women who have no economic or political power must attend to the serious business of contriving material security'. Jane Austen's sardonic humour lays bare the stratagems, the hypocrisy and the poignancy inherent in the struggle of two very different sisters to achieve respectability. "Sense and Sensibility" is a delightful comedy of manners in which the sisters Elinor and Marianne represent these two... (more)

The Human Comedy

by William Saroyan

The story of an American family in wartime.

A Streetcar Named Desire

by Tennessee Williams

The story of Blanche DuBois and her last grasp at happiness, and of Stanley Kowalski, the one who destroyed her chance.

Like Water for Chocolate

A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies

by Laura Esquivel

The number one bestseller in Mexico and America for almost two years, and subsequently a bestseller around the world, "Like Water For Chocolate" is a romantic, poignant tale, touched with moments of magic, graphic earthiness, bittersweet wit - and recipes. A sumptuous feast of a novel, it relates the bizarre history of the all-female De La Garza family. Tita, the youngest daughter of the house, has been forbidden... (more)

The Diary of a Young Girl

by Anne Frank

Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl is among the most enduring documents of the twentieth century. Since its publication in 1947, it has been read by tens of millions of people all over the world. It remains a beloved and deeply admired testament to the indestructible nature of the human spirit. Restored in this Definitive Edition are diary entries that were omitted from the original edition. These passages,... (more)

Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories (Modern Library)

Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories (Modern Library)

by Truman Capote

Contains: Breakfast at Tiffany's House of Flowers A Diamond Guitar A Christmas Memory

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: of love etc.

by Louisa May Alcott

by W. H. Auden, Oscar Wilde

by Stephen Fry

by Kamila Shamsie

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Richard Curtis

by David Bevington, William Shakespeare, Louva Elizabeth Irvine, Roma Gill, A. R. Humphreys, A. L. Rowse, Barbara A. Mowat, Paul Werstine, Peter Holland, R. A. Foakes

by Jane Austen

by Dodie Smith

by Andre Dubus III

by John Fowles

by Malcolm Bradbury

by Pico Iyer

by Malcolm Bradbury

by Jane Austen

by William Saroyan

by Tennessee Williams

A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies

by Laura Esquivel

by Anne Frank

by Truman Capote