Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

The Fledgling (Langton, Jane. Hall Family Chronicles, Bk. 4.)

The Fledgling (Langton, Jane. Hall Family Chronicles, Bk. 4.)

by Jane Langton

Georgie's fondest hope, to be able to fly, is fleetingly fulfilled when she is befriended by a Canada goose.

The king of real-world chic shares his tips and award-winning flair in a colorful guidebook designed to unleash every woman’s inner fashionista . A twenty-year veteran of the fashion industry, Isaac Mizrahi has become a unique icon in the world of style. He doesn’t do “makeovers” or take pleasure in berating the way a woman dresses. Instead, he is a problem solver—and a titan of trendsetting who believes that... (more)

Everything Matters!: A Novel

by Ron Currie

In infancy, Junior Thibodeaux is encoded with a prophesy: a comet will obliterate life on Earth in thirty-six years. Alone in this knowledge, he comes of age in rural Maine grappling with the question: Does anything I do matter? While the voice that has accompanied him since conception appraises his choices, JuniorÂ’s loved ones emerge with parallel storiesÂ—his anxious mother; his brother, a cocaine addict... (more)

We Agreed to Meet Just Here (Awp Award Series in the Novel)

We Agreed to Meet Just Here (Awp Award Series in the Novel)

by Scott Blackwood

Winner of the 2008 AWP Award for the Novel (Robert Eversz, Judge), We Agreed to Meet Just Here is a lyrical mystery about disappearance, told in precise and luminous prose. A young lifeguard in an Austin suburb vanishes one night while returning from a screening of The Third Man . A doctor, ill with cancer, goes missing from his home, and is later seen, bearded and ragged, wandering the aisles of a grocery... (more)

Selected Stories of Grace Paley: A Selection

Selected Stories of Grace Paley: A Selection

by Grace Paley

These classic Grace Paley stories, chosen uniquely for audiobook listeners by the author, reflect the full and rich range of Paley's talents and span her career from the late fifties onward. Included here are such unforgettable pieces as "The Little Disturbances of Man", "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute", and "Later the Same Day". With her quirky, boisterous characters, lavish use of language, and timely... (more)

Like Water for Chocolate

by Laura Esquivel; Illustrator-Cathleen Toelke; Translator-Carol & Thomas Christensen

Die a Little: A Novel

by Megan E. Abbott

FEMME FATALES OBSESSIVE LOVE DOUBLE CROSSES How does a respectable young woman fall into Los Angeles' hard-boiled underworld? Shadow-dodging through the glamorous world of 1950s Hollywood and its seedy flip side, Megan Abbott's debut, Die a Little, is a gem of the darkest hue. This ingenious twist on a classic noir tale tells the story of Lora King, a schoolteacher, and her brother Bill, a junior... (more)

Later the Same Day (Contemporary American Fiction Series)

Later the Same Day (Contemporary American Fiction Series)

by Grace Paley

In the 17 short stories collected here, Paley writes with verbal economy and resonance, pithy insights, and warmth and humor. The themes are familiar: friendship, commitment, responsibility, love, political idealism and activism, children, the nuclear shadow. PW greatly enjoyed these tales, stating: " 'Somewhere for me perfection is flowering,' says a character in one of these stories. Many readers will find... (more)

The Saints of Big Harbour: A Novel

by Lynn Coady

"A true grit coming-of-age novel" (Seattle Post-Intelligencer), Saints of Big Harbour is a funny, brutal, and vivid story about small-town life and the inescapable power of gossip. Lynn Coady gives us the unforgettable Guy Boucher, a fatherless teenager and recluse, who finds himself at the center of an ugly rumor. Several versions of truth emerge and collide through Guy's eyes and the stories of those who... (more)

LITTLE FRIEND

by Donna Tartt

Although the Cleves generally revelled in every detail of their family history, the events of 'the terrible Mother's Day' were never, ever discussed. On that day, nine-year-old Robin Cleves, loved by all for his whims and peculiarities, was found hanging by the neck from a rope slung over a black-tupelo tree in his own garden. Eleven years later, the mystery - with its taunting traces of foul play - was no... (more)

The Flexitarian Table: Inspired, Flexible Meals for Vegetarians, Meat Lovers, and Everyone inBetween

The Flexitarian Table: Inspired, Flexible Meals for Vegetarians, Meat Lovers, and Everyone inBetween

by Peter Berley

Today a single family can include staunch vegetarians as well as passionate meat lovers. When company shows up, the situation gets even more complicated. How can you satisfy them all without making two (or three) completely different meals? In The Flexitarian Table, the award-winning author Peter Berley presents menus that are flexible, exciting, relaxing to prepare -- and that make everyone feel welcome. With... (more)

Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel

by Rivka Galchen

When Dr. Leo Liebenstein’s wife disappears, she leaves behind a single, confounding clue: a woman who looks, talks, and behaves exactly like her—or almost exactly like her—and even audaciously claims to be her. While everyone else is fooled by this imposter, Leo knows better than to trust his senses in matters of the heart. Certain that the original Rema is alive and in hiding, Leo embarks on a quixotic journey... (more)

Fidelity: Poems

by Grace Paley

Just before her death in 2007 at the age of eighty-four, Grace Paley completed this wise and poignant book of poems. Full of memories of friends and family and incisive observations of life in both her beloved hometown, New York City, and rural Vermont, the poems are sober and playful, experimenting with form while remaining eminently readable. They explore the beginnings and ends of relationships, the ties that... (more)

My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro

My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro

"When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name . . . . It is perhaps only in reading a love... (more)

The Flying Troutmans: A Novel

by Miriam Toews

Meet the Troutmans. Hattie’s boyfriend has just dumped her, her sister Min’s back in the psych ward, and Min’s kids, Logan and Thebes, are not talking and talking way too much, respectively. Then there’s the past, in which Min tried to kill Hattie once and to kill herself a lot, in which Min threw the kids’ father out of the house, in which Hattie dropped out of school, in which Logan and his friends kidnapped a... (more)

Wuthering Heights

by Emily Bronte

There are few more convincing, less sentimental accounts of love than Wuthering Heights. This is the story of a tormented foundling who falls in love with the daughter of his benefactor, and of the violence and misery that result from their thwarted longing for each other.

The History of Love: A Novel

by Nicole Krauss

The illuminating national bestseller: "Vertiginously exciting…vibrantly imagined….<Krauss is> a prodigious talent."—Janet Maslin, New York Times A long-lost book reappears, mysteriously connecting an old man searching for his son and a girl seeking a cure for her widowed mother's loneliness. Leo Gursky is just about surviving, tapping his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he's... (more)

Middlesex: A Novel

by Jeffrey Eugenides

A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides --the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl. In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond clasmate with a gift for acting. The passion that... (more)

The Virgin Suicides

by Jeffrey Eugenides

In the tradition of Bright Lights, Big City and The Secret History comes a compelling, highly-acclaimed debut novel of youth and innocence. On the elm-lined streets of a middle-class American city, the lives of a group of teenaged boys are forever changed by their obsession with five mysteriously doomed sisters.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world, and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind.... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: really good ones

by Jane Langton

by Isaac Mizrahi

by Ron Currie

by Scott Blackwood

by Grace Paley

by Laura Esquivel; Illustrator-Cathleen Toelke; Translator-Carol & Thomas Christensen

by Megan E. Abbott

by Grace Paley

by Lynn Coady

by Donna Tartt

by Peter Berley

by Rivka Galchen

by Grace Paley

by Miriam Toews

by Emily Bronte

by Nicole Krauss

by Jeffrey Eugenides

by Jeffrey Eugenides

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez