Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: rebellious writers

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  Blues for a Black Cat & Other Stories (French Modernist Library Series)

  by Boris Vian

  "<This collection> displays Vian's range from gallows humor to verbal fireworks, and happily serves to give visibility to this important writer."- Publishers Weekly. "Ultimately, Blues for a Black Cat is a collection of moral fables, albeit fables told in a cynical, mocking voice and set in a skewed version of the real world. Under the surface absurdity and verbal play, they offer serious indictments of... (more)
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  I Spit on Your Graves (Canongate Crime Classics)

  by Boris Vian

  Published in Paris in 1946 as a hardboiled thriller loaded with sex and blood, allegedly censored in the US and "translated" into French-- I Spit On Your Graves was both a pure mystification and direct home to American literature and movies. More deeply, it was a violent attack on racism by a jazz fan who had already befriended many black musicians and was to become the closest French friend of Ellington, Davis,... (more)
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  L'écume des jours

  by Boris Vian

  Text: French
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  Autumn in Peking

  by Boris Vian

  Vian's 1947 novel Autumn in Peking ( L'Automne à Pékin ) is perhaps Vian's most slapstick work, with an added amount of despair in its exotic recipe for a violent cocktail drink. The story takes place in the imaginary desert called Exopotamie where all the leading characters take part in the building of a train station with tracks that go nowhere. Houses and buildings are destroyed to build this unnecessary... (more)
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  Lolita

  by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, Maurice Couturier

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  The Magus

  by John Fowles

  At the novels center is Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman who accepts a teaching position on a remote Greek island. There he befriends a local millionaire, but the friendship soon evolves into a deadly game and Nicholas finds that he must fight not only for his sanity but for his very survival.
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  The Fall of the House of Usher

  by Edgar Allan Poe

  Edited with an Introduction by David Galloway.
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  Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde

  by Oscar Wilde

  Oscar Wilde, best known for his acerbic, witty plays and urbane nonfiction, was also a master of the fairy tale. This volume brings together all of Wilde's tales from his two collections--"The Happy Prince" and "The House of Pomegranates"--and retains the evocative illustrations done for the original editions. **MASS MARKET PAPER**
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  On the Road

  by Jack Kerouac

  First published in 1957, this novel epitomized to the world the Beat philosophy. It chronicles a spontaneous and wandering life style founded both on jazz and drug-induced visions.
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  Queer: A Novel

  by William S. Burroughs

  In an introduction, Burroughs observes that he wrote this heretofore unpublished picaresque novel in 1951, well before Naked Lunch established his reputation. He reveals that the book had its genesis in a terrible event: his accidental shooting to death of his wife, Joan, a tragedy that released the black wellsprings of his talent. The narrative recounts the hallucinatory life of William Lee, an American in Mexico... (more)
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  The Bald Soprano and Other Plays: Bald Soprano/the Lesson/Jack or the Submission/the Chairs

  by Eugene Ionesco

  The leading figure of absurdist theater and one of the great innovators of the modern stage, Eugene Ionesco did not write his first play, The Bald Soprano, until 1950. He went on to become an internationally renowned master of modern drama, famous for the comic proportions and bizarre effects that allow his work to be simultaneously hilarious, tragic, and profound.
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  Lawrence: Sons and Lovers (Landmarks of World Literature)

  by Michael H. Black

  This is the first critical study of Sons and Lovers to engage with the new Cambridge edition, which prints for the first time the whole text that Lawrence wrote, restoring the sustantial cuts made by the first editor. Michael Black gives special attention to the genesis of the book--the writing and editing processes, where Jessie Chambers and then Edward Garnett made decisive interventions. He analyzes Sons and... (more)