Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Three Lives (Dover Thrift Editions)

by Gertrude Stein

Clear, carefully crafted stories of 3 women, whose relatively ordinary lives and minds Stein invests with extraordinary interest. Excellent entree to author's later work.

Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties

Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties

Noel Riley Fitch has written a perfect book, full to the brim with literary history, correct and whole-hearted both in statement and in implication. She makes me feel and remember a good many things that happened before and after my time. I'm glad to have lived long enough to read it. --Glenway Wescott .

Paris Was Yesterday

by Janet Flanner

In 1925 Flanner began her New Yorker “Letter from Paris,” from which most of the pieces in this collection are drawn. They give an incomparable view of French life before World War II. Edited by Irving Drutman; Index.

Matisse the Master

by Henri Matisse, Hilary Spurling

“If my story were ever to be written down truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone,” wrote Henri Matisse. It is hard to believe today that Matisse, whose exhibitions draw huge crowds worldwide, was once almost universally reviled and ridiculed. His response was neither to protest nor to retreat; he simply pushed on from one innovation to the next, and left the world to draw its own conclusions. ... (more)

A Cab at the Door & Midnight Oil

by V. S. Pritchett

Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice

by Janet Malcolm

"How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?” Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism. The pair, of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master “whose charm was as conspicuous as her fatness” and “thin, plain, tense, sour” Alice B. Toklas, the “worker bee” who ministered to Stein’s needs throughout their forty-year... (more)

Rhino Ritz: An American Mystery

by Keith Abbott

"A satirical novel that manages to combine both mystery and sci-fi genres....Action aplenty ...and fast dialogue." -- L.A. Times Book Review, Dec. 30, 1979 "Keith Abbott is a brilliant, virtuoso writer....He fascinates. He creates and maintains a climate of everyday perfection, and does it by destroying consistency. -- Die Zeit, March 11, 1994 "This is a very funny, loose, episodic book, held together... (more)

Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company

Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company

by James R. Mellow

On almost every Saturday of the first half of the twentieth century, Gertrude Stein would open her door to the likes of Picasso and Matisse, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Cocteau and Apollinaire, welcoming them into a salon alive with vivid avant-garde paintings and sparkling intellectual conversation. In Charmed Circle, James R. Mellow has re-created this fascinating world and the complex woman who dominated it. His... (more)

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