Great books by wordsmiths
Discover a curated list of great books by masterful wordsmiths. Explore timeless literature and exceptional writing from the world's most talented authors.
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Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami
NATIONAL BESTSELLER ā¢ From the acclaimed author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and one of the worldās greatest storytellers comes āan insistently metaphysical mind-benderā (The New Yorker) about a teenager on the run and a deceptively simple old man. Now with a new introduction by the author. Here we meet fifteen-year-old runaway Kafka Tamura and the elderly Nakata, who is drawn to Kafka for reasons that he cannot fathom. As their paths converge, acclaimed author Haruki Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder, in what is a truly remarkable journey. āAs powerful as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.... Reading Murakami ... is a striking experience in consciousness expansion.āāChicago Tribune
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Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
by Haruki Murakami
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 1Q84 and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle comes a relentlessly inventive novel that dives deep into the very nature of consciousness. āFantastical, mysterious, and funny . . . a fantasy world that might have been penned by Franz Kafka.āāThe Philadelphia Inquirer Across two parallel narratives, Murakami draws readers into a mind-bending universe in which Lauren Bacall, Bob Dylan, a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure granddaughter, and various thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters collide to dazzling effect. What emerges is a hyperkinetic novel that is at once hilariously funny and a deeply serious meditation on the nature and uses of the mind.
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Herzog
by Saul Bellow
In one of his finest achievements, Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow presents a multifaceted portrait of a modern-day hero, a man struggling with the complexity of existence and longing for redemption. A Penguin Classic This is the story of Moses Herzog, a great sufferer, joker, mourner, and charmer. Although his life steadily disintegrates around himāhe has failed as a writer and teacher, as a father, and has lost the affection of his wife to his best friendsāHerzog sees himself as a survivor, both of his private disasters and those of the age. He writes unsent letters to friends and enemies, colleagues and famous people, revealing his wry perception of the world and the innermost secrets of his heart. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Philip Roth.
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Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
by Henry Miller
One of Henry Miller's most luminous statements of his personal philosophy of life, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, provides a symbolic title for this collection of stories and essays. Many of them have appeared only in foreign magazines while others were printed in small limited editions which have gone out of print. Miller's genius for comedy is at its best in "Money and How It Gets That Way"--a tongue-in-cheek parody of "economics" provoked by a postcard from Ezra Pound which asked if he "ever thought about money." His deep concern for the role of the artist in society appears in "An Open Letter to All and Sundry," and in "The Angel is My Watermark" he writes of his own passionate love affair with painting. "The Immorality of Morality" is an eloquent discussion of censorship. Some of the stories, such as "First Love," are autobiographical, and there are portraits of friends, such as "Patchen: Man of Anger and Light," and essays on other writers such as Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Sherwood Anderson and Ionesco. Taken together, these highly readable pieces reflect the incredible vitality and variety of interests of the writer who extended the frontiers of modern literature with Tropic of Cancer and other great books.
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The Air-conditioned Nightmare
by Henry Miller
His stories and essays celebrate those rare individuals (famous and obscure) whose creative resilience and mere existence oppose the mechanization of minds and souls.
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Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller
The account of a young writer and his friends in free-wheeling Paris.
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Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
by Henry Miller
Tells the story of Miller's life on Big Sur, a section of California coast where he lived for fifteen years.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
Introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides ā¢ Nominated as one of Americaās best-loved novels by PBSās The Great American Read Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wildeās story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the authorās most popular work. The tale of Dorian Grayās moral disintegration caused a scandal when it ļ¬rst appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novelās corrupting inļ¬uence, he responded that there is, in fact, āa terrible moral in Dorian Gray.ā Just a few years later, the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wildeās homosexual liaisons, which resulted in his imprisonment. Of Dorian Grayās relationship to autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, āBasil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to beāin other ages, perhaps.ā