books i would save if the house was burning
books I would give 11/10 stars to defender of these forever
Items in this hypelist
Books
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Adania Shibli · 2020
Bodies of Light
Jennifer Down · 2021
Frankenstein: The 1818 Text
Mary Shelley · 2018
<b>Mary Shelley’s classic novel, presented in its original 1818 text, with an introduction from National Book Critics Circle award-winner Charlotte Gordon</b><br> <br> <b>Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s <i>The Great American Read</i></b><br> <br>The original 1818 text of <i>Frankenstein</i> preserves the hard-hitting and politically-charged aspects of Shelley’s original writing, as well as her unflinching wit and strong female voice. This edition also emphasizes Shelley’s relationship with her mother—trailblazing feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who penned <i>A Vindication of the Rights of Woman</i>—and demonstrates her commitment to carrying forward her mother’s ideals, placing her in the context of a feminist legacy rather than the sole female in the company of male poets, including Percy Shelley and Lord Byron.<br> <br> This edition includes a new introduction and suggestions for further reading by National Book Critics Circle award-winner and Shelley expert Charlotte Gordon, literary excerpts and reviews selected by Gordon, and a chronology and essay by preeminent Shelley scholar Charles E. Robinson. <br> <br>Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin
Masha Gessen · 2012
The Orange and other poems
Wendy Cope · 2023
My heart has made its mind up And I'm afraid it's you. The Orange provides the perfect introduction to Wendy Cope, one of Britain's wittiest, best-selling and best-loved poets. In poems that can turn from laugh-out-loud funny to deeply moving, Wendy Cope offers reflections on love and life. From the joy of falling - and being - in love to ways to help you deal with a painful break-up or the memories of people loved and lost, this is a book you will want to savour and share with all your friends. 'Wendy Cope's readership, numerous and adoring, is the envy of most poets. Cope's real strength lies not in charm or insight (she has buckets of both) but in the pitch perfect exactitude of her writing.' Sunday Times
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath · 2005
<p><i>The Bell Jar</i> chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under -- maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made <i>The Bell Jar</i> a haunting American classic.</p> <p>This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.</p>
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Mark Haddon · 2004
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: A novel
Gabrielle Zevin · 2022
Walk Through Walls
Marina Abramovic · 2016
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
John Carreyrou · 2018
My Year of Rest and Relaxation: A Novel
Ottessa Moshfegh · 2018
From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman's efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong? My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.
The Secret History
Donna Tartt · 1992
<b><b><b><b>ONE OF <i>TIME MAGAZINE</i>'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • </b>INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A contemporary literary classic and "a<b>n accomplished psychological thriller ... absolutely chilling" (<i>Village Voice</i>)</b>, f<b>rom the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of <i>The Goldfinch.<br><br></i></b></b></b>One of <i>The Atlantic</i>’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years</b><br><br>Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.<br><br><b>“A remarkably powerful novel [and] a ferociously well-paced entertainment . . . Forceful, cerebral, and impeccably controlled.” —<i>The New York Times</i></b>
Norwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami · 2003
Alternate cover edition here.<br/><br/>When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.
Beautiful World, Where Are You: A Novel
Sally Rooney · 2021
AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Beautiful World, Where Are You is a new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends. Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?
The Copenhagen Trilogy
Tove Ditlevsen · 2021
<p><b>A </b><b><i>New York Times </i>10 </b><b>Best Books of the Year (2021)</b><br><b>An NPR Best Books of the Year (2021)</b><br><br><b>Called "a masterpiece" by <i>The New York Times</i>, the acclaimed trilogy from Tove Ditlevsen, a pioneer in the field of genre-bending confessional writing.</b><br><br>Tove Ditlevsen is today celebrated as one of the most important and unique voices in twentieth-century Danish literature, and <i>The Copenhagen Trilogy</i> (1969–71) is her acknowledged masterpiece. <i>Childhood </i>tells the story of a misfit child’s single-minded determination to become a poet; <i>Youth </i>describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. <i>Dependency </i>picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the first of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor-husband.<br><br>Throughout, the narrator grapples with the tension between her vocation as a writer and her competing roles as daughter, wife, mother, and drug addict, and she writes about female experience and identity in a way that feels very fresh and pertinent to today’s discussions around feminism. Ditlevsen’s trilogy is remarkable for its intensity and its immersive depiction of a world of complex female friendships, family and growing up—in this sense, it’s Copenhagen's answer to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels. She can also be seen as a spiritual forerunner of confessional writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy. Her trilogy is drawn from her own experiences but reads like the most compelling kind of fiction.<br><br>Born in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen in 1917, Ditlevsen became famous for her poetry while still a teenager, and went on to write novels, stories, and memoirs. Having been dismissed by the critical establishment in her lifetime as a working-class female writer, she is now being rediscovered and championed as one of Denmark’s most important modern authors.</p>
Down the Drain
Julia Fox · 2023
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER<br/><br/>The hotly anticipated book from “one of the all-time pop-culture greats” (New York magazine) that chronicles her shocking life and unyielding determination to not only survive but achieve her dreams.<br/><br/>Julia Fox is famous for many things: her captivating acting, such as her breakout role in the film Uncut Gems; her trendsetting style, including bleached eyebrows, exaggerated eyeshadow, and cutout dresses; her mastery of social media, where she entertains and educates her millions of followers. But all these share the trait for which she is most famous: unabashedly and unapologetically being herself.<br/><br/>This commitment to authenticity has never been more on display than in Down the Drain. With writing that is both eloquent and accessible, Fox recounts her turbulent path to cultural supremacy: her parents’ volatile relationship that divided her childhood between Italy and New York City and left her largely raising herself; a possessive and abusive drug-dealing boyfriend whose torment continued even from within Rikers Island; her own trips to jail as well as to a psychiatric hospital; her work as a dominatrix that led to a complicated entanglement with a sugar daddy; a heroin habit that led to New Orleans trap houses and that she would kick only after the fatal overdose of her best friend; her own near-lethal overdoses and the deaths of still more friends from drugs and suicide; an emotionally explosive, tabloid-dominating romance with a figure she dubs “The Artist”; a whirlwind, short-lived marriage and her trials as a single parent striving to support her young son. Yet as extraordinary as her story is, its universality is what makes it so powerful. Fox doesn’t just capture her improbable evolution from grade-school outcast to fashion-world icon, she captures her transition from girlhood to womanhood to motherhood. Family and friendship, sex and death, violence and love, money and power, innocence and experience—it’s all here, in raw, remarkable, and riveting detail.<br/><br/>More than a year before the book’s publication, Fox’s description of it as “a masterpiece” in a red carpet interview went viral. As always, she was just being honest. Down the Drain is a true literary achievement, as one-of-a-kind as its author.
Of Mice and Men (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)
John Steinbeck · 1994
A controversial tale of friendship and tragedy during the Great Depression<br/><br/>A Penguin Classic<br/><br/>Over seventy-five years since its first publication, Steinbeck’s tale of commitment, loneliness, hope, and loss remains one of America’s most widely read and taught novels. An unlikely pair, George and Lennie, two migrant workers in California during the Great Depression, grasp for their American Dream. They hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they land jobs on a ranch in the Salinas Valley, the fulfillment of their dream seems to be within their grasp. But even George cannot guard Lennie from the provocations, nor predict the consequences of Lennie's unswerving obedience to the things George taught him.<br/><br/>Of Mice and Men represents an experiment in form, which Steinbeck described as “a kind of playable novel, written in a novel form but so scened and set that it can be played as it stands.” A rarity in American letters, it achieved remarkable success as a novel, a Broadway play, and three acclaimed films. This edition features an introduction by Susan Shillinglaw, one of today’s leading Steinbeck scholars.<br/><br/>For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
The Da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon)
Dan Brown · 2009
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.<br/>This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.<br/>As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee · 2014
Look for The Land of Sweet Forever, a posthumous collection of newly discovered short stories and previously published essays and magazine pieces by Harper Lee, coming October 21, 2025. Voted America's Best-Loved Novel in PBS's The Great American Read Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep South—and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred One of the most cherished stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than forty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father—a crusading local lawyer—risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.
