personal library 📚

Normal People: A Novel

Sally Rooney · 2020

As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow

Zoulfa Katouh · 2022

Wuthering Heights (Penguin Classics)

Emily Brontë • 2002

<b>Coming soon to the big screen is Emerald Fennell’s feature film “<i>Wuthering Heights</i>,” which captures the spirit of this epic love story and stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as Catherine and Heathcliff.<br></b><br>Emily Brontë's only novel endures as a work of tremendous and far-reaching influence. The Penguin Classics edition is the definitive version of the text, edited with an introduction by Pauline Nestor.<br><br>Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange, situated on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before. What unfolds is the tale of the intense love between the gypsy foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. Catherine, forced to choose between passionate, tortured Heathcliff and gentle, well-bred Edgar Linton, surrendered to the expectations of her class. As Heathcliff's bitterness and vengeance at his betrayal is visited upon the next generation, their innocent heirs must struggle to escape the legacy of the past. <br><br>In this edition, a new preface by Lucasta Miller, author of <i>The Brontë Myth</i>, looks at the ways in which the novel has been interpreted, from Charlotte Brontë onwards. This complements Pauline Nestor's introduction, which discusses changing critical receptions of the novel, as well as Emily Brontë's influences and background.

La Metamorfosis

Franz Kafka • 1915

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Stephen Chbosky · 1999

The Poppy War

R. F. Kuang • 2018

Crime and Punishment (Vintage Classics)

Crime and Punishment (Vintage Classics)

<b>Hailed by <i>Washington Post Book World</i> as “the best [translation] currently available" when it was first published, this second edition of <i>Crime and Punishment </i>has been updated in honor of the 200th anniversary of Dostoevsky’s birth. • <b>ONE OF <i>TIME MAGAZINE</i>'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME</b></b><br><br>With the same suppleness, energy, and range of voices that won their translation of <i>The Brothers Karamazov</i> the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky offer a brilliant translation of <i>Crime and Punishment, </i>Dostoevsky's astounding pyschological thriller, newly revised for his bicentenniel. <br><br>In <i>Crime and Punishment</i>, when Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the tsars, commits an act of murder and theft, he sets into motion a story that is almost unequalled in world literature for its excruciating suspense, its atmospheric vividness, and its depth of characterization and vision. Dostoevsky’s drama of sin, guilt, and redemption transforms the sordid story of an old woman’s murder into the nineteenth century’s profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel.

Kafka on the shore

Kafka on the shore

Babel

R.F. Kuang · 2022

Madonna in a Fur Coat

Sabahattin Ali · 2020

Othello

William Shakespeare • 2015

The Vegetarian A Novel

Han Kang • 2016

<b>FROM HAN KANG, WINNER OF THE 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE</b><br><br><b>“[Han Kang’s] intense poetic prose . . . exposes the fragility of human life.”—The Nobel Committee for Literature, in the citation for the Nobel Prize</b><br><br><b><i>A NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER</b><br><b>WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE </b><br><b>ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY<br>A <i>KIRKUS REVIEWS </i>BEST FICTION BOOK OF THE CENTURY</b><br><br><b>“Ferocious.”—<i>The New York Times Book Review</i> (Ten Best Books of the Year)</b><br><b>“Both terrifying and terrific.”—Lauren Groff</b><br><b>“Provocative [and] shocking.”—<i>The Washington Post</i></b><br><br>Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself. <br><br>Celebrated by critics around the world, <i>The Vegetarian</i> is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.<br><b><br>A Best Book of the Year: <i>BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, Wall Street Journal, Time, Elle, The Economist, HuffPost, Slate, Bustle, The St. Louis Dispatch, Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly</i></b>

Strange Houses: A Novel

Strange Houses: A Novel

Dead Poets Society

N. H. Kleinbaum • 2006

Hunger

Choi Jin-young • 2025

Strangers on a Pier: Portrait of a Family

Strangers on a Pier: Portrait of a Family

Tuesdays with Morrie

Mitch Albom · 2002

Yellowface

Yellowface

No Longer Human

Osamu Dazai · 1958

<p> Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being. </p><p>Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. His attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a "clown" to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness.</p><p>Still one of the ten bestselling books in Japan, No Longer Human is an important and unforgettable modern classic: "The struggle of the individual to fit into a normalizing society remains just as relevant today as it was at the time of writing." (The Japan Times)</p>

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>

Pride and Prejudice (Penguin Classics)

Jane Austen · 2002

All the Lovers in the Night

Mieko Kawakami • 2022

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine: A Novel

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine: A Novel

Grief is the Thing with Feathers

Grief is the Thing with Feathers

Shy: A Novel

Shy: A Novel

Before Your Memory Fades

Toshikazu Kawaguchi • 2022

Almond

Won-pyung Sohn • 2020

More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

Satoshi Yagisawa • 2024

Convenience Store Woman

Sayaka Murata • 2019

Before the Coffee Gets Cold Tales from the Cafe

Toshikazu Kawaguchi • 2020

If Cats Disappeared From The World

If Cats Disappeared From The World

Katabasis: A Novel

Katabasis: A Novel

The Goldfinch

The Goldfinch

War And Peace

Leo Tolstoy • 2009

20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

Xiaolu Guo • 2021

Kitchen

Banana Yoshimoto • 2015

The Alchemist 25th Anniversary Edition

Paulo Coelho • 2014

Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory Stories

Raphael Bob-Waksberg • 2020