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Book List - books to die for

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Generic Profile avatar books to die for books to read before you die Edit
List created by Daniel B. (bd1345) on Nov 8, 2011
List Votes: 1 Books: 54 Contributors: 1 Watchers: 0 List Type: Open
1
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Better in the Dark (St. Germain, Bk 8) by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Here at last is a long-hinted-at chapter in the undead existence of the immortal Count Saint-Germain: the story of Ranegonda of Saxony, one of the three great loves of Saint-Germian's life. 937 A.D. The Saxon fortress of Leosan is under the almost unheard-of rule of a woman. The Gerefa...  more

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2
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Writ In Blood (St. Germain) by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Ambitious in its scope and provocative in its content, the saga of the undying Count Saint-Germain is a monumental feat of the imagination.Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's novels have powerfully captured Saint-Germain throughout his long existence, from the temples of Ancient Egypt to our present...  more

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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Mansions of Darkness (Saint-Germain, Bk 9) by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Ambitious in its scope and provocative in its content, the saga of Count Saint-Germain is a monumental feat of the imagination. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's powerful and evocative novels have captured Saint-Germain throughout his long existence, from the temples of ancient Eygpt to our present...  more

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4
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
The Palace (Saint Germain, Bk 2) by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
They say his palazzo is to be a magnificent work of art-a dazzling edifice to rival the most opulent in the city. Its owner is a stranger to Florence, a wealthy foreigner who dresses in black silk and practices the age-old secrets of alchemy. But the man who calls himself Francesco Ragoczy da...  more

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5
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Communion Blood (Saint-Germain, Bk 12) by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Olivia Atta Clemens, Saint-Germain's love from the days of Imperial Rome, has died the True Death and left her lavish estates to her servant, Niklos Aurilios, but they have been claimed by a young noble who says he is the long-lost son of Olivia's dead husband. Saint-Germain may not be...  more

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6
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
In the Face of Death (Count Saint-Germain series) by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
This erotic and historical vampire novel is set in America in the years before and during the Civil War and features Madelaine de Montalia, sometime lover of Count St. Germain; General William Tecumseh Sherman; and, in a supporting role, St. Germain himself. Madelaine lives with and studies the...  more

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7
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Czeslaw Milosz - The Collected Poems by Czeslaw Milosz
The Collected Poems (1931-1987) of Czeslaw Milosz is a gathering, in English Translation, of more than fifty years of work by one of this century's most remarkable poets. It includes volumes previously translated into English, generous new selections of work from all periods of Milosz's...  more

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8
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
The Captive Mind (Vintage International) by Czeslaw Milosz
The best known prose work by the winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature examines the moral and intellectual conflicts faced by men and women living under totalitarianism of the left or right.

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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Bells in Winter by Czeslaw Milosz
A selection of insightful and moving poems examines self, history, and the human character through the expression and translation of personal as well as historical experience. 

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10
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Madwomen: The "Locas mujeres" Poems of Gabriela Mistral, a Bilingual Edition by Gabri...
A schoolteacher whose poetry catapulted her to early fame in her native Chile and an international diplomat whose boundary-defying sexuality still challenges scholars, Gabriela Mistral (1889?1957) is one of the most important and enigmatic figures in Latin American literature of the last...  more

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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Gabriela Mistral: poesía by Gabriela Mistral
No description available.

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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Tala by Gabriela Mistral
No description available.

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Daniel B. (bd1345)
A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral by Licia Fiol-Matta
Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was a poetic idol for generations of Latin Americans who viewed her as Womanhood incarnate, the national schoolteacher-mother. How this distinctly masculine woman who never gave birth...  more

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14
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Ain't I a Woman! A Book of Women's Poetry from Around the World by Illona Linthwaite
Spanning the centuries from Sappho's Greece to tenth-century Japan, from nineteenth-century Chile to Zindziswa Mandela's twentieth-century South Africa, the voices of these women poets express themes of love, injustice, motherhood, and loss, and the oppressions of race and sex. The sequence of...  more

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Daniel B. (bd1345)
A Quiet Life by Kenzaburo Oe & Kunioki Yanagishita (Translator) & William Wet...
Kenzaburo Oe is one of the most original and important writers of our time, and nowhere is his genius more evident than in his mastery of the Japanese "I"-novel -- that uncanny blend of the real with the imagined, memoir with fiction, the reconstruction of history with the evocation of the inner...  more

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16
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
The Silent Cry: A Novel (Japanese for Busy People) by Kenzaburo Oe
The Silent Cry traces the uneasy relationship between two brothers who return to their ancestral home, a village in densely forested western Japan. While one brother tries to sort out the after-effects of a friend's suicide and the birth of a retarded son, the other embarks on a quixotic mission...  more

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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! by Kenzaburo Oe
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! is a virtuoso novel from one of today’s finest authors. K is a famous writer living in Tokyo with his wife and three children, one of whom is mentally disabled. This child, Eeyore, has been doing disturbing things—behaving aggressively, asserting...  more

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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Lars Gyllensten (World Authors) by Hans Isaksson
No description available.

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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
The epic novel of man and nature that won its author the Nobel Prize in Literature—the first new English translation since the novel's original publication ninety years ago When it was first published in 1917, Growth of the Soil was immediately recognized as a masterpiece. Ninety years...  more

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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Mysteries by Knut Hamsun
In a small Norwegian coastal town, society's carefully woven threads begin to unravel when an unsettling stranger named Johan Nagel arrives. With an unsparing and often brutal insight into human nature, Nagel draws out the seemingly innocent townsfolk, exposing their darkest instincts and...  more

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21
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Hunger by Knut Hamsun
Knut Hamsun believed that modern literature should express the complexity of the human mind, nowhere is that philosophy more evident than in this stunning modern masterpiece, "Hunger". It tells the story of an unnamed vagrant who stumbles around the streets of Norway's capital looking for food....  more

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22
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass & Ralph Manheim (Translator)
Acclaimed as the greatest German novel written since the end of World War II, The Tin Drum is the autobiography of thirty-year-old Oskar Matzerath, who has lived through the long Nazi nightmare and who, as the novel begins, is being held in a mental institution. Willfully stunting his growth at...  more

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23
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Cat and Mouse by Gunter Grass
The setting is Danzig during World War II. The narrator recalls a boyhood scene in which a black cat pounces on his friend Mahlke’s “mouse”-his prominent Adam’s apple. This incident sets off a wild series of events that ultimately leads to Mahlke’s becoming a...  more

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24
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
The Flounder (Helen Kurt Wolff Book) by Gunter Grass
It all begins in the Stone Age, when a talking fish is caught by a fisherman at the very spot where millennia later Grass's home town, Danzig, will arise. Like the fish, the fisherman is immortal, and down through the ages they move together. As Grass blends his ingredients into a powerful brew,...  more

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25
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
The Rat by Gunter Grass
A female rat engages the narrator in a series of dialogues-convincingly demonstrating to him that the rats will inherit a devastated earth. Dreams alternate with reality in this story within a story within a story. Translated by Ralph Manheim. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

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26
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
In the novel, Siddhartha, a young man, leaves his family for a contemplative life, then, restless, discards it for one of the flesh. He conceives a son, but bored and sickened by lust and greed, moves on again. Near despair, Sidddhartha comes to a river where he hears a unique sound. This sound...  more

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27
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse
Nobel Prize-winner Hermann Hess was one of the most daring innovators in modern fiction. Writing in the existential tradition of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, he was one of the first novelists to make use of the discoveries of Sigmund Freud. To these he added his own far-reaching speculations on the...  more

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28
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Narcissus and Goldmund by Herman Hesse
Hesse's novel of two medieval men, one quietly content with his religion and monastic life, the other in fervent search of more worldly salvation. This conflict between flesh and spirit, between emotional and contemplative man, was a life study for Hesse. It is a theme that transcends all time.

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29
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
The Plague by Albert Camus & Stuart Gilbert (Translator)
A haunting tale of human resilience in the face of unrelieved horror, Camus' novel about a bubonic plague ravaging the people of a North African coastal town is a classic of twentieth-century literature.

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30
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
The Stranger by Albert Camus & Stuart Gilbert (Translator)
Thirty years after its original publication, THE STRANGER remains among the most influential books of our time. A terrifying picture of a man victimized by life itself -- he is a faceless man, who has committed a pointless murder -- it is a book whose unrelenting grip upon our consciousness has...  more

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Daniel B. (bd1345)
The Fall by Albert Camus
No description available.

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32
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller
Deep in the Utah desert, Brother Francis of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz has miraculously discovered the relics of the martyr Isaac Leibowitz himself, including the blessed blueprint and the sacred shopping list. They may provide a ray of hope in a terrifying age of darkness, a time of...  more

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33
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman by Walter Miller
It has been nearly forty years since Walter M. Miller, Jr., shocked and dazzled readers with his provocative bestseller and enduring classic, A Canticle for Leibowitz.  Now, in one of the most eagerly awaited publishing events of our time, here is Miller's masterpiece, an epic...  more

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34
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
The Ship of Ishtar by A. Merritt
Ship of Love Ship of Doom The goddess of love and beauth was adrift on an enchanted ocean in a magic world. the myriad forces of sananic evil plagued the vessel of the red-haired, pasionate goddess. only one man, John Kenton, the american adventurer, could save Istar's priestess from the...  more

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35
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Dwellers in the Mirage by A. Merritt
Leif Langdon was suddenly ripped from the 20th century and plunged into the ancient world of the Mirage. But his entrance into this awesome land awakened the slumbering Dwayanu, who in this strange incarnation was also Leif. Thus, two-men-in-one battle with the beautiful witch-woman Lur and the...  more

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36
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
The Face in the Abyss by A. Merritt
Transporting the reader into a unique world of fantastic adventure and cosmic wonders, A. Merritt draws upon the legend of Atlantis and its lost colonies and brings his hero face to face with a land where surviving fragments of this prehistoric world remain. Searching for treasure, Graydon...  more

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37
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
1984 by George Orwell
1984 has come and gone, but George Orwell's prophetic, nightmarish vision in 1949 of the world we were becoming is timelier than ever. 1984 is still the great modern classic of "Negative Utopia"--a startlingly original and haunting novel that creates an imaginary world that is...  more

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38
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Animal Farm by George Orwell
A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned--a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that...  more

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39
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy
Dr. Tom More has created a stethoscope of the human spirit. With it, he embarks on an unforgettable odyssey to cure mankind's spiritual flu. This novel confronts both the value of life and its susceptibility to chance and ruin.

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40
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
A Far Rockaway of the Heart (New Directions Paperbook) by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"A Far Rockaway of the Heart" is Ferlinghetti's sequel to "A Coney Island of the Mind," written forty years afterwards in what the author has called "a poetry seizure" that lasted more than a year. A sequence of one hundred and one poems with recurrent themes, it includes various sections on...  more

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41
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Daphne du Maurier's Classics of the Macabre by Daphne du Maurier & Michael Forema...
Six masterpieces of imagination, illustrated in glowing color by prize-winning artist Michael Foreman.  Don't Look Now, a classic story of the macabre, opens up the collection, followed by The Apple Tree, The Blue Lenses, The Birds, The Alibi, and Not After Midnight. These...  more

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42
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
"Last Night I Dreamt I Went To Manderley Again." So the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter remembered the chilling events that led her down the turning drive past the beeches, white and naked, to the isolated gray stone manse on the windswept Cornish coast. With a husband she barely knew,...  more

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43
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas
The story of the soldier who gambled for Christ's robe and won a new life. In the autumn of 1940 a saleswoman in an Ohio department store wrote to Lloyd C. Douglas inquiring whether anyone knew what became of the robe that the Roman soldiers gambled for while its owner was dying on a cross....  more

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44
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Magnificent Obsession by Lloyd C Douglas
A surgeon ... and his soul This celebrated novel is the story of Bobby Merrick, a spoiled and very rich young man who learned a magnificent secret through a tragic accident. His secret led him from a life of futility to greatness as a brain surgeon. And it led him, too, from loneliness to...  more

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45
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
The Big Fisherman by Lloyd C. Douglas
The dramatic story of Simon Peter, is set on the shores of Galilee, the crossroads of the world - a polyglot world of quarreling, scheming peoples and warring then as they are today. Lloyd C. Douglas has taken his characters from this world: Simon, the Big Fisherman, two fisted and profane,...  more

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46
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
The Words: The Autobiography of Jean Paul Sartre by Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre's famous autobiography of his first ten years has been widely compared to Rousseau's Confessions. Written when he was fifty-nine years old, The Words is a masterpiece of self-analysis. Sartre the philosopher, novelist and playwright brings to his own childhood the same rigor of...  more

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47
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Jean Paul Sartres No Exit and the Flies by Jean-Paul Sartre
No description available.

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48
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
SAINT GENET by Jean-Paul Sartre
No description available.

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49
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Treasures of the Night: The Collected Poems of Jean Genet by Jean Genet
No description available.

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50
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
The Thief's Journal by Jean Genet & Bernard Frechtman (Translator)
The Thief's Journal is perhaps Jean Genet's most authentically autobiographical novel, personifying his quest for spiritual glory through the pursuit of evil. Writing in the intensely lyrical prose style that is his trademark, the man Jean Cocteau dubbed France's "Black...  more

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51
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Prisoner of Love by Jean Genet
his last book, tr Barbara Bray, intro Edmund White

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52
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Our Lady Of The Flowers by Jean Genet
Jean Genet's seminal Our Lady Of The Flowers (1943) is generally considered to be his finest fictional work. The first draft was written while Genet was incarcerated in a French prison; when the manuscript was discovered and destroyed by officials, Genet, still a prisoner, immediately set about...  more

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53
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
The Not So Little Book of Dung by Caroline Holmes
What goes in, must come out, and as soon as humans ceased to be hunter-gatherers and settled with their families and livestock into static communities, both ends needed sustainable attention. Dung from an array of sources - man, horse, blackbird, pigeon and the Beast of Paeonia - has fuelled...  more

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54
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Daniel B. (bd1345)
Anais Nin: A Biography by Deirdre Bair
The first biography of the famous diarist written with exclusive access to her complete, original diary and with the full cooperation of her family traces her infamous erotic exploits among the intellectual elite.

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Comment added 11/8/11 by Daniel B. (bd1345):
some great reads world shaking books