BooksList.Best
Search

Letters of a Portuguese Nun: Uncovering the Mystery Behind a 17th Century Forbidden Love

10 best books like Letters of a Portuguese Nun: Uncovering the Mystery Behind a 17th Century Forbidden Love (Myriam Cyr): The True History of Paradise, Behind Rebel Lines, The Second Common Reader, The Possibility of Everything, Monsieur Proust's Library, The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography, One More Theory About Happiness: A Memoir, Proust's Overcoat: The True Story of One Man's Passion for All Things Proust, The Proust Project, Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature

The True History of Paradise
AuthorMargaret Cezair-Thompson
ISBN0452280753
It is Easter 1981, and Jamaica is in a state of emergency: There is violence in the streets and police checkpoints are everywhere. Island dwellers for centuries, the Landing family has gathered to bury one of its own. Staring at the closed coffin of Lana Ramcharan, her mother and sister confront the cruelest...
Behind Rebel Lines
AuthorSeymour Reit
ISBN0152164278
In 1861, when war erupted between the States, President Lincoln made an impassioned plea for volunteers. Determined not to remain on the sidelines, Emma Edmonds cropped her hair, donned men’s clothing, and enlisted in the Union Army. Posing in turn as a slave, peddler, washerwoman, and fop, Emma...
The Second Common Reader
AuthorVirginia Woolf
ISBN0156028166
3.5 stars

Last year I came across The Common Reader Vol. I at a Kinokuniya Bookstore in Bangkok and ordered Vol. II immediately. In fact, these famed two volumes have been published in various editions since 1932 and I've tried to buy them for a long time. Enticed by the simple title, I've since...
The Possibility of Everything
AuthorHope Edelman
ISBN0345506502
From the bestselling author of Motherless Daughters, here is the real-life story of one woman's search for a cure to her family's escalating troubles, and the leap of faith that took her on a journey to an exotic place and a new state of mind.

In the autumn of 2000, Hope Edelman was a woman adrift,...
Monsieur Proust's Library
AuthorAnka Muhlstein
ISBN1590515668
Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometimes seems he was unable to create a fictional personage without a book in hand. Two hundred of his creatures inhabit his fictional world, and sixty writers hover over them. These writers--among them various classical authors of the seventeenth...
The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography
AuthorA.J.A. Symons
ISBN0940322617
One day in 1925 a friend asked A. J. A. Symons if he had read Fr. Rolfe's Hadrian the Seventh. He hadn't, but soon did, and found himself entranced by the novel -- "a masterpiece"-- and no less fascinated by the mysterious person of its all-but-forgotten creator. The Quest for Corvo is a hilarious and heartbreaking...
One More Theory About Happiness: A Memoir
AuthorPaul Guest
ISBN0061685178
Paul Guest was a normal 12-year-old, fascinated with the old firecrackers his grandfather kept in a jar. He'd break them up and set fire to the rupture, creating showers of sparks. The day after he graduated from grade school, he borrowed a bicycle, lost control, and flipped it. Lying on the ground, unable...
Proust's Overcoat: The True Story of One Man's Passion for All Things Proust
AuthorLorenza Foschini
ISBN0061965677
Jacques Guérin was a prominent businessman at the head of his family's successful perfume company, but his real passion was for rare books and literary manuscripts. From the time he was a young man, he frequented the antiquarian bookshops of Paris in search of lost, forgotten treasures. The ultimate...
The Proust Project
AuthorAndré Aciman
Discovering Proust is like wandering through a totally unfamiliar land and finding it peopled with kindred spirits and sister souls and fellow countrymen . . . They speak our language, our dialect, share our blind-spots and are awkward in exactly the same way we are, just as their manner of lacing every...
Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature
AuthorElizabeth Hardwick
ISBN0940322781
The novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick is one of contemporary America's most brilliant writers, and Seduction and Betrayal, in which she considers the careers of women writers as well as the larger question of the presence of women in literature, is her most passionate and concentrated work...
The Paris Review Interviews, III
AuthorThe Paris Review
"I have all the copies of The Paris Review and like the interviews very much. They will make a good book when collected and that will be very good for the Review."--Ernest Hemingway

Since The Paris Review was founded in 1953, it has given us invaluable conversations with the greatest writers...
Homer's the Iliad and the Odyssey: A Biography
AuthorAlberto Manguel
ISBN0871139766
No one knows if there was a man named Homer, but there is no little doubt that the epic poems assembled under his name form the cornerstone of Western literature. The Iliad and The Odyssey, with their incomparable tales of the Trojan War, brace Achilles, Ulysses and Penelope, the Cyclops, the beautiful...
Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave
AuthorJennifer Fleischner
ISBN0767902580
A vibrant social history set against the backdrop of the Antebellum south and the Civil War that recreates the lives and friendship of two exceptional women: First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln and her mulatto dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckly.

I consider you my best living friend, Mary Lincoln wrote...
Vanity Fair's Tales of Hollywood: Rebels, Reds, and Graduates and the Wild Stories Behind theMaking of 13 Iconic Films
AuthorGraydon Carter
ISBN0143114719
The stories behind the stories of some of Hollywood's most iconic movies

The magazine world 's monthly arbiter of culture, personality, and world affairs, Vanity Fair has always offered the definitive insider's look at Hollywood power and glamour since its relaunch twenty-five years ago....
A Plea for Eros: Essays
AuthorSiri Hustvedt
ISBN0312425538
From the author of the international bestseller What I Loved, a provocative collection of autobiographical and critical essays about writing and writers.

Whether her subject is growing up in Minnesota, cross-dressing, or the novel, Hustvedt's nonfiction, like her fiction, defies easy...
Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel
AuthorFrancine Klagsbrun
ISBN0805242376
The definitive biography of Golda Meir: the iron-willed leader, chain-smoking political operative, and tea-and-cake-serving grandmother who became the fourth prime minister of Israel and one of the most notable women of our time.
Golda Meir was a world figure unlike any other. Born in czarist...
The Life and Times of Pancho Villa
AuthorFriedrich Katz
ISBN0804730466
Alongside Moctezuma and Benito Juárez, Pancho Villa is probably the best-known figure in Mexican history. Villa legends pervade not only Mexico but the United States and beyond, existing not only in the popular mind and tradition but in ballads and movies. There are legends of Villa the Robin Hood,...
A Thoroughly Modern Princess
AuthorWendy Markham
ISBN0380820544
Love Can Be a Royal Pain!

A most impetuous princess, Her Highness, Emmaline of Verdunia, would have wed her suitable prince and been done with it -- if she hadn't been swept off her feet by Granger Lockwood IV, "America's Sexiest Single Man." Their one brief dalliance was indeed magical -- but...
Children's Literature: A Very Short Introduction
AuthorKimberley Reynolds
ISBN0199560242
This Very Short Introduction provides a lively and comprehensive discussion of children's literature--what it is, why it is interesting, how it contributes to culture, and how it is studied as literature. Reynolds provides a general overview of the history of the subject as it has developed in English,...
Black Belt Librarians: Every Librarian's Real World Guide to a Safer Workplace
AuthorWarren Graham
ISBN1599480271
Since this book is so short, I kept a running tab of comments as they occurred to me. This is what I came up with, and the accompanying page numbers:

2: Why the alphabet is in alphabetical order is not a stupid question. For that matter, if there is any profession where the idea of a stupid question...
U and I
AuthorNicholson Baker
ISBN0679735755
Pleasingly bizarre idea for a book, as Baker uses Barthelme's death as an excuse to spiral into an essay on his obsession with John Updike (a writer, as Baker points out, that I would NEVER have connected with Baker), who was still alive. The gimmick, and one I quite like, is that Baker deals with the influence...
Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America
AuthorKali Nicole Gross
ISBN0190241217
Shortly after a dismembered torso was discovered by a pond outside Philadelphia in 1887, investigators homed in on two suspects: Hannah Mary Tabbs, a married, working class, black woman, and George Wilson, a former neighbor that Tabbs implicated after her arrest.

As details surrounding...
The Gardens of the Dead
AuthorWilliam Brodrick
ISBN0670034983
A gripping new tale of intrigue from a “John le Carré in the making” (Daily Telegraph, London)

William Brodrick’s extraordinary new thriller, like its predecessor The Sixth Lamentation, focuses again on Father Anselm, a barrister turned monk who finds himself at the center of a mystery...
The Fugitive Wife
AuthorPeter C. Brown
ISBN0393329755
The year is 1900 in gold-prospecting Alaska. Essie, a Midwestern farm girl fleeing from a stormy marriage, joins up with prospectors bound for Nome, where the golden sands teem with dreamers, schemers, and high rollers. When Leonard, Essie's stubborn and volatile husband, travels north, astonishing...
Leaving Home
AuthorAnita Brookner
ISBN1400095654
At twenty-six, Emma Roberts comes to the painful realization that if she is ever to become truly independent, she must leave her comfortable London flat and venture into the wider world. This entails not only breaking free from a claustrophobic relationship with her mother, but also shedding her inherited...
About
Feedback
© BooksList.Best 2024