Shelfology Book Pairing

by Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac's groundbreaking novel soon to be a major motion picture with a star-studded cast. In what is sure to be one of the major cinematic events of 2012, Jack Kerouac's legendary Beat classic, "On the Road," will finally hit the big screen. Directed by Walter Salles ("The Motorcycle Diaries"; "Paris, Je T'Aime") and with a cast of some of Hollywood's biggest stars, including Kristen Stewart (The Twilight Saga), Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams ("Julie & Julia," "The Fighter"), Tom Sturridge, and Viggo Mortensen (the Lord of the Rings trilogy, "The Road"), the film will attract new fans who will be inspired by Kerouac's revolutionary masterwork.

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky give us a brilliantly faithful rendition of this classic novel, in all its tragedy and tormented comedy. In this second edition, they have updated their translation in honor of the 200th anniversary of Dostoevsky’s birth. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator of Dostoevsky's most revolutionary novel is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In full retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man’s essentially irrational nature.