11 minute read
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 14, ARMENPRESS."Armenpress" News Agency's "Bestsellers List" hosted two new "guests" this week. “Gerezmania” by poet Hovhannes Grigoryan tops this week’s "Bestseller Books List" introduced by "Armenpress" News Agency.
"The Great Gatsby" by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald appeared in the second position. The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel written by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald that follows a cast of characters living in the fictional town of West Egg on prosperous Long Island in the summer of 1922. The story primarily concerns the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his quixotic passion for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan. Considered to be Fitzgerald's magnum opus, The Great Gatsby explores themes of decadence, idealism, resistance to change, social upheaval, and excess, creating a portrait of the Jazz Age that has been described as a cautionary tale regarding the American Dream.
First published by Scribner's in April 1925, The Great Gatsby received mixed reviews and sold poorly; in its first year, the book only sold 20,000 copies. Fitzgerald died in 1940. His work, spearheaded by The Great Gatsby, experienced a revival during World War II, and the novel became a part of high school curriculum in the following decades. The book has remained popular since, leading to numerous stage and film adaptations. The Great Gatsby is widely considered to be a literary classic and a contender for the title "Great American Novel". The book is consistently ranked among the greatest works of American literature.
"King Arshak,Eunuch Drastamat" by late Armenian author Levon Khechoyan occupies the third position. The Armenian novelist and short story writer, was born in 1955 in the village of Baralet in the Akhalkalack region of Georgia and since 1987lived in the town of Hrazdan in the Kotayk province of Armenia.
In 1983 he graduated from the Armenian Pedagogical Institute receiving an M.A. in philology. Although he started writing as a teenager, his first works were not published until 1988 in local periodicals. His first collection of short stories,Trees of Incense, was published in 1991. Many of his short stories have been translated into Russian and Ukrainian. By 1994 his works periodically appeared in a Moscow-based literary weekly, “Literaturnaya Gazeta” and in literary magazines “Druzhba Narodov”, “Grani” and “Lepta”.
''The Book of Lamentations'' by St. Gregory of Narek occupies the fourth position of the list. As far as the pearl of the medieval Armenian literature, which is also known to the public as "Narek" for short, is much in demand in Armenia, "Zangak" printing house introduced the new publication of the book, which appeared in the first horizontal of the list. The mystical poem "Book of Lamentations" has been translated into many languages and has played a significant role in the development of the Armenian literary language. In 95 grace-filled prayers St. Gregory draws on the exquisite potential of the Classical Armenian language to translate the pure sighs of the broken and contrite heart into an offering of words pleasing to God. The result is an edifice of faith for the ages, unique in Christian literature for its rich imagery, its subtle theology, its Biblical erudition, and the sincere immediacy of its communication with God. This masterpiece by St. Gregory of Narek has always been included in our bestseller books list.
"Memories of My Melancholy Whores" by Columbian author Gabriel García Márquez is on the fifth horizontal. The book was translated into Armenian from the Russian version by Hovhannes Ayvazyan in 2010. "Memories of My Melancholy Whores" is dedicated to the love affairs of an old journalist, who falls in love with a young girl.
“From a New Line” by Hovhannes Grigoryan occupies the sixth position. The book was published by “Antares” Publishing House.
"The Trial" by Franz Kafka occupies the seventh place. The Trial (original German title: Der Process, later Der Prozess, Der Proceß and Der Prozeß) is a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915 but not published until 1925. One of Kafka's best-known works, it tells the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed to neither him nor the reader.
Like Kafka's other novels, The Trial was never completed, although it does include a chapter which brings the story to an end. Because of this, there are some inconsistencies and discontinuities in narration within the novel, such as disparities in timing.
After Kafka's death in 1924 his friend and literary executor Max Brod edited the text for publication by Verlag Die Schmiede. The original manuscript is held at the Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am Neckar, Germany. In 1999, the book was listed in Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century and as No. 2 of the Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century.
"Animal Farm" by George Orwell occupies the 8th position. Animal Farm is an allegorical and dystopian novel, published in Englandon 17 August 1945. According to Orwell, the book reflects events leading up to theRussian Revolution of 1917 and then on into the Stalin era in the Soviet Union. Orwell, ademocratic socialist, was an outspoken critic of Joseph Stalin and, especially after experiences with the NKVD and the Spanish Civil War, he was actively opposed to the controversial ideology of Stalinism. The Soviet Union, he believed, had become a brutaldictatorship, built upon a cult of personality and enforced by a reign of terror. In a letter to Yvonne Davet, Orwell described Animal Farm as a satirical tale against Stalin "un conte satirique contre Staline", and in his essay "Why I Write" (1946), he wrote that Animal Farm was the first book in which he had tried, with full consciousness of what he was doing, "to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole".
The original title was Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, though the subtitle was dropped by U.S. publishers for its 1946 publication and subsequently all but one of the translations during Orwell's lifetime omitted it. Other variations in the title include: A Satire and A Contemporary Satire. Orwell suggested the title Union des républiques socialistes animales for the French translation, which recalled the French name of the Soviet Union,Union des républiques socialistes soviétiques, and which abbreviates to URSA, the Latinfor "bear", a symbol of Russia.
"The Alchemist" novel by contemporary Brazilian author Paulo Coelho occupies the 9th position. This book has been translated into 67 languages and according to AFP, it has sold more than 30 million copies in 56 different languages, becoming one of the best-selling books in history and winning the Guinness World Record for most translated book by a living author. An allegorical novel, The Alchemist follows a young Andalusian shepherd named Santiago in his journey to Egypt, after having a recurring dream of finding treasure there. The Alchemist follows the journey of an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago. Santiago, believing a recurring dream to be prophetic, decides to travel to a Romani in a nearby town to discover its meaning. A gypsy woman tells him that there is a treasure in the Pyramids in Egypt.
Early into his journey, he meets an old king, Melchizedek, who tells him to sell his sheep to travel to Egypt and introduces the idea of a Personal Legend (which is always capitalized in the book). Your Personal Legend "is what you have always wanted to accomplish. Everyone, when they are young, knows what their Personal Legend is". He adds that "when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it". This is the core theme of the book.
And "The Picture of Dorian Gray" occupies the final position of our list.This is the only published novel by Oscar Wilde, appearing as the lead story in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine on 20 June 1890, printed as the July 1890 issue of this magazine. The magazine's editors feared the story was indecent as submitted, so they censored roughly 500 words, without Wilde's knowledge, before publication. But even with that, the story was still greeted with outrage by British reviewers, some of whom suggested that Wilde should be prosecuted on moral grounds, leading Wilde to defend the novel aggressively in letters to the British press. Wilde later revised the story for book publication, making substantial alterations, deleting controversial passages, adding new chapters and including an aphoristic Preface which has since become famous in its own right. The amended version was published by Ward, Lock and Company in April 1891. Some scholars believe that Wilde would today have wanted us to read the version he originally submitted to Lippincott's.
Completed by Roza Grigoryan