Evening Book
Group Recommendations for 2017
We Will Pick
10 Titles
Nonfiction:
A 2015 Stonewall
Honor Book A groundbreaking work of LGBT literature takes an honest look at the
life, love, and struggles of transgender teens. Author and photographer
Susan Kuklin met and interviewed six transgender or gender-neutral young adults
and used her considerable skills to represent them thoughtfully and
respectfully before, during, and after their personal acknowledgment of gender
preference. Portraits, family photographs, and candid images grace the pages,
augmenting the emotional and physical journey each youth has taken. Each honest
discussion and disclosure, whether joyful or heartbreaking, is completely
different from the other because of family dynamics, living situations, gender,
and the transition these teens make in recognition of their true selves.
Elizabeth Kolbert's environmental classic Field Notes
from a Catastrophe first developed out of a groundbreaking, National
Magazine Award-winning three-part series in The New Yorker. She
expanded it into a still-concise yet richly researched and damning book about
climate change: a primer on the greatest challenge facing the world today. But
in the years since, the story has continued to develop; the situation has
become more dire, even as our understanding grows. Now, Kolbert returns to the
defining book of her career. She'll add a chapter bringing things up-to-date on
the existing text, plus she'll add three new chapters--on ocean acidification,
the tar sands, and a Danish town that's gone carbon neutral--making it, again,
a must-read for our moment.
After
a close friend died of cancer, middle-aged, overweight, acrophobic newspaperman
Tom Ryan decided to pay tribute to her in a most unorthodox manner. Ryan and
his friend, miniature schnauzer Atticus M. Finch, would attempt to climb all
forty-eight of New Hampshire's four thousand- foot peaks twice in one winter
while raising money for charity. It was an adventure of a lifetime, leading
them across hundreds of miles and deep into an enchanting but dangerous winter
wonderland. At the heart of the amazing journey was the extraordinary
relationship they shared, one that blurred the line between man and dog. Following Atticus is
an unforgettable true saga of adventure, friendship, and the unlikeliest of
family, as one remarkable animal opens the eyes and heart of a tough-as-nails
newspaperman to the world's beauty and its possibilities.
The Feud: The Hatfields & McCoys: The True
Story
by Dean King p. 464 ISBN:978-0316167079 (2 recommendations)
More than a century after the violence ended,
the feud between the Hatfields and McCoys still evokes images of snaggletoothed
rustics with a gun in one hand and a jug of moonshine whiskey in the other. The
recent dramatized series on the History Channel attempted to present a more
realistic view while regenerating interest in the affair. King, who served as
an advisor on that series, goes much further in this well-written, superbly
researched, but depressingly grim chronicle. The two families lived in relative
harmony for generations astride the Tug River, which forms the current boundary
between Kentucky and West Virginia. The families traded with each other and
even intermarried. The roots of the conflict, according to King, are found in the
political and military tensions generated by the Civil War. After the war, the
tensions quickly escalated into violence, which intensified as economic
factors, family loyalty, and outside interference complicated matters. King
paints an unrelentingly sad portrait of families locked in a tragic struggle
from which even moderating members seemed unable to withdraw. This is an
outstanding reexamination of a mythic but all too real and savage story.
Cokie Roberts brings
to life the extraordinary accomplishments of women who laid the groundwork for
a better society. Recounted with insight and humor, and drawing on personal
correspondence, private journals, and other primary sources, many of them
previously unpublished, here are the fascinating and inspiring true stories of
first ladies and freethinkers, educators and explorers. Featuring an
exceptional group of women—including Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, Rebecca
Gratz, Louise Livingston, Sacagawea, and others—Ladies of Liberty sheds new light on the generation of
heroines, reformers, and visionaries who helped shape our nation, finally
giving these extraordinary ladies the recognition they so greatly deserve.
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER.
Fans of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train will thrill at “the
perfect page-turner to start your summer” (People, Book of the Week): Luckiest
Girl Alive—described by Reese Witherspoon as “one of those reads you just
can’t put down!” HER
PERFECT LIFE IS A PERFECT LIE. As a teenager at the prestigious Bradley School,
Ani FaNelli endured a shocking, public humiliation that left her desperate to
reinvent herself. Now, with a glamorous job, expensive wardrobe, and handsome
blue blood fiancé, she’s this close to living the perfect life she’s
worked so hard to achieve. But Ani has a secret. There’s something else buried
in her past that still haunts her, something private and painful that threatens
to bubble to the surface and destroy everything. With a singular voice and
twists you won’t see coming, Luckiest Girl Alive explores the unbearable
pressure that so many women feel to “have it all” and introduces a heroine
whose sharp edges and cutthroat ambition have been protecting a scandalous
truth, and a heart that's bigger than it first appears. The question remains:
will breaking her silence destroy all that she has worked for—or, will it at
long last, set Ani free?
Missoula, Montana, is a typical college town, home to a highly
regarded state university whose beloved football team inspires a passionately
loyal fan base. Between January 2008 and May 2012, hundreds of students
reported sexual assaults to the local police. Few of the cases were properly
handled by either the university or local authorities. In this, Missoula
is also typical. In these pages, acclaimed journalist Jon Krakauer investigates
a spate of campus rapes that occurred in Missoula over a four-year period.
Taking the town as a case study for a crime that is sadly prevalent throughout
the nation, Krakauer documents the experiences of five victims: their fear and
self-doubt in the aftermath; the skepticism directed at them by police,
prosecutors, and the public; their bravery in pushing forward and what it cost
them. These stories cut through abstract ideological debate about acquaintance
rape to demonstrate that it does not happen because women are sending mixed
signals or seeking attention. They are victims of a terrible crime, deserving
of fairness from our justice system. Rigorously researched, rendered in
incisive prose, Missoula stands as an essential call to
action.
A fascinating,
accessible introduction to Islam from the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Zealot INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A
finalist for the GuardianFirst Book Award In No god but God, internationally acclaimed scholar
Reza Aslan explains Islam—the origins and evolution of the faith—in all its
beauty and complexity. This
updated edition addresses the events of the past decade, analyzing how they
have influenced Islam’s position in modern culture. Aslan explores what the
popular demonstrations pushing for democracy in the Middle East mean for the
future of Islam in the region, how the Internet and social media have affected
Islam’s evolution, and how the war on terror has altered the geopolitical
balance of power in the Middle East. He also provides an update on the
contemporary Muslim women’s movement, a discussion of the controversy over
veiling in Europe, an in-depth history of Jihadism, and a look at how Muslims
living in North America and Europe are changing the face of Islam. Timely and
persuasive, No god but God is an elegantly written account that
explains this magnificent yet misunderstood faith.
Now a New York Times bestseller “This estimable book rides
into the summer doldrums like rural electrification. . . . It deals in the
truths that matter.”-–Dwight Garner, The New York Times “White Trash will change the way we think about our
past and present.” —T. J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Custer’s Trials In her groundbreaking history of the
class system in America, what the New York Times hails as "formidable and
truth-dealing,” Nancy Isenberg takes on our comforting myths about equality,
uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing––if
occasionally entertaining––poor white trash. “When you turn an election into
a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win,”
says Isenberg of the political climate surrounding Sarah Palin. And we
recognize how right she is today. Yet the voters boosting Trump have been a
permanent part of our American fabric, argues Isenberg. The wretched and landless poor have existed from the
time of the earliest British colonial settlement. They were alternately known
as “waste people,” “offals,” “rubbish,” “lazy lubbers,” and “crackers.” By the
1850s, the downtrodden included so-called “clay eaters” and “sandhillers,”
known for prematurely aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin,
ragged clothing, and listless minds. Surveying political rhetoric and
policy, popular literature and scientific theories over four hundred years,
Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free
society––where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility.
Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early
nineteenth century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues
nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white
trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics–-a widely
popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for
sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ’s Great
Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo andDuck Dynasty. Marginalized as a class, white
trash have always been at or near the center of major political debates over
the character of the American identity. We
acknowledge racial injustice as an ugly stain on our nation’s history. With
Isenberg’s landmark book, we will have to face the truth about the enduring,
malevolent nature of class as well.
In
1692, at the edge of the New England wilderness, an entire village went insane.
Everyone knows the story: The pre-teen daughters of the local minister are
mysteriously overcome by convulsions, their uncontrollable screaming sending
the superstitious community into fear and confusion. Lacking other explanations--adolescent
rebellion, maybe?--Satanic influence is suspected, and accusations of
witchcraft soon fly like enchanted broomsticks. The town is pitted against
itself, and by the time the hysteria fades, 19 men and women are hanged,
another pressed to death. But what actually happened? Pulitzer Prize-winner
Stacy Schiff's The Witches: Salem, 1692 steps back from more than three
centuries of hyperbole and supposition, giving us our most complete account
yet. It can't have been easy: As Schiff points out early in the book, the
Puritans of Salem village were often assiduous diarists and record-keepers, but
first-hand accounts of the months of the hysteria are mysteriously rare-and
those that exist are mainly unreliable. To construct her history, Schiff went through
the looking glass, compiling seemingly every fact available to create a
historically accurate narrative of events while placing it within the cultural
context of 17th century New England. The results are obvious: this book is
dense with facts and a large cast of characters, and readers must commit. But
Schiff keeps the proceedings rolling with wry humor and an eye for the
peculiar-yet-illuminating detail. This isn't The Crucible or Blair Witch; it's
light on sensationalism, but rife with real-life toil-and-trouble. The truth,
as always, is strange enough.
Poetry:
Robert Frost has
long dominated the public's image of New England poetry, but who are the poets
who follow him in time and how have they expressed their visions of the
landscape, the individual, and the community? This volume brings together the
work of thirty distinguished poets to convey the vitality and variety of the
region's poetic creation during much of the twentieth century. After Frost is published in association with the New England
Foundation for the Humanities, which has sponsored a program of reading and
discussion groups with poets across the region using this anthology. The works of
30 major New England poets of the 20th century published in conjunction with
the New England Foundation for the Humanities. Readings on cassette are
included.
Jane Kenyon is one of America's most prized contemporary poets.
Her previous collection, Otherwise: New and Selected Poems,
published just after her death in 1995, has been a favorite among readers, with
more than 80,000 copies in print, and is a contemporary classic. Collected
Poems assembles all of Kenyon's published poetry in one book. Included
here are the complete poems found in her four previous volumes―From Room to
Room, The Boat of Quiet Hours, Let Evening Come,
and Constance―as well as the poems that appear in her posthumous
volumes Otherwiseand A Hundred White Daffodils, four
poems never before published in book form, and her translations in Twenty
Poems of Anna Akhmatova.
When New and Selected Poems was
originally published in 1992, Mary Oliver was awarded the National Book Award.
In the fourteen years since its initial appearance it has become one of the
best-selling volumes of poetry in the country. This collection features thirty
poems published only in this volume as well as selections from the poet's first
eight books. Mary
Oliver's perceptive, brilliantly crafted poems about the natural landscape and
the fundamental questions of life and death have won high praise from critics
and readers alike. "Do you love this world?" she interrupts a poem
about peonies to ask the reader. "Do you cherish your humble and silky
life?" She makes us see the extraordinary in our everyday lives, how something
as common as light can be "an invitation/to happiness,/and that
happiness,/when it's done right,/is a kind of holiness,/palpable and
redemptive." She illuminates how a near miss with an alligator can be the
catalyst for seeing the world "as if for the second time/the way it really
is." Oliver's passionate demonstrations of delight are powerful reminders
of the bond between every individual, all living things, and the natural world. Winner of the
National Book Award for Poetry. Oliver, who also won the Pulitzer Prize, has
lived in New England for many years
Former poet laureate Donald Hall selects
the essential work from a moving and brilliant life in poetry. The ability to write poems has “abandoned”
Donald Hall, now in his eighties, one of the most significant — and
beloved — poets of his generation. Instead of creating new poems, he has looked
back over his astonishingly rich body of work and hand-picked poems for this
final, concise volume that will delight, and endure. The
Selected Poems of Donald Hall is the definitive collection, showcasing
poems rich with humor and eros and “a kind of simplicity that succeeds in
engaging the reader in the first few lines” (Billy Collins). “However
wrenching [Hall’s poems] may be from line to line, they tell a story that is
essentially reassuring: art and love are compatible, genius is companionable,
and people stand by one another in the end” (New York Times Book Review).
Biography/Memoir:
Blue Highways: A Journey Into America by William
Least Heat-Moon and William Least Heat Moon p.448 ISBN:
978-0316353298
First published in 1982, William Least
Heat-Moon's account of his journey along the back roads of the United States
(marked with the color blue on old highway maps) has become something of a
classic. When he loses his job and his wife on the same cold February day, he
is struck by inspiration: "A man who couldn't make things go right could at
least go. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life. Chuck routine.
Live the real jeopardy of circumstance. It was a question of dignity." Driving cross-country in a van named Ghost Dancing,
Heat-Moon (the name the Sioux give to the moon of midsummer nights) meets up
with all manner of folk, from a man in Grayville, Illinois, "whose cap
told me what fertilizer he used" to Scott Chisholm, "a Canadian
citizen ... [who] had lived in this country longer than in Canada and liked the
United States but wouldn't admit it for fear of having to pay off bets he made
years earlier when he first 'came over' that the U.S. is a place no Canadian
could ever love." Accompanied by his photographs, Heat-Moon's literary
portraits of ordinary Americans should not be merely read, but savored.
A gorgeous, moving memoir
of how one of America's most innovative and respected journalists found his
voice by coming to terms with a painful past New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow mines the
compelling poetry of the out-of-time African-American Louisiana town where
he grew up -- a place where slavery's legacy felt astonishingly close,
reverberating in the elders' stories and in the near-constant wash of violence. Blow's attachment to his
mother -- a fiercely driven woman with five sons, brass knuckles in her glove
box, a job plucking poultry at a nearby factory, a soon-to-be-ex husband, and a
love of newspapers and learning -- cannot protect him from secret abuse at the
hands of an older cousin. It's damage that triggers years of anger and searing
self-questioning. Finally, Blow escapes
to a nearby state university, where he joins a black fraternity after a passage
of brutal hazing, and then enters a world of racial and sexual privilege that
feels like everything he's ever needed and wanted, until he's called upon, himself,
to become the one perpetuating the shocking abuse. A powerfully redemptive memoir that both fits the
tradition of African-American storytelling from the South, and gives it an
indelible new slant.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST ONE OF THE BEST
BOOKS OF THE YEAR
The New York Times, Washington Post, The
San Francisco, Chronicle, Vogue, NPR, Publishers
Weekly, BookPage A revealing and beautifully
written memoir and family history from acclaimed photographer Sally Mann.
In this groundbreaking book, a unique interplay of narrative and image, Mann's
preoccupation with family, race, mortality, and the storied landscape of the
American South are revealed as almost genetically predetermined, written into
her DNA by the family history that precedes her. Sorting through boxes of
family papers and yellowed photographs she finds more than she bargained for:
"deceit and scandal, alcohol, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen,
clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land . . . racial
complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of the prodigal
son, and maybe even bloody murder." In lyrical prose and startlingly
revealing photographs, she crafts a totally original form of personal history
that has the page-turning drama of a great novel but is firmly rooted in the fertile
soil of her own life.
The
first Hispanic and third woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court,
Sonia Sotomayor has become an instant American icon. Now, with a candor and
intimacy never undertaken by a sitting Justice, she recounts her life from a
Bronx housing project to the federal bench, a journey that offers an inspiring
testament to her own extraordinary determination and the power of believing in
oneself. Here is the story of a precarious childhood, with an alcoholic father
(who would die when she was nine) and a devoted but overburdened mother, and of
the refuge a little girl took from the turmoil at home with her passionately
spirited paternal grandmother. But it was when she was diagnosed with juvenile
diabetes that the precocious Sonia recognized she must ultimately depend on
herself. She would learn to give herself the insulin shots she needed to
survive and soon imagined a path to a different life. With only television
characters for her professional role models, and little understanding of what
was involved, she determined to become a lawyer, a dream that would sustain her
on an unlikely course, from valedictorian of her high school class to the
highest honors at Princeton, Yale Law School, the New York County District
Attorney’s office, private practice, and appointment to the Federal District
Court before the age of forty. Along the way we see how she was shaped by her
invaluable mentors, a failed marriage, and the modern version of extended
family she has created from cherished friends and their children. Through her
still-astonished eyes, America’s infinite possibilities are envisioned anew in
this warm and honest book, destined to become a classic of self-invention and
self-discovery.
"I'm hardly the first person to notice
that there is only the present, constantly," writes Barton in this
extraordinary memoir. "The present moment is lived, and relieved; written,
and rewritten. Every previous version still inhabits it." What gives this
insight and the many others that follow uncommon power is the ever present fact
that Barton, a pioneering entrepreneur in the cable television industry, was
dying of stomach cancer as he wrote them. Alternating chapters with mystery
writer Shames (The Naked Detective), Barton, who died in September, 2002, at
51, offers us-and his wife and three children-his final rewrite of a life
filled with the optimism and idealism of his generation. Barton tells us how it
feels to die while the party is still raging, offering us glimpses of a life
that packed in everything from being a professional ski bum to working as an aide
to New York State governor Hugh Carey to huge success as a visionary
businessman (Barton helped found MTV, among other achievements). Readers will
be knocked out by his honesty and his utter lack of self-pity or
sentimentality. The "gift" of terminal cancer, according to Barton,
is that "it doesn't kill you all at once. It gives you time to set your
house in order.... It gives you time to think, to sum things up." Setting
his house in order included taking his family for a balloon ride at dawn.
Summing up what matters, he reminds us that it is the large and small moments
of pleasure and love, those very present moments, that redeem us in the end.
This is a very beautiful book about how to live.
Classics:
'The novel
has everything: an absorbing melodrama, with a supporting cast of heroes,
villains and eccentrics, set in a London where vast wealth and desperate
poverty live cheek-by-jowl' Jasper Rees, The Times When Nicholas
Nickleby is left penniless after his father's death, he appeals to his wealthy
uncle to help him find work and to protect his mother and sister. But Ralph
Nickleby proves both hard-hearted and unscrupulous, and Nicholas finds himself
forced to make his own way in the world. His adventures gave Dickens the
opportunity to portray an extraordinary gallery of rogues and eccentrics:
Wackford Squeers, the tyrannical headmaster of Dotheboys Hall, a school for
unwanted boys, the slow-witted orphan Smike, rescued by Nicholas, the
pretentious Mantalinis and the gloriously theatrical Mr and Mrs Crummels and
their daughter, the 'infant phenomenon'. Like many of Dickens's novels,
Nicholas Nickleby is characterised by his outrage at cruelty and social
injustice, but it is also a flamboyantly exuberant work, whose loose, haphazard
progress harks back to the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry
Fielding.
The
Old Man and the Sea,
an apparently simple fable, represents the mature Hemingway at his best. He was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature soon after its publication, and half a
century later it is still one of his most read books.
‘Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he
mad? And if not, is he a devil?’Set on the bleak moors of Yorkshire, Lockwood
is forced to seek shelter at Wuthering Heights, the home of his new landlord,
Heathcliff. The intense and wildly passionate Heathcliff tells the story of his
life, his all-consuming love for Catherine Earnshaw and the doomed outcome of
that relationship, leading to his revenge. Poetic, complex and grand in its scope,
Emily Brontë's masterpiece is considered one of the most unique gothic novels
of its time.
Graphic Novels:
2014 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST In her first
memoir, Roz Chast brings her signature wit to the topic of aging parents.
Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through four-color
cartoons, family photos, and documents, and a narrative as rife with laughs as
it is with tears, Chast's memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone
experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents. When it came to her
elderly mother and father, Roz held to the practices of denial, avoidance, and
distraction. But when Elizabeth Chast climbed a ladder to locate an old
souvenir from the "crazy closet"―with predictable results―the tools
that had served Roz well through her parents' seventies, eighties, and into
their early nineties could no longer be deployed.While the particulars are
Chast-ian in their idiosyncrasies―an anxious father who had relied heavily on
his wife for stability as he slipped into dementia and a former assistant
principal mother whose overbearing personality had sidelined Roz for
decades―the themes are universal: adult children accepting a parental role;
aging and unstable parents leaving a family home for an institution; dealing
with uncomfortable physical intimacies; managing logistics; and hiring
strangers to provide the most personal care.An amazing portrait of two lives at
their end and an only child coping as best she can, Can't We Talk about
Something More Pleasant will show the full range of Roz Chast's talent
as cartoonist and storyteller.
FEATURED ON MORE THAN TWENTY BEST-OF LISTS, INCLUDING TIME,
AMAZON, E! AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY! Hark! A Vagrant is an uproarious
romp through history and literature seen through the sharp, contemporary lens
of New Yorker cartoonist and comics sensation Kate Beaton. No
era or tome emerges unscathed as Beaton rightly skewers the Western world's
revolutionaries, leaders, sycophants, and suffragists while equally honing her
wit on the hapless heroes, heroines, and villains of the best-loved fiction.
She deftly points out what really happened when Brahms fell asleep listening to Liszt, that the world's first hipsters were obviously the Incroyables and the Merveilleuses from eighteenth-century France, that Susan B. Anthony is, of course, a "Samantha," and that the polite banality of Canadian culture never gets old. Hark! A Vagrant features sexy Batman, the true stories behind classic Nancy Drew covers, and Queen Elizabeth doing the albatross. As the 500,000 unique monthly visitors to harkavagrant.com already know, no one turns the ironic absurdities of history and literature into comedic fodder as hilariously as Beaton.
She deftly points out what really happened when Brahms fell asleep listening to Liszt, that the world's first hipsters were obviously the Incroyables and the Merveilleuses from eighteenth-century France, that Susan B. Anthony is, of course, a "Samantha," and that the polite banality of Canadian culture never gets old. Hark! A Vagrant features sexy Batman, the true stories behind classic Nancy Drew covers, and Queen Elizabeth doing the albatross. As the 500,000 unique monthly visitors to harkavagrant.com already know, no one turns the ironic absurdities of history and literature into comedic fodder as hilariously as Beaton.
A Vanity Fair Best Book of 2014. A Kirkus
Reviews Best Fiction Book of 2014 When three daunting dolls intersect
with one hapless heroine and a hard-boiled private eye, deception, betrayal,
and murder stalk every mean street in…Kill My Mother. Adding to a legendary career that includes a Pulitzer
Prize, an Academy Award, Obie Awards, and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the
National Cartoonist Society and the Writers Guild of America, Jules Feiffer now
presents his first noir graphic novel. Kill My Mother is a
loving homage to the pulp-inspired films and comic strips of his youth.
Channeling Eisner's The Spirit, along with the likes of Hammett,
Chandler, Cain, John Huston, and Billy Wilder, and spiced with the deft humor
for which Feiffer is renowned, Kill My Mother centers on five
formidable women from two unrelated families, linked fatefully and fatally by a
has-been, hard-drinking private detective. As our story begins, we meet Annie
Hannigan, an out-of-control teenager, jitterbugging in the 1930s. Annie dreams
of offing her mother, Elsie, whom she blames for abandoning her for a job soon
after her husband, a cop, is shot and killed. Now, employed by her husband’s
best friend―an over-the-hill and perpetually soused private eye―Elsie finds
herself covering up his missteps as she is drawn into a case of a mysterious
client, who leads her into a decade-long drama of deception and dual identities
sprawling from the Depression era to World War II Hollywood and the jungles of
the South Pacific. Along with three femme fatales, an obsessed daughter, and a
loner heroine, Kill My Mother features a fighter turned tap
dancer, a small-time thug who dreams of being a hit man, a name-dropping cab
driver, a communist liquor store owner, and a hunky movie star with a
mind-boggling secret. Culminating in a U.S.O. tour on a war-torn Pacific
island, this disparate band of old enemies congregate to settle scores. In a
drawing style derived from Steve Canyon and The Spirit,
Feiffer combines his long-honed skills as cartoonist, playwright, and
screenwriter to draw us into this seductively menacing world where streets are
black with soot and rain, and base motives and betrayal are served on the rocks
in bars unsafe to enter. Bluesy, fast-moving, and funny, Kill My Mother is
a trip to Hammett-Chandler-Cain Land: a noir-graphic novel like the movies
they don’t make anymore.
Fiction:
From internationally bestselling author Tracy Chevalier,
a riveting drama of a pioneer family on the American frontier 1838: James
and Sadie Goodenough have settled where their wagon got stuck – in the muddy,
stagnant swamps of northwest Ohio. They and their five children work
relentlessly to tame their patch of land, buying saplings from a local tree man
known as John Appleseed so they can cultivate the fifty apple trees required to
stake their claim on the property. But the orchard they plant sows the seeds of
a long battle. James loves the apples, reminders of an easier life back in
Connecticut; while Sadie prefers the applejack they make, an alcoholic refuge
from brutal frontier life. 1853: Their youngest child Robert is wandering
through Gold Rush California. Restless and haunted by the broken family he left
behind, he has made his way alone across the country. In the redwood and giant
sequoia groves he finds some solace, collecting seeds for a naturalist who
sells plants from the new world to the gardeners of England. But you can run
only so far, even in America, and when Robert’s past makes an unexpected
appearance he must decide whether to strike out again or stake his own claim to
a home at last. Chevalier tells a fierce, beautifully crafted story in At
the Edge of the Orchard, her most graceful and richly imagined work yet.
In her sweeping
debut novel, Elizabeth J. Church takes us from the World War II years in
Chicago to the vast sun-parched canyons of New Mexico in the 1970s as we follow
the journey of a driven, spirited young woman, Meridian Wallace, whose
scientific ambitions are subverted by the expectations of her era. In 1941, at seventeen
years old, Meridian begins her ornithology studies at the University of
Chicago. She is soon drawn to Alden Whetstone, a brilliant, complicated physics
professor who opens her eyes to the fundamentals and poetry of his field, the
beauty of motion, space and time, the delicate balance of force and energy that
allows a bird to fly. Entranced and in
love, Meridian defers her own career path and follows Alden west to Los Alamos,
where he is engaged in a secret government project (later known to be the atomic
bomb). In married life, though, she feels lost and left behind. She channels
her academic ambitions into studying a particular family of crows, whose free
life and companionship are the very things that seem beyond her reach. There in
her canyons, years later at the dawn of the 1970s, with counterculture youth
filling the streets and protests against the war rupturing college campuses
across the country, Meridian meets Clay, young geologist and veteran of the
Vietnam War, and together they seek ways to mend what the world has broken.
Exquisitely capturing the claustrophobic eras of
1940s and 1950s America, The
Atomic Weight of Love also
examines the changing roles of women during the decades that followed. And in
Meridian Wallace we find an unforgettable heroine whose metamorphosis shows how
the women’s movement opened up the world for a whole generation.
As Simon, a lonely research librarian, searches
frantically for the key to a curse that might be killing the women in his
family, he learns strange and fascinating secrets about their past. A tale full
of magic and family mystery that will
keep you up all night reading."―Isaac Fitzgerald, BuzzFeed Simon Watson, a
young librarian, lives alone in a house that is slowly crumbling toward the
Long Island Sound. His parents are long dead. His mother, a circus mermaid who
made her living by holding her breath, drowned in the very water his house
overlooks. His younger sister, Enola, ran off six years ago and now reads tarot
cards for a traveling carnival. One June day, an old book arrives on Simon's
doorstep, sent by an antiquarian bookseller who purchased it on speculation.
Fragile and water damaged, the book is a log from the owner of a traveling
carnival in the 1700s, who reports strange and magical things, including the
drowning death of a circus mermaid. Since then, generations of
"mermaids" in Simon's family have drowned--always on July 24, which
is only weeks away. As his friend Alice looks on with alarm, Simon becomes
increasingly worried about his sister. Could there be a curse on Simon's
family? What does it have to do with the book, and can he get to the heart of
the mystery in time to save Enola? In the tradition of Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, and Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, The Book of
Speculation--with two-color illustrations by the author--is Erika Swyler's
moving debut novel about the power of books, family, and magic.
For readers who can’t get enough of the hit Broadway musical Hamilton, Gore Vidal’s
stunning novel about Aaron Burr, the man who killed Alexander Hamilton in a
duel—and who served as a successful, if often feared, statesman of our
fledgling nation. Here is an
extraordinary portrait of one of the most complicated—and misunderstood—figures
among the Founding Fathers. In 1804, while serving as vice president, Aaron
Burr fought a duel with his political nemesis, Alexander Hamilton, and killed
him. In 1807, he was arrested, tried, and acquitted of treason. In 1833, Burr
is newly married, an aging statesman considered a monster by many. But he is
determined to tell his own story, and he chooses to confide in a young New York
City journalist named Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler. Together, they explore
both Burr's past—and the continuing civic drama of their young nation. Burr is the first novel in Gore Vidal's Narratives of
Empire series, which spans the history of the United States from the Revolution
to post-World War II. With their broad canvas and sprawling cast of fictional
and historical characters, these novels present a panorama of American politics
and imperialism, as interpreted by one of our most incisive and ironic
observers.
New York Times Notable Book of the Year * Washington Post Top Ten Book of the Year In a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle of the night and then set fire to her home. When their lifelong neighbor Akhmed finds Havaa hiding in the forest with a strange blue suitcase, he makes a decision that will forever change their lives. He will seek refuge at the abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded. For Sonja, the arrival of Akhmed and Havaa is an unwelcome surprise. Weary and overburdened, she has no desire to take on additional risk and responsibility. But over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja’s world will shift on its axis and reveal the intricate pattern of connections that weaves together the pasts of these three unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate. A story of the transcendent power of love in wartime, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a work of sweeping breadth, profound compassion, and lasting significance.
The
Rocky Mountains have cast their
spell over the Courtlands, who are taking a family vacation before their
daughter leaves for college. But when Caitlin and her younger brother, Sean, go
out for an early morning run and only Sean returns, the mountains become as
terrifying as they are majestic. Written with a precision that captures every
emotion, every moment of fear, as each member of the family searches for
answers, Descent races like an avalanche toward its heart-pounding conclusion.
“Read this astonishing novel . . . The magic of his prose equals the horror of
Johnston’s story.” —The Washington Post “A compelling thriller that is both
creepy and literary . . . Descent is not just a mystery. It is an emotional
story of evil, fear, acceptance and irony.”—The Denver Post “What makes the
novel unforgettable is its sense of character, its deliberate, unadorned prose
and Johnston’s unflinching exploration of human endurance, physical and
psychological.” —Miami Herald “A super-charged, addictive read.” —The
Missourian “An original and psychologically deep thriller.” —Outside magazine
“Outstanding . . . The days when you had to choose between a great story and a
great piece of writing? Gone.” —Esquire “[A] dazzling debut . . . Exquisitely
crafted.” —The Dallas Morning News “Incredibly powerful, richly atmospheric.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune “ [An] engulfing thriller-cum-western.” —The New York
Times Book Review “Brilliant . . . As gripping as any Everest expedition.”
—Peter Heller
A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding by Jackie Copleton p.304 ISBN:978-0143128250 When Amaterasu Takahashi opens the door of her Philadelphia home to a badly scarred man claiming to be her grandson, she doesn’t believe him. Her grandson and her daughter, Yuko, perished nearly forty years ago during the bombing of Nagasaki. But the man carries with him a collection of sealed private letters that open a Pandora’s Box of family secrets Ama had sworn to leave behind when she fled Japan. She is forced to confront her memories of the years before the war: of the daughter she tried too hard to protect and the love affair that would drive them apart, and even further back, to the long, sake-pouring nights at a hostess bar where Ama first learned that a soft heart was a dangerous thing. Will Ama allow herself to believe in a miracle?
When Ibby Bell’s
father dies unexpectedly in the summer of 1964, her mother unceremoniously
deposits Ibby with her eccentric grandmother Fannie and throws in her father’s
urn for good measure. Fannie’s New Orleans house is like no place Ibby has ever
been—and Fannie, who has a tendency to end up in the local asylum—is like no
one she has ever met. Fortunately, Fannie’s black cook, Queenie, and her
smart-mouthed daughter, Dollbaby, take it upon themselves to initiate Ibby into
the ways of the South, both its grand traditions and its darkest secrets. For Fannie’s own family
history is fraught with tragedy, hidden behind the closed rooms in her ornate
Uptown mansion. It will take Ibby’s arrival to begin to unlock the mysteries
there. And it will take Queenie and Dollbaby’s hard-won wisdom to show Ibby
that family can sometimes be found in the least expected places. For fans of Saving
CeeCee Honeycutt and The Help, Dollbabybrings to life the
charm and unrest of 1960s New Orleans through the eyes of a young girl learning
to understand race for the first time. By
turns uplifting and funny, poignant and full of verve, Dollbabyis a novel readers will
take to their hearts.
From the author of the New York Times bestseller and beloved book club favorite The Kitchen House, a novel of family and long-buried
secrets along the treacherous Underground Railroad. Jamie Pyke, son of both a
slave and master of Tall Oakes, has a deadly secret that compels him to take a
treacherous journey through the Underground Railroad. Published in 2010, The
Kitchen House became a
grassroots bestseller. Fans connected so deeply to the book’s characters that
the author, Kathleen Grissom, found herself being asked over and over “what
happens next?” The wait is finally over. This
new, stand-alone novel opens in 1830, and Jamie, who fled from the Virginian
plantation he once called home, is passing in Philadelphia society as a wealthy
white silversmith. After many years of striving, Jamie has achieved acclaim and
security, only to discover that his aristocratic lover Caroline is pregnant.
Before he can reveal his real identity to her, he learns that his beloved
servant Pan has been captured and sold into slavery in the South. Pan’s father,
to whom Jamie owes a great debt, pleads for Jamie’s help, and Jamie agrees,
knowing the journey will take him perilously close to Tall Oakes and the
ruthless slave hunter who is still searching for him. Meanwhile, Caroline’s
father learns and exposes Jamie’s secret, and Jamie loses his home, his
business, and finally Caroline. Heartbroken
and with nothing to lose, Jamie embarks on a trip to a North Carolina
plantation where Pan is being held with a former Tall Oakes slave named Sukey,
who is intent on getting Pan to the Underground Railroad. Soon the three of
them are running through the Great Dismal Swamp, the notoriously deadly hiding
place for escaped slaves. Though they have help from those in the Underground
Railroad, not all of them will make it out alive.
From the New York Times bestselling author of
Midwives and The Sandcastle Girls comes the spellbinding tale of
a party gone horribly wrong: two men lie dead in a suburban living room, two
women are on the run from police, and a marriage is ripping apart at the seams.
When
Kristin Chapman agrees to let her husband, Richard, host his brother’s bachelor
party, she expects a certain amount of debauchery. She brings their young
daughter to Manhattan for the evening, leaving her Westchester home to the men
and their hired entertainment. What she does not expect is this: bacchanalian
drunkenness, her husband sharing a dangerously intimate moment in the guest
room, and two women stabbing and killing their Russian bodyguards before
driving off into the night. In the aftermath, Kristin and Richard’s life
rapidly spirals into nightmare. The police throw them out of their home, now a
crime scene, Richard’s investment banking firm puts him on indefinite leave,
and Kristin is unsure if she can forgive her husband for the moment he shared
with a dark-haired girl in the guest room. But the dark-haired girl, Alexandra,
faces a much graver danger. In one breathless, violent night, she is free,
running to escape the police who will arrest her and the gangsters who will
kill her in a heartbeat. A captivating, chilling story about shame and scandal,
The Guest Room is a riveting novel from one of our greatest
storytellers.
I Don’t Know How She Does It by Alison
Pearson p. 337 ISBN:978-0375713750 (2
recommendations)
Allison
Pearson's debut novel, I Don't Know How She Does It, is a rare and
beautiful hybrid: a devastatingly funny novel that's also a compelling
fictional world. You want to climb inside this book and inhabit it. However,
you might find it pretty messy once you're in there. Narrator Kate Reddy is the
manager of a hedge fund and mother of two small children. The book opens with
an emblematic scene as Kate "distresses" a store-bought mince pie to
make it appear homemade. Her days are measured in increments of minutes and
even seconds; her fund stays organized but her house and family are falling
apart. The book is a pearly string of great lines. Here's Kate on lack of
sleep: "They're right to call it a broken night.... You crawl back to bed
and you lie there trying to do the jigsaw of sleep with half the pieces missing."
On baby boys: "A mother of a one-year-old son is a movie star in a world
without critics." On subtle office dynamics:The women in the offices
of EMF [Kate's firm] don't tend to display pictures of their kids. The higher
they go up the ladder, the fewer the photographs. If a man has pictures of kids
on his desk, it enhances his humanity; if a woman has them it decreases hers.
Why? Because he's not supposed to be home with the children; she is. There's inherent drama here: Kate is
wildly appealing, and we want things to work out for her. In the end, the book
isn't a just collection of clever lines on the theme of working motherhood;
it's a real, rich novel about a character we come to cherish.
Wickedly funny, this
totally engaging, richly observed first novel by Hannah Rothschild is a tour de
force. Its sweeping narrative and cast of wildly colorful characters takes you
behind the scenes of a London auction house, into the secret operations of a powerful
art dealer, to a flamboyant eighteenth-century-style dinner party, and into a
modest living room in Berlin, among many other unexpected settings. In The Improbability of Love we meet Annie McDee, thirty-one, who
is working as a chef for two rather sinister art dealers. Recovering from the
end of a long-term relationship, she is searching in a neglected secondhand
shop for a birthday present for her unsuitable new lover. Hidden behind a
rubber plant on top of a file cabinet, a grimy painting catches her eye. After
spending her meager savings on the picture, Annie prepares an elaborate
birthday dinner for two, only to be stood up.
The painting becomes hers, and as it turns out,
Annie has stumbled across a lost masterpiece by one of the most important French
painters of the eighteenth century. But who painted this masterpiece is not
clear at first. Soon Annie finds herself pursued by interested parties who
would do anything to possess her picture. For a gloomy, exiled Russian
oligarch, an avaricious sheikha, a desperate auctioneer, and an unscrupulous
dealer, among others, the painting embodies their greatest hopes and fears. In
her search for the painting’s identity, Annie will unwittingly uncover some of
the darkest secrets of European history—as well as the possibility of falling
in love again. Irreverent, witty,
bittersweet, The Improbability
of Love draws an
unforgettable portrait of the London art scene, but it is also an exuberant and
unexpected journey through life’s highs and lows and the complexities of love
and loss.
From
a land famous for storytelling comes an "absolute masterpiece"* -- an
epic novel of Ireland that captures the intimate, passionate texture of the
Irish spirit. One wintry evening in 1951, an itinerant storyteller -- a
Seanchai, the very last practitioner of a fabled tradition extending back
hundreds of years -- arrives unannounced at a house in the Irish countryside.
In exchange for a bed and a warm meal, he invites his hosts and some of their
neighbors to join him by the fireside, and begins to tell formative stories of
Ireland's history. One of his listeners, a nine-year-old boy, grows so
entranced by the story-telling that, when the old man leaves abruptly under
mysterious circumstances, the boy devotes himself to finding him again. Ronan's
search for the Storyteller becomes both a journey of self-discovery and an
immersion into the sometimes-conflicting histories of his native land. As the
long-unspoken secrets of his own family begin to reveal themselves, he becomes
increasingly single-minded in pursuit of the old man, who he fears may already
be dead. But Ronan's personal path also leads him deeper and deeper into the
history and mythology of Ireland itself, in all its drama, intrigue, and
heroic. Ireland travels through the centuries, interweaving Ronan's
quest for the Storyteller with a richly evocative unfolding of the great
moments in Irish history, ranging from the savage grip of the Ice Age to the
green andtroubled land of tourist brochures and political unrest. Along the
way, we meet foolish kings and innocent monks, fabled saints and great works of
art, shrewd Normanraiders, strong tribal leaders, poets, politicians, and
lovers. Each illuminates the magic of Ireland and the eternal connection of its
people to the land.A sweeping novel of huge ambition, Ireland is the
beautifully told story of a remarkable nation. From the epic sweep of its
telling to the precision of its characters -- great and small, tragic and comic
-- it rings with the truth of a writer passionate about his country and in full
command of his craft.
When
Craig Gilner gets into Manhattan's exclusive Executive Pre-Professional High
School, it's the culmination of a year of intense focus and grinding hard work.
Now he has to actually attend the school with other equally high-performing
students. Oops. And so the unraveling begins, with a depressed Craig spending
more time smoking dope and throwing up than studying. Although medication helps
his depression, he decides to stop taking it. Soon after, he makes another
decision: to commit suicide. A call to a suicide hotline gets him into a
psychiatric hospital, where he is finally able to face his demons. Readers must
suspend their disbelief big time for this to work. Because the teen psych ward
is undergoing renovations, Craig is put in with adults, which provides the
narrative with an eccentric cast of characters rather than just similarly
screwed-up teens. And in his five days in the hospital, Craig manages to cure
his eating disorder, find a girlfriend, realize he wants to be an artist, and
solve many of his co-residents' problems, including locating Egyptian music for
his roommate, who won't get out of bed. What could he do if he wasn't
depressed! But what's terrific about the book is Craig's voice--intimate, real,
funny, ironic, and one kids will come closer to hear. Many readers will be
familiar with the drugs, the sexual experimentation, the language, and, yes,
the depression--or they'll know someone who is. This book offers hope in a
package that readers will find enticing, and that's the gift it offers.
Kathleen Grissom, New York Times bestselling author of the highly
anticipated Glory
Over Everything, established herself as a remarkable new talent
with The Kitchen House,
now a contemporary classic. In this gripping novel, a dark secret threatens to
expose the best and worst in everyone tied to the estate at a thriving
plantation in Virginia in the decades before the Civil War.
Orphaned during her passage from Ireland, young, white Lavinia arrives on the steps of the kitchen house and is placed, as an indentured servant, under the care of Belle, the master’s illegitimate slave daughter. Lavinia learns to cook, clean, and serve food, while guided by the quiet strength and love of her new family. In time, Lavinia is accepted into the world of the big house, caring for the master’s opium-addicted wife and befriending his dangerous yet protective son. She attempts to straddle the worlds of the kitchen and big house, but her skin color will forever set her apart from Belle and the other slaves.Through the unique eyes of Lavinia and Belle, Grissom’s debut novel unfolds in a heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful story of class, race, dignity, deep-buried secrets, and familial bonds.
Orphaned during her passage from Ireland, young, white Lavinia arrives on the steps of the kitchen house and is placed, as an indentured servant, under the care of Belle, the master’s illegitimate slave daughter. Lavinia learns to cook, clean, and serve food, while guided by the quiet strength and love of her new family. In time, Lavinia is accepted into the world of the big house, caring for the master’s opium-addicted wife and befriending his dangerous yet protective son. She attempts to straddle the worlds of the kitchen and big house, but her skin color will forever set her apart from Belle and the other slaves.Through the unique eyes of Lavinia and Belle, Grissom’s debut novel unfolds in a heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful story of class, race, dignity, deep-buried secrets, and familial bonds.
Named
one of the most anticipated novels of the year by New York Magazine, The
Wall Street Journal, Entertainment Weekly, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s
Bazaar, Publishers Weekly, The Huffington Post, and more. From New
York Times and internationally bestselling author Isabel Allende, an
exquisitely crafted love story and multigenerational epic that sweeps from San
Francisco in the present-day to Poland and the United States during the Second
World War. In 1939, as Poland falls under the shadow of the Nazis, young Alma
Belasco’s parents send her away to live in safety with an aunt and uncle in
their opulent mansion in San Francisco. There, as the rest of the world goes to
war, she encounters Ichimei Fukuda, the quiet and gentle son of the family’s
Japanese gardener. Unnoticed by those around them, a tender love affair begins
to blossom. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the two are cruelly
pulled apart as Ichimei and his family—like thousands of other Japanese
Americans—are declared enemies and forcibly relocated to internment camps run
by the United States government. Throughout their lifetimes, Alma and Ichimei
reunite again and again, but theirs is a love that they are forever forced to
hide from the world. Decades later, Alma is nearing the end of her long and
eventful life. Irina Bazili, a care worker struggling to come to terms with her
own troubled past, meets the elderly woman and her grandson, Seth, at San
Francisco’s charmingly eccentric Lark House nursing home. As Irina and Seth
forge a friendship, they become intrigued by a series of mysterious gifts and
letters sent to Alma, eventually learning about Ichimei and this extraordinary
secret passion that has endured for nearly seventy years. Sweeping through time
and spanning generations and continents, The Japanese Lover explores
questions of identity, abandonment, redemption, and the unknowable impact of
fate on our lives. Written with the same attention to historical detail and
keen understanding of her characters that Isabel Allende has been known for
since her landmark first novel The House of the Spirits, The Japanese
Lover is a profoundly moving tribute to the constancy of the human heart in
a world of unceasing change.
From the New York Times–bestselling author of the Dante Club, the story of an epic literary heist by
a forgotten class of consummate criminals book′a-neer′ (bŏŏk′kȧ-nēr′), n. a literary pirate; an individual
capable of doing all that must be done in the universe of books that
publishers, authors, and readers must not have a part in London, 1890—Pen Davenport
is the most infamous bookaneer in Europe. A master of disguise, he makes his
living stalking harbors, coffeehouses, and print shops for the latest
manuscript to steal. But this golden age of publishing is on the verge of
collapse. For a hundred years, loose copyright laws and a hungry reading public
created a unique opportunity: books could easily be published abroad without an
author’s permission. Authors gained fame but suffered financially—Charles
Dickens, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, to name a few—but publishers
reaped enormous profits while readers bought books inexpensively. Yet on the
eve of the twentieth century, a new international treaty is signed to grind
this literary underground to a sharp halt. The bookaneers are on the verge of
extinction.
From the New York Times–bestselling author of The Dante Club, Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer is the astonishing story of these literary thieves’ epic final heist. On the island of Samoa, a dying Robert Louis Stevenson labors over a new novel. The thought of one last book from the great author fires the imaginations of the bookaneers, and soon Davenport sets out for the South Pacific accompanied by his assistant Fergins. But Davenport is hardly the only bookaneer with a mind to pirate Stevenson’s last novel. His longtime adversary, the monstrous Belial, appears on the island, and soon Davenport, Fergins, and Belial find themselves embroiled in a conflict larger, perhaps, than literature itself. In The Last Bookaneer, Pearl crafts a finely wrought tale about a showdown between brilliant men in the last great act of their professions. It is nothing short of a page-turning journey to the heart of a lost era. Praise for The Last Bookaneer:
“Matthew Pearl has a particular specialty: finding an obscure corner of 19th-century history and spinning from it literary fiction that is thought-provoking, enlightening, smoothly written — and a ripping good story to boot.” —The Seattle Times
From the New York Times–bestselling author of The Dante Club, Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer is the astonishing story of these literary thieves’ epic final heist. On the island of Samoa, a dying Robert Louis Stevenson labors over a new novel. The thought of one last book from the great author fires the imaginations of the bookaneers, and soon Davenport sets out for the South Pacific accompanied by his assistant Fergins. But Davenport is hardly the only bookaneer with a mind to pirate Stevenson’s last novel. His longtime adversary, the monstrous Belial, appears on the island, and soon Davenport, Fergins, and Belial find themselves embroiled in a conflict larger, perhaps, than literature itself. In The Last Bookaneer, Pearl crafts a finely wrought tale about a showdown between brilliant men in the last great act of their professions. It is nothing short of a page-turning journey to the heart of a lost era. Praise for The Last Bookaneer:
“Matthew Pearl has a particular specialty: finding an obscure corner of 19th-century history and spinning from it literary fiction that is thought-provoking, enlightening, smoothly written — and a ripping good story to boot.” —The Seattle Times
“A luminous,
Marquez-esque tale” (O, The Oprah Magazine) from the New York Times bestselling author of The Museum of Extraordinary
Things: a forbidden love story set on a tropical island about the extraordinary
woman who gave birth to painter Camille Pissarro—the Father of Impressionism. Growing up on idyllic St.
Thomas in the early 1800s, Rachel dreams of life in faraway Paris. Rachel’s
mother, a pillar of their small refugee community of Jews who escaped the
Inquisition, has never forgiven her daughter for being a difficult girl who
refuses to live by the rules. Growing up, Rachel’s salvation is their maid
Adelle’s belief in her strengths, and her deep, life-long friendship with
Jestine, Adelle’s daughter. But Rachel’s life is not her own. She is married
off to a widower with three children to save her father’s business. When her
older husband dies suddenly and his handsome, much younger nephew, Frédérick,
arrives from France to settle the estate, Rachel seizes her own life story,
beginning a defiant, passionate love affair that sparks a scandal that affects
all of her family, including her favorite son, who will become one of the
greatest artists of France. “A work of
art” (Dallas Morning News), The
Marriage of Opposites showcases
the beloved, bestselling Alice Hoffman at the height of her considerable
powers. “Her lush, seductive prose, and heart-pounding subject…make this latest
skinny-dip in enchanted realism…the Platonic ideal of the beach read” (Slate.com).
Once forgotten to history, the marriage of Rachel and Frédérick “will only
renew your commitment to Hoffman’s astonishing storytelling” (USA TODAY).
Middlesex: A Novel by Jeffrey
Eugenides p.544 ISBN:0978-0312427733 (Morning
Book Group selection in 2011)
"I
was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in
January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near
Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." And so begins Middlesex,
the mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek American family and the
"roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time." The odd but
utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41-year-old
hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender heart of this
long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides, whose elegant and haunting
1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides, remains one of the finest first novels
of recent memory. Eugenides weaves together a kaleidoscopic narrative spanning
80 years of a stained family history, from a fateful incestuous union in a
small town in early 1920s Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit; from the early
days of Ford Motors to the heated 1967 race riots; from the tony suburbs of
Grosse Pointe and a confusing, aching adolescent love story to modern-day
Berlin. Eugenides's command of the narrative is astonishing. He balances
Cal/Callie's shifting voices convincingly, spinning this strange and often
unsettling story with intelligence, insight, and generous amounts of humor:
Emotions, in my experience aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in
"sadness," "joy," or "regret." … I'd like to have
at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions
like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the
disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." ... I'd like to have a
word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for
"the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the
right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need
them more than ever. When you get to the end of this splendorous book, when you
suddenly realize that after hundreds of pages you have only a few more left to
turn over, you'll experience a quick pang of regret knowing that your time with
Cal is coming to a close, and you may even resist finishing it--putting it
aside for an hour or two, or maybe overnight--just so that this wondrous,
magical novel might never end
Inspired by
literature’s most haunting love triangle, award-winning author Lynn Cullen
delivers a pitch-perfect rendering of Edgar Allan Poe, his mistress’s
tantalizing confession, and his wife’s frightening obsession in this new
masterpiece of historical fiction to which Sara Gruen says, “Mrs. Poe had my heart racing...Don't miss it!” 1845: New York City is a
sprawling warren of gaslit streets and crowded avenues, bustling with new
immigrants and old money, optimism and opportunity, poverty and crime. Edgar
Allan Poe’s “The Raven” is all the rage—the success of which a struggling poet
like Frances Osgood can only dream. As a mother trying to support two young
children after her husband’s cruel betrayal, Frances jumps at the chance to
meet the illustrious Mr. Poe at a small literary gathering, if only to help her
fledgling career. Although not a great fan of Poe’s writing, she is nonetheless
overwhelmed by his magnetic presence—and the surprising revelation that he
admires her work. What follows is a flirtation, then a seduction, then an illicit
affair…and with each clandestine encounter, Frances finds herself falling
slowly and inexorably under the spell of her mysterious, complicated lover. But
when Edgar’s frail wife, Virginia, insists on befriending Frances as well, the
relationship becomes as dark and twisted as one of Poe’s tales. And like those
gothic heroines whose fates are forever sealed, Frances begins to fear that
deceiving Mrs. Poe may be as impossible as cheating death itself…
A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice: "A
brilliant and breathtaking blaze of a novel" -- Clare Clark Guardian
"A spare, beautiful novel, so deeply about America and the language of
America that its sentences seem to rise up from the earth itself. Laird Hunt
had me under his spell from the first word of Neverhome to the last.
Magnificent" -- Paul Auster "Neverhome is a wondrous feat. Few novels
written in English approach its linguistic verve" -- Eileen Battersby
Irish Times "The Civil War has given us so many great literary works that
I couldn't have imagined a new fictional approach that was both stunningly
original and yet utterly natural, even inevitable. But this is just what Laird
Hunt brilliantly delivers in his new novel. The key is his central character:
in her voice, her personality, her yearning, she deeply touches our shared and
enduring humanity. Neverhome is masterful work by one of our finest
writers" -- Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange
Mountain "With nothing but the simple language of well-worn words, Mr Hunt
has conjured up a wholly original heroine with an utterly fresh voice... A book
that deserves a wider readership." The Economist Inaugural
winner of the Grand Prix de la Littérature Américaine She calls herself Ash, but that's not her real name.
She is a farmer's faithful wife, but she has left her husband to don the
uniform of a Union soldier in the Civil War. NEVERHOME tells the harrowing
story of Ash Thompson during the battle for the South. Through bloodshed and
hysteria and heartbreak, she becomes a hero, a folk legend, a madwoman and a
traitor to the American cause. Laird
Hunt's dazzling new novel throws a light on the adventurous women who chose to
fight instead of stay behind. It is also a mystery story: why did Ash leave and
her husband stay? Why can she not return? What will she have to go through to
make it back home? In gorgeous prose,
Hunt's rebellious young heroine fights her way through history, and back home
to her husband, and finally into our hearts.
In love we find out who we want to be. In war we find out who we
are. FRANCE, 1939 In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says
goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn't believe
that the Nazis will invade France … but invade they do, in droves of marching
soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and
drop bombs upon the innocent. When a German captain requisitions Vianne's home,
she and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything. Without food
or money or hope, as danger escalates all around them, she is forced to make
one impossible choice after another to keep her family alive. Vianne's sister,
Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old girl, searching for purpose with
all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the
unknown terrors of war, she meets Gäetan, a partisan who believes the French
can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only the young
can … completely. But when he betrays her, Isabelle joins the Resistance and
never looks back, risking her life time and again to save others. With courage,
grace and powerful insight, bestselling author Kristin Hannah captures the epic
panorama of WWII and illuminates an intimate part of history seldom seen: the
women's war. The Nightingale tells the stories of two sisters, separated by
years and experience, by ideals, passion and circumstance, each embarking on
her own dangerous path toward survival, love, and freedom in German-occupied,
war-torn France--a heartbreakingly beautiful novel that celebrates the
resilience of the human spirit and the durability of women. It is a novel for
everyone, a novel for a lifetime.
"Atkinson's bright voice rings on every
page, and her sly and wry observations move the plot as swiftly as suspense
turns the pages of a thriller."-San Francisco Chronicle Two years after
the events of Case Histories left him a retired millionaire, Jackson Brodie has
followed Julia, his occasional girlfriend and former client, to Edinburgh for
its famous summer arts festival. But when he witnesses a man being brutally
attacked in a traffic jam - the apparent victim of an extreme case of road rage
- a chain of events is set in motion that will pull the wife of an unscrupulous
real estate tycoon, a timid but successful crime novelist, and a hardheaded
female police detective into Jackson's orbit. Suddenly out of retirement,
Jackson is once again in the midst of several mysteries that intersect in one
giant and sinister scheme.
"Compelling and always entertaining." -USA Today
"Compelling and always entertaining." -USA Today
At
once intimate and epic, The Orchardist is historical fiction at its
best, in the grand literary tradition of William Faulkner, Marilynne Robinson,
Michael Ondaatje, Annie Proulx, and Toni Morrison.In her stunningly original
and haunting debut novel, Amanda Coplin evokes a powerful sense of place,
mixing tenderness and violence as she spins an engrossing tale of a solitary
orchardist who provides shelter to two runaway teenage girls in the untamed
American West, and the dramatic consequences of his actions.
A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR! Keira Knightley is
to produce and star in the movie adaption of The Other Typist! A haunting debut novel set against the
background of New York City in the 1920s... "From the first page [I]
was absorbed...Suzanne Rindell's story of a 1920s police stenographer who
becomes increasingly obsessed with a glamorous new typist reminds me at points
ofNotes on a Scandal and
Patricia Highsmith, but has creepy charms all its own."--The Paris
Review Confessions are Rose Baker's
job. A typist for the New York City Police Department, she sits in judgment
like a high priestess. Criminals come before her to admit their transgressions,
and, with a few strokes of the keys before her, she seals their fate. But while
she may hear about shootings, knifings, and crimes of passion, as soon as she
leaves the room, she reverts to a dignified and proper lady. Until Odalie joins
the typing pool. As Rose quickly falls
under the stylish, coquettish Odalie's spell, she is lured into a sparkling
underworld of speakeasies and jazz. And what starts as simple fascination turns
into an obsession from which she may never recover.
A remarkable novel about secrets, desire, memory, passion, and
possibility. Newlywed Grace Monroe doesn’t fit anyone’s expectations of a
successful 1950s London socialite, least of all her own. When she receives an
unexpected inheritance from a complete stranger, Madame Eva d’Orsey, Grace is
drawn to uncover the identity of her mysterious benefactor. Weaving through the
decades, from 1920s New York to Monte Carlo, Paris, and London, the story Grace
uncovers is that of an extraordinary women who inspired one of Paris’s greatest
perfumers. Immortalized in three evocative perfumes, Eva d’Orsey’s history will
transform Grace’s life forever, forcing her to choose between the woman she is
expected to be and the person she really is. The Perfume Collector explores
the complex and obsessive love between muse and artist, and the tremendous
power of memory and scent.
Marie Bostwick
weaves the unforgettable story of four very different women whose paths cross,
changing their lives forever . . . It's a long way from Fort Worth, Texas, to
New Bern, Connecticut, yet it only takes a day in the charming Yankee town to
make Evelyn Dixon realize she's found her new home. The abrupt end of her
marriage was Evelyn's wake-up call to get busy chasing her dream of opening a
quilt shop. Finding a storefront is easy enough; starting a new life isn't.
Little does Evelyn imagine it will bring a trio like Abigail Burgess, her niece
Liza, and Margot Matthews through her door . . . Troubled and angry after her
mother's death, Liza threatens to embarrass her Aunt Abigail all over town unless
she joins her for quilting classes. A victim of downsizing at the peak of her
career, Margot hopes an event hosted by the quilt shop could be a great chance
to network-and keep from dying of boredom . . . As they stitch their unique
creations, Evelyn, Abigail, Liza, and Margot form a sisterhood they never
sought-but one that they'll be grateful for when the unexpected provides a
poignant reminder of the single thread that binds us all . . . Praise for the
Novels of Marie Bostwick Fields of Gold "A touching story"-Patricia
Gaffney "Gripping, heartwarming"-Dorothy Garlock On Wings of the
Morning "Will set your heart to soaring" -Debbie Macomber
This is the kind of book where you can smell and hear and see
the fictional world the writer has created, so palpably does the atmosphere
come through. Set on an island in the straits north of Puget Sound, in
Washington, where everyone is either a fisherman or a berry farmer, the story
is nominally about a murder trial. But since it's set in the 1950s, lingering
memories of World War II, internment camps and racism helps fuel suspicion of a
Japanese-American fisherman, a lifelong resident of the islands. It's a great
story, but the primary pleasure of the book is Guterson's renderings of the
people and the place.
The bestselling author of Major Pettigrew’s Last
Stand returns with a breathtaking novel of love on the eve of World War I
that reaches far beyond the small English town in which it is set. East Sussex,
1914. It is the end of England’s brief Edwardian summer, and everyone agrees
that the weather has never been so beautiful. Hugh Grange, down from his
medical studies, is visiting his Aunt Agatha, who lives with her husband in the
small, idyllic coastal town of Rye. Agatha’s husband works in the Foreign
Office, and she is certain he will ensure that the recent saber rattling over
the Balkans won’t come to anything. And Agatha has more immediate concerns; she
has just risked her carefully built reputation by pushing for the appointment
of a woman to replace the Latin master. When Beatrice Nash arrives with one
trunk and several large crates of books, it is clear she is significantly more
freethinking—and attractive—than anyone believes a Latin teacher should be. For
her part, mourning the death of her beloved father, who has left her penniless,
Beatrice simply wants to be left alone to pursue her teaching and writing. But
just as Beatrice comes alive to the beauty of the Sussex landscape and the
colorful characters who populate Rye, the perfect summer is about to end. For
despite Agatha’s reassurances, the unimaginable is coming. Soon the limits of
progress, and the old ways, will be tested as this small Sussex town and its
inhabitants go to war.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • NEW YORK TIMESBESTSELLER. NAMED
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Wall Street
Journal • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Economist • Vogue • Slate • Chicago
Tribune • The Seattle Times • Dayton Daily News • Publishers Weekly • Alan Cheuse,
NPR’s All Things Considered. ELECTED
ONE OF THE TOP 10 BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times •
Entertainment Weekly • The Christian Science Monitor • The Kansas City Star •
Library Journal In a Balkan country
mending from war, Natalia, a young doctor, is compelled to unravel the
mysterious circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death.
Searching for clues, she turns to his worn copy of The Jungle Book and the stories he told her of his
encounters over the years with “the deathless man.” But most extraordinary of
all is the story her grandfather never told her—the legend of the tiger’s wife.
“It is fair to call this arguably the most important German
novel of the post-war era." -The Observer "Grass published his
milestone of postwar literature 50 years ago, The Tin Drum, one of the great
novels of the twentieth century, was published in Ralph Manheim’s outstanding
translation in 1959. It became a runaway bestseller and catapulted its young
author to the forefront of world literature. After more than fifty years, The
Tin Drum has, if anything, gained in power and relevance. All of Grass’s
amazing evocations are still there, and still amazing: Oskar Matzerath, the
indomitable drummer; his grandmother, Anna Koljaiczek; his mother, Agnes;
Alfred Matzerath and Jan Bronski, his presumptive fathers. And Oskar’s midget
friends—Bebra, the great circus master, and Roswitha Raguna, the famous
somnambulist; Sister Scholastica and Sister Agatha, the Right Reverend Father
Wiehnke, the Greffs, the Schefflers, Herr Fajngold, all Kashubians, Poles,
Germans, and Jews—waiting to be discovered and rediscovered.
A riveting
historical novel about Peggy Shippen Arnold, the cunning wife of Benedict
Arnold and mastermind behind America’s most infamous act of treason... Everyone knows Benedict
Arnold—the Revolutionary War general who betrayed America and fled to the
British—as history’s most notorious turncoat. Many know Arnold’s
co-conspirator, Major John André, who was apprehended with Arnold’s documents
in his boots and hanged at the orders of General George Washington. But few
know of the integral third character in the plot: a charming young woman who
not only contributed to the betrayal but orchestrated it. Socialite Peggy Shippen is half
Benedict Arnold’s age when she seduces the war hero during his stint as
military commander of Philadelphia. Blinded by his young bride’s beauty and
wit, Arnold does not realize that she harbors a secret: loyalty to the British.
Nor does he know that she hides a past romance with the handsome British spy
John André. Peggy watches as her husband, crippled from battle wounds and in
debt from years of service to the colonies, grows ever more disillusioned with
his hero, Washington, and the American cause. Together with her former love and
her disaffected husband, Peggy hatches the plot to deliver West Point to the
British and, in exchange, win fame and fortune for herself and Arnold. Told from the perspective of Peggy’s
maid, whose faith in the new nation inspires her to intervene in her mistress’s
affairs even when it could cost her everything, The Traitor’s Wife brings these infamous figures to life,
illuminating the sordid details and the love triangle that nearly destroyed the
American fight for freedom.
From the bestselling
and highly acclaimed author of the “page-turning tale” (Library Journal,
starred review) Mrs. Poe comes a fictionalized imagining of
the personal life of America’s most iconic writer: Mark Twain.In March of 1909,
Mark Twain cheerfully blessed the wedding of his private secretary, Isabel V.
Lyon, and his business manager, Ralph Ashcroft. One month later, he fired both.
He proceeded to write a ferocious 429-page rant about the pair, calling Isabel
“a liar, a forger, a thief, a hypocrite, a drunkard, a sneak, a humbug, a
traitor, a conspirator, a filthy-minded and salacious slut pining for
seduction.” Twain and his daughter, Clara Clemens, then slandered Isabel in the
newspapers, erasing her nearly seven years of devoted service to their family.
How did Lyon go from being the beloved secretary who ran Twain’s life to a
woman he was determined to destroy?
In Twain’s
End, Lynn Cullen “cleverly spins a mysterious, dark tale” (Booklist)
about the tangled relationships between Twain, Lyon, and Ashcroft, as well as
the little-known love triangle between Helen Keller, her teacher Anne Sullivan
Macy, and Anne’s husband, John Macy, which comes to light during their visit to
Twain’s Connecticut home in 1909. Add to the party a furious Clara Clemens,
smarting from her own failed love affair, and carefully kept veneers
shatter.Based on Isabel Lyon’s extant diary, Twain’s writings, letters,
photographs, and events in Twain’s boyhood that may have altered his ability to
love, Twain’s End triumphs as “a tender evocation of a
vain, complicated man’s twilight years and a last chance at love” (People).
An irresistible,
deftly observed novel from the New
York Times-bestselling author of Modern
Lovers— about the secrets, joys, and jealousies that rise to
the surface over the course of an American family’s two-week stay in Mallorca. For the Posts, a two-week
trip to the Balearic island of Mallorca with their extended family and friends
is a celebration: Franny and Jim are observing their thirty-fifth wedding
anniversary, and their daughter, Sylvia, has graduated from high school. The
sunlit island, its mountains and beaches, its tapas and tennis courts, also
promise an escape from the tensions simmering at home in Manhattan. But all
does not go according to plan: over the course of the vacation, secrets come to
light, old and new humiliations are experienced, childhood rivalries resurface,
and ancient wounds are exacerbated. This
is a story of the sides of ourselves that we choose to show and those we try to
conceal, of the ways we tear each other down and build each other up again, and
the bonds that ultimately hold us together. With wry humor and tremendous
heart, Emma Straub delivers a richly satisfying story of a family in the midst
of a maelstrom of change, emerging irrevocably altered yet whole.
A New York Times Notable Book • An Entertainment Weekly “Must List” Pick • “Prepare to be
dazzled.”—Paula McLain • “Quite simply astonishing.”—Sarah Blake What if
Virginia Woolf’s sister had kept a diary? For fans of The Paris Wife and Loving Frank comes a spellbinding new story of the
inseparable bond between Virginia and her sister, the gifted painter Vanessa
Bell, and the real-life betrayal that threatened to destroy their family.
Hailed byThe New York Times Book Review as “an uncanny success” and based on
meticulous research, this stunning novel illuminates a little-known episode in
the celebrated sisters’ glittering bohemian youth among the legendary
Bloomsbury Group. Find your next book
club pick, read special features, and more. Join the Random House Reader’s
Circle. London,
1905: The city is alight with change, and the Stephen siblings are at the
forefront. Vanessa, Virginia, Thoby, and Adrian are leaving behind their
childhood home and taking a house in the leafy heart of avant-garde Bloomsbury.
There they bring together a glittering circle of bright, outrageous artistic
friends who will grow into legend and come to be known as the Bloomsbury Group.
And at the center of this charmed circle are the devoted, gifted sisters:
Vanessa, the painter, and Virginia, the writer. Each member of the group will go on to earn fame and success, but so far
Vanessa Bell has never sold a painting. Virginia Woolf’s book review has just
been turned down by TheTimes.
Lytton Strachey has not published anything. E. M. Forster has finished his
first novel but does not like the title. Leonard Woolf is still a civil servant
in Ceylon, and John Maynard Keynes is looking for a job. Together, this
sparkling coterie of artists and intellectuals throw away convention and
embrace the wild freedom of being young, single bohemians in London. But the landscape shifts when Vanessa unexpectedly
falls in love and her sister feels dangerously abandoned. Eerily possessive,
charismatic, manipulative, and brilliant, Virginia has always lived in the
shelter of Vanessa’s constant attention and encouragement. Without it, she
careens toward self-destruction and madness. As tragedy and betrayal threaten
to destroy the family, Vanessa must decide if it is finally time to protect her
own happiness above all else. The work of
exciting young newcomer Priya Parmar, Vanessa
and Her Sister exquisitely
captures the champagne-heady days of prewar London and the extraordinary lives
of sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf.
We Never Asked for Wings: A Novel by Vanessa
Diffenbaugh p. 336 ISBN:978-0553392333
From the beloved New
York Times bestselling author
of The Language of Flowers comes her much-anticipated new novel
about young love, hard choices, and hope against all odds. For fourteen years, Letty
Espinosa has worked three jobs around San Francisco to make ends meet while her
mother raised her children—Alex, fifteen, and Luna, just six—in their tiny
apartment on a forgotten spit of wetlands near the bay. But now Letty’s parents
are returning to Mexico, and Letty must step up and become a mother for the
first time in her life. Navigating this
new terrain is challenging for Letty, especially as Luna desperately misses her
grandparents and Alex, who is falling in love with a classmate, is unwilling to
give his mother a chance. Letty comes up with a plan to help the family escape
the dangerous neighborhood and heartbreaking injustice that have marked their
lives, but one wrong move could jeopardize everything she’s worked for and her
family’s fragile hopes for the future. Vanessa
Diffenbaugh blends gorgeous prose with compelling themes of motherhood,
undocumented immigration, and the American Dream in a powerful and prescient
story about family.
BOOKS NOT AVAILABLE IN NEW HAMPSHIRE LIBRARY SYSTEM:
Finding My Identity My
story of how DNA proved my legacy My life story - The journey that led me to
prove my legacy through DNA analysis. Everyone has a story. It takes courage to
tell it. By writing this book I hope I can help one of many survive what I
lived by telling my own experiences. I hope to help others realize they do have
an identity and they need to be responsible for it.
By all accounts, Emily Hahn (1905^-97) should be a household
name. A trailblazer, she routinely defied convention and chronicled her
singular experiences in hundreds of articles for the New Yorker and in
more than 50 books. Cuthbertson, who met Hahn while working on his biography of
John Gunther, speculates that she was just too controversial, versatile, and
complicated for fame then, but not now. He adroitly brings her back into the
limelight by detailing her achievements--she was the first woman at her
university to earn a degree in mining engineering, she drove cross-country
during the risky 1920s, then lived by her wits in colonial Africa and war-torn
China, mining not the earth but her involvements with other cultures, men, and
every conceivable form of entertainment, work, and danger. The events that Hahn
witnessed were world-changing, and her blazing candor about war, race, sex, and
feminism was courageous; but she was too hot to handle, and even though she
wrote for the New Yorker well into her eighties, she dropped from sight.
Thanks to Cuthbertson, Hahn has an encore in front of an audience hungry for
just her kind of story.
The British antihero of this moving biography
started with teenage glue-sniffing, petty thievery and gang brawls, then
graduated to heroin and major thievery. He endured prison stints and led a
"medieval existence" on the streets, finally emerging into triumphant
semistability as an "ex-homeless, ex-junkie psychopath" with only
occasional episodes of violence and suicidal impulses. In Cambridge, England,
Masters, an advocate for the homeless, befriended Stuart—someone for whom
"cause and effect are not connected in the usual way"—and found him
at times obnoxious and repellent, but also funny and honest. Masters notes bad
genes and childhood sexual molestation, and critiques "the System" of
British welfare and criminal justice institutions that help with one hand and
brutalize with the other, but he doesn't reduce Stuart's intractable problems
to simple dysfunction or societal neglect. By eschewing easy answers (the easy
answers—don't drink, don't use, don't steal, don't play with knives—are
precisely the hardest for Stuart), he accords full humanity to Stuart's
stumbling efforts to grapple with his demons. Hilarious and clear-eyed, the
author's superbly drawn portrait of Stuart is an unforgettable literary
evocation and a small masterpiece of moral empathy and imagination.
The acclaimed social psychologist offers an insider’s look at
his research and groundbreaking findings on stereotypes and identity. Claude M. Steele, who has been called “one of the few
great social psychologists,” offers a vivid first-person account of the
research that supports his groundbreaking conclusions on stereotypes and
identity. He sheds new light on American social phenomena from racial and
gender gaps in test scores to the belief in the superior athletic prowess of
black men, and lays out a plan for mitigating these “stereotype threats” and
reshaping American identities.
This insightful exploration of the varieties of
Americans' experience with race and racism in everyday life would be an
excellent starting point for the upcoming national conversations on race that
President Clinton and his appointed commission will be conducting this fall.
Tatum, a developmental psychologist (Mt. Holyoke Coll.) with a special interest
in the emerging field of racial-identity development, is a consultant to school
systems and community groups on teaching and learning in a multicultural
context. Not only has she studied the distinctive social dynamics faced by
black youth educated in predominantly white environments, but since 1980, Tatum
has developed a course on the psychology of racism and taught it in a variety
of university settings. She is also a black woman and a concerned mother of
two, and she draws on all these experiences and bases of knowledge to write a
remarkably jargon-free book that is as rigorously analytical as it is
refreshingly practical and drives its points home with a range of telling
anecdotes. Tatum illuminates ``why talking about racism is so hard'' and what
we can do to make it easier, leaving her readers more confident about facing
the difficult terrain on the road to a genuinely color-blind society.
Meet Big Sam Hannigan. Tough, righteous, a man on a
mission. Only problem is, it's the wrong mission. With the New York Times bestseller Kill
My Mother, legendary cartoonist Jules Feiffer began an epic saga of
American noir fiction. With Cousin Joseph, a prequel that
introduces us to bare-knuckled Detective Sam Hannigan, head of the Bay City's
Red Squad and patriarch of the Hannigan family featured in Kill My
Mother, Feiffer brings us the second installment in this highly anticipated
graphic trilogy. Our story opens in Bay City in 1931 in the midst of the Great
Depression. Big Sam sees himself as a righteous, truth-seeking patriot,
defending the American way, as his Irish immigrant father would have wanted,
against a rising tide of left-wing unionism, strikes, and disruption that
plague his home town. At the same time he makes monthly, secret overnight trips
on behalf of Cousin Joseph, a mysterious man on the phone he has never laid
eyes on, to pay off Hollywood producers to ensure that they will film only
upbeat films that idealize a mythic America: no warts, no injustice
uncorrected, only happy endings. But Sam, himself, is not in for a happy
ending, as step by step the secret of his unseen mentor's duplicity is revealed
to him. Fast-moving action, violence, and murder in the noir style of pulps and
forties films are melded in the satiric, sociopolitical Feifferian style to dig
up the buried fearmongering of the past and expose how closely it matches the
headlines, happenings, and violence of today. With Cousin Joseph,
Feiffer builds on his late-life conversion to cinematic noir, bowing, as ever,
to youthful heroes Will Eisner and Milton Caniff, but ultimately creating a
masterpiece that through his unique perspective and comic-strip noir style
illuminates the very origins of Hollywood and its role in creating the bipolar
nation we've become.
Told by
nine-year-old Benjamin, the youngest of four brothers, THE FISHERMEN is the
Cain and Abel-esque story of a childhood in Nigeria, in the small town of
Akure. When their father has to travel to a distant city for work, the brothers
take advantage of his absence to skip school and go fishing. At the forbidden
nearby river, they meet a madman who persuades the oldest of the boys that he
is destined to be killed by one of his siblings. What happens next is an almost
mythic event whose impact-both tragic and redemptive-will transcend the lives
and imaginations of the book's characters and readers. Dazzling and viscerally
powerful, THE FISHERMEN is an essential novel about Africa, seen through the
prism of one family's destiny.
Dinitia Smith’s
spellbinding novel recounts George Eliot’s honeymoon in Venice in June 1880
following her marriage to a handsome young man twenty years her junior. When
she agreed to marry John Walter Cross, Eliot was recovering from the death of
George Henry Lewes, her beloved companion of twenty-six years. Eliot was
bereft: left at the age of sixty to contemplate profound questions about her
physical decline, her fading appeal, and the prospect of loneliness. In
her youth, Mary Ann Evans—who would later be known as George Eliot—was a
country girl, considered too plain to marry, so she educated herself in order
to secure a livelihood. In an era when female novelists were objects of wonder,
she became the most famous writer of her day—with a male nom de plume. The Honeymoon explores different kinds of love, and
of the possibilities of redemption and happiness even in an imperfect union.
Smith integrates historical truth with her own rich rendition of Eliot’s inner
voice, crafting a page-turner that is as intelligent as it is gripping.
“A remarkable novel”
(The New York Times) about America’s first female soldier, Deborah
Sampson Gannett, who ran away from home in 1782, successfully disguised herself
as a man, and fought valiantly in the Revolutionary War. At a time when rigid
societal norms seemed absolute, Deborah Sampson risked everything in search of
something better.Revolutionary, Alex Myers’s richly imagined and
carefully researched debut novel, tells the story of a fierce-tempered young
woman turned celebrated solider and the remarkable courage, hope, fear, and
heartbreak that shaped her odyssey during the birth of a nation. After years of indentured servitude in a sleepy
Massachusetts town, Deborah chafes under the oppression of colonial society and
cannot always hide her discontent. When a sudden crisis forces her hand, she
decides to escape the only way she can, rejecting her place in the community in
favor of the perilous unknown. Cutting her hair, binding her chest, and donning
men’s clothes stolen from a neighbor, Deborah sheds her name and her home,
beginning her identity-shaking transformation into the imaginary “Robert
Shurtliff”—a desperate and dangerous masquerade that grows more serious when
“Robert” joins the Continental Army. What
follows is a journey through America’s War of Independence like no other—an
unlikely march through cold winters across bloody battlefields, the nightmare
of combat and the cruelty of betrayal, the elation of true love and the tragedy
of heartbreak. As The Boston
Globe raves, “Revolutionarysucceeds
on a number of levels, as a great historical-military adventure story, as an
exploration of gender identity, and as a page-turning description of the
fascinating life of the revolutionary Deborah Sampson.”
Longlisted for the National Book Award * A stunning
exploration of characters shaped by the forces of history, the debut work of
fiction by a 2013 National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Honoree.An
absentee father, a former dissident from communist-era Prague, needles his
adult daughter for details about her newly commissioned play when he fears it
will cast him in an unflattering light. An actor, imprisoned during the Red
Scare for playing up his communist leanings to get a part with a leftist film
director, is shamed by his act when he reunites with his precocious young son.
An Israeli soldier, forced to defend a settlement filled with American
religious families, still pines for a chance to discover the United States for
himself. A young Israeli journalist, left unemployed after America’s most
recent economic crash, questions her life path when she begins dating a
middle-aged widower still in mourning for his wife. And in the book’s final
story, a tour de force spanning three continents and three generations of
women, a young American and her Israeli husband are forced to reconsider their
marriage after the death of her dissident art-collecting grandmother. Again and again,
Molly Antopol’s deeply sympathetic characters struggle for footing in an
uncertain world, hounded by forces beyond their control. Their voices are
intimate and powerful and they resonate with searing beauty. Antopol is a
superb young talent, and The UnAmericans will long be
remembered for its wit, humanity, and heart.
Jo Becker has every
reason to be content. She has three dynamic daughters, a loving marriage, and a
rewarding career. But she feels a sense of unease. Then an old housemate
reappears, sending Jo back to a distant past when she lived in a communal house
in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Drawn deeper into her memories of that fateful
summer in 1968, Jo begins to obsess about the person she once was. As she is
pulled farther from her present life, her husband, and her world, Jo struggles
against becoming enveloped by her past and its dark secret.