By: Boo, Katherine.
A first book by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist profiles everyday life in the settlement of Annawadi as experienced by a Muslim teen, an ambitious rural mother of a prospective female college student and a young scrap metal thief, in an account that illuminates how their efforts to build better lives are challenged by regional religious, caste and economic tensions.
By: Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 1849-1924.
Ten-year-old Mary comes to live in a lonely house on the Yorkshire moors and discovers an invalid cousin and an abandoned garden.
By: Butler, Robert Olen.
A collection of stories about Vietnamese immigrants living in Louisiana as they face love, loss, despair, and the challenges and conflicts of a new life.
By: Cain, Susan.
Demonstrates how introverted people are misunderstood and undervalued in modern culture, charting the rise of extrovert ideology while sharing anecdotal examples of how to use introvert talents to adapt to various situations.
By: Cahalan, Susannah.
A dramatic account of a young <i>New York Post </i>reporter's struggle with a rare brain-attacking autoimmune disease traces how she woke up in a hospital room under guard with no memory of baffling psychotic symptoms, describing the last-minute intervention by a brilliant doctor who identifies the source of her illness.
By: Chandler, Raymond, 1888-1959.
Stories and Early Novels includes every story that Chandler did not later incorporate into a novel - thirteen in all. Drawn from the pages of Black Mask and Dime Detective, these stories show how Chandler adapted the violent conventions of the pulp magazines - with their brisk exposition and rapid-fire dialogue - to his own emerging vision of 20th-century America.<BR>Raymond Chandler: Stories and Early Novels contains a newly researched chronology of Chandler's life, explanatory notes, and an essay on the texts.
By: Chaon, Dan.
Focusing on the condition of the modern family, a thematically linked collection of short fiction captures the lives, dreams, and fates of men, women, and children who live outside of the American Dream.
By: Cisneros, Sandra.
For Esperanza, a young girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, life is an endless landscape of concrete and run-down tenements, and she tries to rise above the hopelessness
By: Coplin, Amanda.
When two feral girls--one of them very pregnant--appear on his homestead, solitary orchardist Talmadge, who carefully tends the grove of fruit trees he has cultivated for nearly half a century, vows to save and protect them.
By: Crace, Jim.
The discovery of a devoted couple found murdered in the dunes of Baritone Bay forms the centerpiece of a story of love and afterlife.
By: Crosley, Sloane.
A debut compilation of literary essays offers a revealing and humorous look at human fallibility and the vagaries of modern urban life as the author details the despoiling of an exhibit at the Natural History Museum, the provocation of her first boss, siccing the cops on her mysterious neighbor, and other offbeat situations.
By: Doctorow, E. L., 1931-
A tale inspired by a true story finds the blind Homer Collyer closeted within a once-grand Fifth Avenue mansion with his damaged brother and remembering a life marked by colorful characters, political events, and technological achievements.
By: Doig, Ivan.
Hired as a housekeeper to work on the early 1900s Montana homestead of widower Oliver Milliron, the irreverent and perpetually whistling Rose and her font-of-knowledge brother, Morris, endeavor to educate the widower's reluctant sons while witnessing local efforts on a massive irrigation project. Reader's Guide available. Reprint.
By: Ellison, Ralph.
A Black man's search for success and the American dream leads him out of college to Harlem and a growing sense of personal rejection and social invisibility
By: Felt, Hali.
A portrait of the enigmatic 20th-century geologist who was the first person to map the ocean floor describes her gender battles at male-dominated, mid-20th-century Columbia University, the artistry and science that informed her work and her contributions to the establishment of the Lamont Geological Observatory. 30,000 first printing.
By: Fountain, Ben.
A satire set in Texas during America's war in Iraq that explores the gaping national disconnect between the war at home and the war abroad. Follows the surviving members of the heroic Bravo Squad through one exhausting stop in their media-intensive "Victory Tour" at Texas Stadium, football mecca of the Dallas Cowboys, their fans, promoters, and cheerleaders.
By: Friedan, Betty
A fiftieth anniversary edition of the trailblazing women's reference shares anecdotes and interviews that were originally collected in the early 1960s to inspire women to develop their intellectual capabilities and reclaim lives beyond period conventions.
By: Gordon, Jaimy
At the rock-bottom end of the sport of kings sits the ruthless and often violent world of cheap horse racing, where trainers and jockeys, grooms and hotwalkers, loan sharks and touts all struggle to take an edge, or prove their luck, or just survive. Equal parts Nathanael West, Damon Runyon and Eudora Welty, Lord of Misrule follows five characters, scarred and lonely dreamers in the American grain, through a year and four races at Indian Mount Downs, downriver from Wheeling, West Virginia
By: Hurston, Zora Neale
When independent Janie Crawford returns home, her small African-American community begins to buzz with gossip about the outcome of her affair with a younger man, in a novel set in the 1930s South
By: July, Miranda
The creator and star of Me and You and Everyone We Know presents a collection of short works featuring profoundly sympathetic protagonists whose inherent sensitivities render them particularly vulnerable to unexpected events.
By: Kerouac, Jack
Follows the counterculture escapades of members of the Beat generation as they seek pleasure and meaning while traveling coast to coast.
By: Lawson, Jenny
In an illustrated memoir, the creator of the Bloggess blog shares humorous stories from her life, including her awkward upbringing in Texas and her relationship with her husband
By: Le Guin, Ursula
Shevek, a brilliant physicist attempts to reunite two planets cut off from each other by centuries of distrust.
By: McCann, Colum
A rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s. A radical young Irish monk struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief.
