Catalog Search Results
21) The summer book
Author
Language
English
Description
"This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia's grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland." -- Publisher's description.
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Buffalo. A father's funeral. Memory. In Generations, Louise Clifton's formidable poetic gift emerges in prose, giving us a memoir of stark and profound beauty. Her story focuses on the lives of the Sayles family: Caroline, "born among the Dahomey people in 1822," who walked north from New Orleans to Virginia in 1830 when she was eight years old; Lucy, the first black woman to be hanged in Virginia; and Gene, born with a withered arm, the son of a...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Call it Zen and the Art of Farming or a Little Green Book, Masanobu Fukuoka's manifesto about farming, eating, and the limits of human knowledge presents a radical challenge to the global systems we rely on for our food. At the same time, it is a spiritual memoir of a man whose innovative system of cultivating the earth reflects a deep faith in the wholeness and balance of the natural world. As Wendell Berry writes in his preface, the book 'is valuable...
Author
Language
English
Description
Singapore, 1939: life on the eve of World War II just isn't what it used to be for Walter Blackett, head of British Singapore's oldest and most powerful firm. No matter how forcefully the police break one strike, the natives go on strike somewhere else. His daughter keeps entangling herself with the most unsuitable beaus, while her intended match, the son of Blackett's partner, is an idealistic sympathizer with the League of Nations and a vegetarian....
Author
Language
English
Description
"Los Angeles in the late 1940s is a city of promise and prosperity, but not for former fighter pilot Dix Steele. To his mind nothing has come close to matching 'that feeling of power and exhilaration and freedom that came with loneness in the sky.' He prowls the foggy city night -- Ưbus stops and stretches of darkened beaches and movie houses just emptying out -- seeking solitary young women. His funds are running out and his frustrations are growing....
29) The murderess
Author
Language
English
Description
"A bone-chilling tale of crime and punishment with the dark beauty of a backwoods ballad. Set on the dirt-poor Aegean island of Skiathos, it is the story of Hadoula, an old woman living on the margins of society and at the outer limits of respectability. Hadoula knows about herbs and their hidden properties, and women come to her when they need help. She knows women's secrets and she knows the misery of their lives, and as the book begins, she is...
Author
Language
English
Description
"I told Helen my story and she went home and cried" begins Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. But Barbara Comyns's beguiling novel is far from maudlin, despite the ostensibly harrowing ordeals its heroine endures. Sophia is twenty-one when she marries fellow artist Charles, and she seems to have nearly as much affection for her pet newt as she does for her husband. Her housekeeping knowledge is lacking (everything she cooks tastes of soap) and she attributes...
31) Pitch dark
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"'What's new. What else. What next. What's happened here.' Pitch Dark, Renata Adler's follow-up to her prizewinning novel Speedboat, is a book of questions. It is also a book of false starts, red herrings, misunderstandings, and all-too-fleeting revelations. Kate Ennis is poised at a critical moment in her affair with a married lover, a fraught relationship that reverberates throughout the novel, as it moves from Kate's house in rural Connecticut...
Author
Language
English
Description
"When World War I broke out the author of ''Buddenbrooks'' was almost 40 but not yet in the public view one of the giants of European literature. In his native Germany it was thought that Gerhart Hauptmann and probably a few of his elder contemporaries were towering above him. But he already had a reputation as one of the most interesting writers in Europe and as a moralist from whom his many readers expected a message in a time of great trials. His...
33) Pinocchio
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Pinocchio, a wooden puppet full of tricks and mischief, with a talent for getting into and out of trouble, wants more than anything else to become a real boy.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Think you know cats? Here is the domesticated feline in history, folklore, art, theater, fiction, poetry, music, the law, and even the occult. The author includes a list of more than 300 references to cats in literature, from the British Medical Journal and Darwin to Baudelaire and Mark Twain. A classic in the genre.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Children is a masterpiece not only of the nineteenth century but of the whole of Russian literature, a book full to bursting with life. It is a novel about the relations between the young and the old, about love, families, politics, religion, about strong beliefs and heated disagreements, illness and death. It is about the clash between liberals and conservatives, revolutionaries and reactionaries. At the time of its publication...
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Pub. Date
[1992]
Language
English
Description
"Jorge Luis Borges declared The Invention of Morel a masterpiece of plotting, comparable to The Turn of The Screw and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Set on a mysterious island, Bioy's novella is a story of suspense and exploration, as well as a wonderfully unlikely romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious." "Inspired by Bioy Casares's fascination with the movie star Lousie Brooks, The Invention of Morel has...
Author
Language
English
Description
The four women at the center of The Enchanted April are alike only in their dissatisfaction with their everyday lives. They find each other--and the castle of their dreams--through a classified ad in a London newspaper one rainy February afternoon. The ladies expect a pleasant holiday, but they don't anticipate that the month they spend in Portofino will reintroduce them to their true natures and reacquaint them with joy.
39) Jakob von Gunten
Author
Publisher
New York Review of Books
Pub. Date
1999.
Language
English
Description
Jakob von Gunten is a seventeen-year-old runaway who enrolls in a school for servants. The Institute is a deeply mysterious place: the faculty lies asleep in a single room; the students, though subject to fierce discipline, come and go at will. Jakob, a spirited and subversive presence, keeps a journal in which he records his quirky impressions of the school, as well as his own enthusiasms and uncertainties, deliberations and dreams. And in the end,...
40) To each his own
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Pub. Date
2000.
Language
English
Description
"This letter is your death sentence. To avenge what you have done you will die." But what has Manno the pharmacist done? Nothing that he can think of. He takes the letter as a joke. The next day he and his hunting companion are both dead. The police investigation is inconclusive. However, Professor Laurana, a modest high school teacher with a literary bent, has noticed a clue that, he believes, will allow him to trace the killer. Patiently, methodically,...
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