Catalog Search Results
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Summary
"Plants, borders, and various horticultural paraphernalia make surprisingly frequent appearances in mystery plots. In this wide-ranging survey of classic and contemporary murder fiction, Marta looks at the detectives, motives, methods, opportunities, and writers that have used the garden as their point of departure. The result is a diverting and eye-opening study that deepens our appreciation of the great crime fiction writers while illuminating the...
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Summary
"1851: a year of political unrest and social inequality, industrial progress and artistic innovation, it is also a turbulent year in the private life of Charles Dickens, as he copes with a double bereavement and a home in danger of falling apart. But this formative year will become perhaps the greatest turning point in his life and writing, as he embraces his calling as a chronicler of ordinary people's lives and establishes himself as an important...
Author
Series
Lexile Measure
1110L
Appears on list
Summary
This volume "really contains two books: a fondly sardonic autobiography and a tough-love lesson for aspiring novelists", written by American author of contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy, Stephen King (b. 1947). The first third of the book contains King's memoir, which includes heartfelt tidbits about his brother, mother and his long battles with alcohol and drug addiction. The second part of the book, "On Writing, " is where...
Author
Summary
"From the award-winning biographer of Chaucer, the story of his most popular and scandalous character, from the Middle Ages to #MeToo Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognizably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers-from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched...
Author
Formats
Summary
In this ambitious successor to The Great Derangement, acclaimed writer Amitav Ghosh finds the origins of our contemporary climate crisis in Western colonialism's violent exploitation of human life and the natural environment.
A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh's new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean....
A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh's new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean....
Author
Summary
Drawing on her experiences as a woman and voracious reader in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a multi-award-winning New York Times best-selling author explores the most probing questions of our time, arming readers with a resistance reading list that includes Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, James Baldwin, and Margaret Atwood.
8) The waves
Author
Pub. Date
c[1931]
Summary
The Waves by an English writer, who is considered as one of the most important modernist 20th Century authors and also a pioneer in the use of the stream of consciousness as a narrative device, Virginia Woolf.
It is an experimental novel which is considered a key text of the Modernist literary movement. Interspersed with lyrical descriptions of waves breaking against the shoreline, the novel traces the intertwining lives of six friends from childhood...
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Summary
"From the New York Times bestselling author of The Most Dangerous Book, the true story behind the creation of another masterpiece of world literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. The Sinner and The Saint is the deeply researched and immersive tale of how Dostoevsky came to write this great murder story-and why it changed the world. As a young man, Dostoevsky was a celebrated writer, but his involvement with the radical politics of his...
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Summary
"Curious readers and fans of monsters and the macabre, get ready to bulk up your TBR piles! Sadie "Mother Horror" Hartmann has curated the best selection of modern horror books, including plenty of deep cuts. Indulge your heart's darkest desires to be terrified, unsettled, disgusted, and heartbroken with stories that span everything from paranormal hauntings and creepy death cults to small-town terrors and apocalyptic disasters. Each recommendation...
11) As I lay dying
Author
Series
Vintage books volume V-254
Lexile Measure
870L
Formats
Summary
The members of a southern family contribute their individual tribulations encompassing impression of rural poverty.
Author
Series
Formats
Summary
Describes how the "protagonists of folklore and religion enact simultaneously the various phases of their common story" and relates "their timeless symbols to those rediscovered in dream by contemporary depth psychology."
Joseph Campbell presents the composite hero. Apollo, the Frog King of the fairy tale, Wotan, the Buddha, and numerous other protagonists of folklore and religion, enact simultaneously the various phases of their common story. The...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
[2020]
Summary
What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work--over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. This little history is about some that have not. John Carey tells the stories behind the world's greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago...
14) Holy the firm
Author
Pub. Date
c1977
Summary
In 1975 Annie Dillard took up residence on an island in Puget Sound in a wooded room furnished with "one enormous window, one cat, one spider and one person." For the next two years she asked herself questions about time, reality, sacrifice death, and the will of God. In Holy the Firm she writes about a moth consumed in a candle flame, about a seven-year-old girl burned in an airplane accident, about a baptism on a cold beach. But behind the moving...
16) King Richard II
Author
Summary
"Not all the water in the rough rude sea/Can wash the balm off from an anointed king," declares the soon-to-be deposed ruler of this historical drama. Confident in his divine right, Richard II is an ineffective and unpopular king who abuses his power and sows the seeds of his own downfall. Toppled from the throne by Henry, his ambitious cousin, Richard only learns to value kingship after he loses it, achieving a tragic dignity only with his downfall....
Author
Summary
Thornton W. Burgess was an important and influential American conservationist and a prolific author of charming and witty children's stories. For over 50 years, Burgess published numerous popular books on the flora and fauna of the natural world and wrote a regular newspaper column called "Bedtime Stories". Often affectionately referred to as the "Bedtime Story-Man", Burgess celebrated his love for the natural world through humorous and educational...
Author
Lexile Measure
1020L
Appears on list
Summary
In the wake of her mother's death, Cheryl Strayed's family scattered and her marriage was destroyed. Four years later, twenty-six years old with nothing to lose, Cheryl made the decision to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert to Washington State - alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker and the trail was little more than an idea. But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone.
19) The face of war
Author
Summary
"Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) was a war correspondent for nearly fifty years. From the Spanish Civil War in 1937 through the wars in Central America in the mid-eighties, her candid reports reflected her feelings for people no matter what their political ideologies, and the openness and vulnerability of her conscience. "I wrote very fast, as I had to, " she says, "afraid that I would forget the exact sound, smell, words, gestures, which were special...
Author
Summary
Tremendous Trifles is comprised of 39 chapters, each functioning as their own essay or story. With whimsical, light-hearted prose, vivid figurative language, and unparalleled insight, Chesterton covers a variety of philosophical principles of everyday life. Chesterton often used ordinary events and objects to explain deeper matters. Using relatable and accessible examples, Tremendous Trifles also test biases and preconceived ideas, specifically in...