Emma (Carlin Sappenfield) by Jane Austen (Editor); Dorothy McMillan (Editor); Richard Cronin (Editor)Emma is Austen's most technically accomplished novel, with a hidden plot, the full implications of which are only revealed by a second reading. It is here presented for the first time with a full scholarly apparatus. The text retains the spelling and the punctuation of the first edition of 1816, allowing readers to see the novel as Austen's contemporaries first encountered it. This volume, first published in 2005, provides comprehensive explanatory notes, an extensive critical introduction covering the context and publication history of the work, a chronology of Austen's life and an authoritative textual apparatus.
Call Number: Central Library: PR4034 .E5 2005
ISBN: 9780521824378
The Handmaid's Tale (Robbi De Peri) by Margaret AtwoodThe seminal work of speculative fiction from the Booker Prize-winning, soon to be a Hulu series starring Elizabeth Moss, Samira Wiley, and Joseph Fiennes. Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the days before, when she lived and made love with her husband Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now.... Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and literary tour de force.
Hospital Sketches (Valerie Hotchkiss) by Louisa May Alcott; Alice FahsSeveral years before Louisa May Alcott createdLittle Women(1868), her most well known novel, she worked as a nurse at a soldiers' hospital in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War. Drawing on that experience, Alcott wroteHospital Sketches(1863), a vivid account that offers rich insights into women's wartime roles, the shocking conditions in soldiers' hospitals, the lives of the soldiers themselves, and the racial prejudice of the time. Part of a vast outpouring of popular Civil War literature published during the conflict,Hospital Sketchestells us much about mid-nineteenth-century literary culture and the ways in which the war was re-created in literature for the reading public in the North. Alice Fahs's introduction supplies biographical, literary, and historical context for Alcott's work. Illustrations, a chronology, questions for consideration, and a selected bibliography add to the volume's value.
Call Number: Central Library: E621 .A34 1960
ISBN: 9780312260286
Madame Bovary (Leslie Foutch) by Gustave Flaubert; Mildred Marmur (Translator)Madame Bovary (1856) is the French writer Gustave Flaubert's debut novel. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. Though the basic plot is rather simple, even archetypal, the novel's true art lies in its details and hidden patterns. Flaubert was a notorious perfectionist and claimed always to be searching for le mot juste ("the precise word"). When it was first serialized in La Revue de Paris between 1 October 1856 and 15 December 1856, the novel was attacked for obscenity by public prosecutors. The resulting trial, held in January 1857, made the story notorious. After Flaubert's acquittal on 7 February 1857, Madame Bovary became a bestseller when it was published as a single volume in April 1857. The novel is now considered Flaubert's masterpiece, as well as a seminal work of realism and one of the most influential novels ever written.
Call Number: Central Library: PQ2246 .M2 E5 1997
ISBN: 0385487193
Who Fears Death (Deborah Lilton) by Nnedi OkoraforRead Nnedi Okorafor's posts on the Penguin Blog. An award-winning literary author presents her first foray into supernatural fantasy with a novel of post-apocalyptic Africa. In a far future, post-nuclear-holocaust Africa, genocide plagues one region. The aggressors, the Nuru, have decided to follow the Great Book and exterminate the Okeke. But when the only surviving member of a slain Okeke village is brutally raped, she manages to escape, wandering farther into the desert. She gives birth to a baby girl with hair and skin the color of sand and instinctively knows that her daughter is different. She names her daughter Onyesonwu, which means "Who Fears Death?" in an ancient African tongue. Reared under the tutelage of a mysterious and traditional shaman, Onyesonwu discovers her magical destiny-to end the genocide of her people. The journey to fulfill her destiny will force her to grapple with nature, tradition, history, true love, the spiritual mysteries of her culture-and eventually death itself.
Call Number: Central Library: PS3615 .K67 W48 2010
ISBN: 9780756406172
A Year in Provence (Deborah Schander) by Peter Mayle; Judith Clancy (Illustrator)National Bestseller In this witty and warm-hearted account, Peter Mayle tells what it is like to realize a long-cherished dream and actually move into a 200-year-old stone farmhouse in the remote country of the Lub#65533;ron with his wife and two large dogs. He endures January's frosty mistral as it comes howling down the Rh#65533;ne Valley, discovers the secrets of goat racing through the middle of town, and delights in the glorious regional cuisine. A Year in Provence transports us into all the earthy pleasures of Proven#65533;al life and lets us live vicariously at a tempo governed by seasons, not by days.
Call Number: Central LIbrary: DC611 .P961 M38 1991
ISBN: 9780679731146
The Grapes of Wrath (Sara Manus) by John Steinbeck; Robert DeMott (Introduction by)The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized--and sometimes outraged--millions of readers. First published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads--driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man's fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman's stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck's powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics. This Penguin Classics edition contains an introduction and notes by Steinbeck scholar Robert Demott. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Call Number: Central Library: PS3537 .T3234 G8 1967
ISBN: 0143039431
Homegoing (Sara Byrd) by Yaa GyasiA novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction. Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia's descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.
Call Number: Central Library: PS3607 .Y37 H66 2016
ISBN: 9781101947135
Hospital Sketches (Valerie Hotchkiss) by Louisa May Alcott; Alice FahsSeveral years before Louisa May Alcott createdLittle Women(1868), her most well known novel, she worked as a nurse at a soldiers' hospital in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War. Drawing on that experience, Alcott wroteHospital Sketches(1863), a vivid account that offers rich insights into women's wartime roles, the shocking conditions in soldiers' hospitals, the lives of the soldiers themselves, and the racial prejudice of the time. Part of a vast outpouring of popular Civil War literature published during the conflict,Hospital Sketchestells us much about mid-nineteenth-century literary culture and the ways in which the war was re-created in literature for the reading public in the North. Alice Fahs's introduction supplies biographical, literary, and historical context for Alcott's work. Illustrations, a chronology, questions for consideration, and a selected bibliography add to the volume's value.
Call Number: Central Library: E621 .A34 1960
ISBN: 9780312260286
Lucky Jim (Bobby Smiley) by Kingsley Amis; David Lodge (Introduction by)Jim Dixon has accidentally fallen into a job at one of Britain's new red brick universities. A moderately successful future in the history department beckons -- as long as Jim can survive a madrigal-singing weekend at Professor Welch's, deliver a lecture on Merrie England, and resist Christine, the hopelessly desirable girlfriend of Welch's awful son Bertrand.
Call Number: Central Library: PZ4 .A517 Lu
ISBN: 9780142180143
The Shadow of the Wind (Ramona Romero) by Carlos Ruiz Zafón; Lucia Graves (Translator)Barcelona, 1945—just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes on his eleventh birthday to find that he can no longer remember his mother’s face. To console his only child, Daniel’s widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelona’s guild of rare-book dealers as a repository for books forgotten by the world, waiting for someone who will care about them again. Daniel’s father coaxes him to choose a volume from the spiraling labyrinth of shelves, one that, it is said, will have a special meaning for him. And Daniel so loves the novel he selects, The Shadow of the Wind by one Julian Carax, that he sets out to find the rest of Carax’s work. To his shock, he discovers that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book this author has written. In fact, he may have the last one in existence. Before Daniel knows it his seemingly innocent quest has opened a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets, an epic story of murder, magic, madness and doomed love. And before long he realizes that if he doesn’t find out the truth about Julian Carax, he and those closest to him will suffer horribly. As with all astounding novels, The Shadow of the Wind sends the mind groping for comparisons —The Crimson Petal and the White? The novels of Arturo Pérez-Reverte? Of Victor Hugo? Love in the Time of Cholera?—but in the end, as with all astounding novels, no comparison can suffice. As one leading Spanish reviewer wrote, “The originality of Ruiz Zafón’s voice is bombproof and displays a diabolical talent. The Shadow of the Wind announces a phenomenon in Spanish literature.” An uncannily absorbing historical mystery, a heart-piercing romance, and a moving homage to the mystical power of books, The Shadow of the Wind is a triumph of the storyteller’s art.
Call Number: Central Library: PQ6668 .U49 S6613 2004
ISBN: 1594200106
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Yvonne Boyer) by Alan BradleyIt is the summer of 1950–and at the once-grand mansion of Buckshaw, young Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison, is intrigued by a series of inexplicable events: A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Then, hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath. For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. “I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.”
Call Number: Central Library: PR9199.4 .B7324 S94 2010
ISBN: 9780385343497
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