Best of
Adult

1974

Butterfly


Kathryn Harvey - 1974
    Only the most beautiful and powerful women in Beverly Hills are invited to join... JESSICA--The lawyer, who longs for the days when men were men, and women dressed to please them.TRUDIE--The builder, who wants a man who will challenge her --all of her--with no holds barred.LINDA--The surgeon, who uses masks to unmask the desires she hides even from herself.But the most mysterious of them all is the woman who created Butterfly. She has changed her name, her accent, even her face to hide her true identity. And now she is about to reveal everything to realize the dream that has driven her since childhood.

Our John Willie


Catherine Cookson - 1974
    Eccentric Miss Peamarsh offers a chance for a new future - but then Davy stumbles across a horrifying secret from Miss Peamarsh's past and it could ruin everything.

Christmas in Purgatory: A Photographic Essay on Mental Retardation


Burton Blatt - 1974
    This classic photo essay of legally sanctioned human abuse in state institutions was written and photographed (1965) long before the current right-to-treatment lawsuits on behalf of institutionalized people.

Carrie


Stephen King - 1974
    The story of misunderstood high school girl Carrie White, her extraordinary telekinetic powers, and her violent rampage of revenge, remains one of the most barrier-breaking and shocking novels of all time.Make a date with terror and live the nightmare that is...Carrie--back cover

Bright Candles: a novel of the Danish resistance


Nathaniel Benchley - 1974
    A DEFIANCE THAT SAW NO SLACKING UNTIL CANDLES COULD SHINE IN DANISH WINDOWS AGAIN

Eighteen Short Songs of the Bitter Motherland


Yiannis Ritsos - 1974
    

Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974


Adrienne Rich - 1974
    

Laura Wilder of Mansfield


William Anderson - 1974
    

The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard Devoto


Wallace Stegner - 1974
    "He was precocious, alert, intelligent, brash, challenging, irreverent, literary, self-conscious, insecure, often ostentatiously crude, sometimes insufferable," Wallace Stegner says of Bernard DeVoto, who, in the words of a childhood acquaintance, was also "the ugliest, most disagreeable boy you ever saw." Between the disagreeable boy and the literary lion, a life unfolds, full of comedy and drama, as told in this definitive biography, which brings together two exemplary American men of letters. Born within a dozen years of one another in small towns in Utah, both men were, as Stegner writes, "novelists by intention, teachers by necessity, and historians by the sheer compulsion of the region that shaped us." From this unique vantage point, Stegner follows DeVoto's path from his beloved but not particularly congenial Utah to the even less congenial Harvard where, galvanized by the disregard of the aesthetes around him, he commenced a career that, over three and a half decades, would embrace nearly every sort of literary enterprise: from modestly successful novels to prize-winning Western histories, from the editorship of the Saturday Review to a famously combative, long-running monthly column in Harper's, "The Easy Chair." A nuanced portrait of a stormy literary life, Stegner's biography of DeVoto is also a window on the tumultuous world of American letters in the twentieth century.

The Snoopy Festival


Charles M. Schulz - 1974
    Snoopy Cartoons: Over 600 black-and-white strips and 96 pages full color

Roughing It Easy: A Unique Ideabook for Camping and Cooking


Dian Thomas - 1974
    Provides instructions for first aid and fire and campsite building as well as the preparation of simple and elaborate camp meals.

Mary Dove


Jane Gilmore Rushing - 1974
    One sparkling October day it happens. The inevitable stranger rides in off the plains, and Mary Dove does what she had always promised her father she would—she shoots.Yet compassion overcomes Mary's fear. In remorse, she tends to the wounded stranger, and what follows is their tentative discovery of each other and a love story that weaves universal and timeless themes.The mother who died before Mary Dove could know her was African-American. And so completely has Mary Dove's father sheltered her that she cannot begin to comprehend what society would so cruelly teach her. Archetypal in their blamelessness and in how deeply they must suffer for their love, Mary Dove and her cowboy, "Red" Christopher Columbus Jones, are so thoroughly West Texan that they prove Rushing's mastery of character and place."Get away," she said"Now I ain't gonna hurt you," he said, "and I don't want to know nothing about you that you don't want to tell." He came a step closer."Stop right now," she said, "or I'll shoot.""You wouldn't," he said.He was so nearly right. She believed what he said—or nearly. But she had been afraid so long. And wasn't it a law of God to do what your father said? She trembled, looking into his smiling blue eyes. It would have been easier if he had been preparing to pounce, like the panther, or striking, like the snake. The rifle barrel dropped, a little. "I knew you wouldn't," he said, taking another step towards her."I have to," she said, and with a terrible struggle to hold the gun steady, she fired.