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A Vote of Confidence


Robin Lee Hatcher - 2009
    For seven years, she's carved out an independent life in the bustling town of Bethlehem Springs, Idaho, teaching piano and writing for the local newspaper. But now she's a single woman running for mayor—and in 1915 this decision is bound to stir up trouble.Morgan McKinley is fed up with the delays that hinder the construction of New Hope Health Spa, a place where both rich and poor can come for rest and healing. New to the area, he has determined that serving as mayor would help him push through his agenda for progress.Gwen and Morgan each want to prove they are the most qualified candidate, not only to voters, but to each other, and so sparks fly as the two campaign. Although Morgan has learned to guard his heart as fiercely as Gwen guards her independence, could they learn to be allies instead of adversaries?This first book in the Sisters of Bethlehem Springs series provides intriguing insights into how women challenged convention and shaped America in the early twentieth century.

The Trouble with Being Born


Emil M. Cioran - 1973
    In all his writing, Cioran cuts to the heart of the human experience.

Boring Postcards


Martin Parr - 1999
    Stale, often dully composed images of corporate headquarters, roadways, bus-station parking lots, convalescent-home dayrooms, hospital cafeterias, and undistinguished motels. But look carefully, and the cards - culled from the collection of artist Martin Parr --are filled with fascinating little details. As a group, they offer readers the interesting opportunity to puzzle over the collective psyche of the people of the 1950s and '60s (the approximate vintage of the images) who were inclined to create, buy, and send these cards. What, one can't help but wonder, could be so scintillating about a room at the Fortes Excelsior Motor Lodge near Pontefract, Yorkshire? The singular force of the orange bedspreads, carpet, drapes, and walls punctuated by the inexplicably white leather upholstered panel attached to the wall unit behind each of the room's beds.The exterior of the Mirfield Modern School, shot at a distance and unimaginatively placed dead in the centre of the grey sky and green playing field? The building's Bauhaus-like lines. The tarmac of Luton Airport in London? The pink jumbo jet being towed into the frame from the left. The uniformly shaped trailers parked at the Freshwater Caravan Camp? The handwritten X that presumably marks the sender's location. The Chalets at Llandanwg? Arguably, not much. The few hundred images here, unfettered by any explanatory text, offer a far from dull diversion for any readers interested in mid-century design or the mundane details of daily life.

Into the Great Wide Open


Kevin Canty - 1996
    Set in the sprawl of suburbia, with its shattered families and hollow lives, Into the Great Wide Open is the story of two young people fleeing their families' emotional abandonment to find refuge in each other.Smart but scarred, Kenny Kolodny yearns to awake from the nightmare of his smashed-up family: his mother is in an institution and forever away; his father is an abusive alcoholic; his brother lives abroad. Seventeen and alone, he hangs on the periphery of his world, until he makes a passionate connection with the troubled, beautiful, fiercely independent Junie Williamson. Kenny discovers in their highly charged, intensely erotic relationship a reality--and a capacity for caring--he has not known before.In prose startling for its diamond-hard edges and bravura lyricism, Kevin Canty revives the heady carnival of adolescence, evoking its confusing emotional landscape and its heightened sensuality, too soon lost. Into the Great Wide Open is a haunting, mesmerizing novel by a writer of deep sensitivity and undeniable talent.

Death in the Garden


Elizabeth Ironside - 1995
    Sixty years later, Diana's grandniece resolves to determine just who did kill George Pollexfen in that sunlit garden between the wars. First U.S. edition.

The Hudson: A History


Tom Lewis - 2005
    This book traces the course of the river through four centuries, recounting the stories of explorers and traders, artists and writers, entrepreneurs and industrialists, ecologists and preservationists—those who have been shaped by the river as well as those who have helped shape it. Their compelling narratives attest to the Hudson River’s distinctive place in American history and the American imagination. Among those who have figured in the history of the Hudson are Benedict Arnold, Alexander Hamilton, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, the Astors and the Vanderbilts, and Thomas Cole of the Hudson River school. Their stories appear here, alongside those of such less famous individuals as the surveyor who found the source of the Hudson and the engineer who tried to build a hydroelectric plant at Storm King Mountain. Inviting us to view the river from a wider perspective than ever before, this entertaining and enlightening book is worthy of its grand subject.

The Prince's Boy


Paul Bailey - 2014
    He has been sent from Bucharest, the city of his childhood, by his wealthy father to embark upon a bohemian adventure and relish the unique pleasures of Parisian life. An innocent in a new city, still grieving the sudden loss of his beloved mother Elena seven years earlier, Dinu is encouraged to enjoy la vie de Bohème by his distant cousin, Eduard. But tentatively, secretly, Dinu is drawn to the Bains du Ballon d’Alsace, a notorious establishment rumoured to offer the men of Paris, married or otherwise, who enjoy something different, everything they crave. It is here that he meets Razvan, a fellow Romanian, the adopted child of a man of refinement – a prince’s boy – whose stories of Proust and other artists entrance Dinu, and who will become the young man’s teacher in the ways of the world. At a distance of forty years, and written in London, his refuge from the horrors of Europe’s early twentieth-century history, Dinu’s memoir of his brief spell in Paris is one of exploration and rediscovery. The love that blossomed that sunlit day in such inauspicious and unromantic surroundings would transcend lust, separation, despair and even death to endure a lifetime.

The Keep


F. Paul Wilson - 1981
    And when an elite SS extermination squad is dispatched to solve the problem, the men find a something that's both powerful and terrifying. Invisible and silent, the enemy selects one victim per night, leaving the bloodless and mutilated corpses behind to terrify its future victims.Panicked, the Nazis bring in a local expert on folklore―who just happens to be Jewish―to shed some light on the mysterious happenings. And unbeknownst to anyone, there is another visitor on his way―a man who awoke from a nightmare and immediately set out to meet his destiny.The battle has begun: On one side, the ultimate evil created by man, and on the other...the unthinkable, unstoppable, unknowing terror that man has inevitably awakened.

The Seamstress


Sara Tuvel Bernstein - 1997
    She was born into a large family in rural Romania and grew up feisty and willing to fight back physically against anti-Semitism from other schoolchildren. She defied her father's orders to turn down a scholarship that took her to Bucharest, and got herself expelled from that school when she responded to a priest/teacher's vicious diatribe against the Jews by hurling a bottle of ink at him. After a series of incidents that ranged from dramatic escapes to a year in a forced labor detachment, Sara ended up in Ravensbruck, a women's concentration camp, and managed to survive. She tells this story with style and power." --Kirkus Reviews

The Green Knight


Iris Murdoch - 1993
    An attempt by the sharp, feral, and uncommonly intelligent Lucas Graffe to murder his sensual and charismatic half-brother Clement is interrupted by a stranger—whom Lucas strikes and leaves for dead. When the stranger mysteriously reappears, with specific demands for reparation, the Graffes’ circle of idiosyncratic family and friends is disrupted—for the demands are bizarre, intrusive, and ultimately fatal.

Good Rockin' Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock 'N' Roll


Colin Escott - 1991
    The early 1950s. The Mississippi rolls by, and there's a train in the night. Down on Beale Street there's hard-edged blues, on the outskirts of town they're pickin' hillbilly boogie.At Sam Phillips' Sun Records studio on Union Avenue, there's something different going on. "Shake it, baby, shake it!" "Go, cat, go!" "We're gonna rock..."This is where rock 'n' roll was born-the record company that launched Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and Carl Perkins. The label that brought the world, "Blue Suede Shoes," "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On," "Breathless," "I Walk the Line," "Mystery Train," "Baby, Let's Play House,' "Good Rockin' Tonight." Good Rockin Tonight is the history, in words and over 240 photographs, of Sam Phillips' legendary storefront studio, from the early days with primal blues artists like Howlin' Wolf and B.B. King to the long nights in the studio with Elvis and Jerry Lee. As colorful and energetic as the music itself, it's a one-of-a-kind book for anyone who wants to know where it all started.

Bad Boy


Jim Thompson - 1953
    And during a childhood spent at the mercy of a father whose schemes put him on the wrong side of the law as often as the right, and a grandfather who knew the bad parts of town like the back of his hand, young Jim learned sin better than any writer had before.From his rabble-rousing adolescencein the American Midwest, to wasted teenage years in the seedy underbelly of the hotel industry, to Thompson's chilling encounter with the real-life inspiration of THE KILLER INSIDE ME, BAD BOY offers a fascinating glimpse at the formative years of the man who would become one of the most famous authors of modern American Noir, in the autobiography-as-novel that follows the birth of the legend himself in the signature style Thompson made famous.

77 Dream Songs


John Berryman - 1964
    This will involve a new jacket design recalling the typographic virtues of the classic Faber poetry covers, connecting the backlist and the new titles within a single embracing cover solution. A major reissue program is scheduled, to include classic individual collections from each decade, some of which have long been unavailable: Wallace Stevens's Harmonium and Ezra Pound's Personae from the 1920s; W.H. Auden's Poems (1930); Robert Lowell's Life Studies from the 1950s; John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs and Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings from the 1960s; Ted Hughes's Gaudete and Seamus Heaney's Field Work from the 1970s; Michael Hofmann's Acrimony and Douglas Dunn's Elegies from the 1980s. Timed to celebrate publication of Seamus Heaney's new collection, Electric Light, the relaunch is intended to re-emphasize the predominance of Faber Poetry, and to celebrate a series which has played a shaping role in the history of modern poetry since its inception in the 1920s.

A Song for Mary: An Irish-American Memory


Dennis Smith - 1999
    Told in the first person, this lyrical remembrance is a powerful odyssey of one young man coming of age in a confusing & sometimes hostile world.

The Flight of Peter Fromm


Martin Gardner - 1973
    His spiritual odyssey is narrated by his mentor, a professor at the divinity school - who is actually a humanist who believes neither in God nor in an afterlife. Although Peter never abandons his theism or his admiration for Jesus, he reaches a point where he feels it would be hypocritical to remain within the church and to become the evangelist he had hoped to be.The counterpoint between Peter and the narrator reflects the eternal conflict between theism and atheism. In following the changes of Peter's beliefs, almost every aspect of Protestant theology and ethics is explored. The evolution of Peter's faith parallels the evolution of Christian theology, from the day of Pentecost to contemporary liberal theology.