The Orphan's Secret


Shirley Dickson - 2021
    Fans of Before We Were Yours, Wives of War and Diney Costelo will be utterly swept away by this heartbreaking – yet beautifully hopeful – World War Two page-turner.England, 1941: Life has always been cruel to Ethel. Raised in an orphanage by a merciless mistress, she never knew the meaning of love. And now she has fallen for the one man she who is forbidden to her – Karl, a German held captive in the local prisoner of war camp. He might be the enemy, but he has her heart.When Ethel discovers she’s pregnant, she is labelled a traitor and shunned by all. The love of her life is torn away from her, but she vows to protect their precious daughter. She gives birth as bombs rain down, to the sound of ear-splitting shrieks and explosions in the distance. But then the planes fly over the house, and the unthinkable happens…A baby girl lies in the rubble, surrounded by broken glass and crumbled brick. The odds are against her, until a woman, Lily, picks up the child from the wreckage. Will she be saved from her mother’s fate or will she forever be a helpless orphan?

My Paris


Gail Scott - 1999
    Not a typical tourist, she prefers indoor spaces, seeing Paris go by on TV or watching from her window the ever-changing displays of men's designer clothing across the boulevard. Or she roams the streets, caught between nostalgia and a competing sense of the present day, between Paris's rich cultural traditions and the realities of Western imperialism. Disillusioned by her inability to reconcile these contradictions and by her own part in perpetuating them, she assembles in her journal pieces of the present, past, of art, philosophy, of herself, and of the world outside her.

Shut Up Shut Down


Mark Nowak - 2004
    He grew up in Buffalo, New York and lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he is active in the labor movement.

Beowulf: A New Translation


Maria Dahvana Headley - 2020
    A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all. These familiar components of the epic poem are seen with a novelist’s eye toward gender, genre, and history. Beowulf has always been a tale of entitlement and encroachment — of powerful men seeking to become more powerful and one woman seeking justice for her child — but this version brings new context to an old story. While crafting her contemporary adaptation, Headley unearthed significant shifts lost over centuries of translation; her Beowulf is one for the twenty-first century.

In the Mecca


Gwendolyn Brooks - 1968
    In The Mecca was nominated for the National Book Award for poetry.

It's Fine By Me


Per Petterson - 1992
    In It's Fine By Me, Arvid befriends a boy named Audun. On Audun's first day of school he refuses to talk or take off his sunglasses; there are stories he would prefer to keep to himself. Audun lives with his mother in a working-class district of Oslo. He delivers newspapers and talks for hours about Jack London and Ernest Hemingway with Arvid. But he's not sure that school is the right path for him and feels that his life holds other possibilities. Sometimes tender, sometimes brutal, It's Fine By Me is a brilliant novel from the acclaimed author of Out Stealing Horses and I Curse the River of Time.

Under Flag


Myung Mi Kim - 1992
    Myung Mi Kim's language is pure and commanding and brings us to a place of grieving we have needed to acknowledge" (Kathleen Fraser). In "Under Flag," winner of the 1991 Multicultural Publishers Book Award, Myung Mi Kim writes in a stark, unflinching voice that alternately drives to the core of painful subject matter and backs off to let beauty speak for itself: "Save the water from rinsing rice for sleek hair / This is what the young women are told, then they're told / Cut off this hair that cedar combs combed / Empty straw sacks and hide under them / Enemy soldiers are approaching..." ("Body As One As History"). The cumulative effect is, according to Ammiel Alcalay, "a poetics which resists being neutralized or categorized."

Ivory Gleam


Priya Dolma Tamang - 2018
    A potpourri of musings assembled with a hint of practical spirituality, to be savoured passably as an oracle of hearts to the many answers, whose questions our minds are yet to comprehend. Ivory Gleam is split into three chapters of learning, longing and loving. Each chapter is a journey traversing a different road to the ultimate destination of self-reflection.

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath


Heather Clark - 2020
    Clark's clear-eyed sympathy for Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath's suicide promotes a deeper understanding of her final days, with their outpouring of first-rate poems. Along with illuminating readings of the poems themselves, Clark's meticulous, compassionate research brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women poets the world over.

Crazy Making


Justin Furstenfeld - 2009
    This amazing package includes Justin's first book spanning over 100 pages and including all lyrics from The Answers through Approaching Normal, and Justin's own thoughts on the how, why and when many of these songs came to life. The perfect companion piece to listen through all of the albums. This is a high quality hard cover, full color book.

The Archivist


Martha Cooley - 1998
    S. Eliot's letters lies at the heart of this emotionally charged novel—a story of marriage and madness, of faith and desire, of jazz-age New York and Europe in the shadow of the Holocaust.

The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story


Rusty Morrison - 2008
    Winner of the 2008 James Laughlin Award. In the aftermath of her father's death, the speaker of Rusty Morrison's exquisitely formed poems takes a step-by-step accounting of her transformation as she reconciles herself to loss. This book-length sequence is the silvery underside of elegy, a lyric of living acceptance paced with the linen texture of right silences. Rusty Morrison's THE TRUE KEEPS CALM BIDING ITS STORY brilliantly restores the energy of telegraphic communication, launching line after line toward a potentially infinite horizon of meaning. Her careful handling of form allows knowing to remain both openly discrete and discretely open. This is a joyous read and a remarkable book--Peter Gizzi.

The Eye Like a Strange Balloon


Mary Jo Bang - 2004
    Beginning with a painting done in 2003, the poems move backwards in time to 1 BC, where an architectural fragment is painted on an architectural fragment, highlighting visual art’s strange relationship between the image and the thing itself. The total effect is exhilarating—a wholly original, personal take on art history coupled with Bang’s sly and elegant commentary on poetry’s enduring subjects: Love, Death, Time and Desire. The recipient of numerous prizes and awards, Bang stands at the front of American poetry with this new work, asking more of the English language, and enticing and challenging the reader.

The Grief We’re Given


William Bortz - 2021
    How are we to learn to grieve when it feels unrelenting? How are we to adore and memorialize small moments of appreciation? How are we to shape our grief into something worth celebrating, and begin to understand the grief we give?

Edgar Allan Poe: A Life From Beginning to End


Hourly History - 2018
    - The Poe Family and the Allan Family - Poe Joins the Military - Poor and Disowned - Writing Career and Famous Works - Poe's Mysterious Death And much more! Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most influential literary figures of all time. He did a lot to change the way people viewed writers and their value. This book dives into the life of this well-known poet and author and explores all the ways he impacted the literary world, both in his own time and up to date. Start reading and be transported back to the nineteenth century to learn about one of the most well-known American writers of all time.