West


Carys Davies - 2018
    Written with compassionate tenderness and magical thinking, it explores the courage of conviction, the transformative power of grief, the desire for knowledge and the pull of home, from an exceptionally talented and original British writer. It is a radiant and timeless epic-in-miniature, an eerie, electric monument to possibility.

It Can't Happen Here


Sinclair Lewis - 1935
    Written during the Great Depression when America was largely oblivious to Hitler's aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a President who becomes a dictator to "save the nation." Now finally back in print, It Can't Happen Here remains uniquely important, a shockingly prescient novel that's as fresh and contemporary as today's news.

Father and I Were Ranchers


Ralph Moody - 1950
    Through his eyes, the pleasures and perils of ranching in the early twentieth century are experienced... auctions and roundups, family picnics, irrigation wars, tornadoes and wind storms all give authentic color to Little Britches. So do wonderfully told adventures, which equip Ralph to take his father's place when it becomes necessary.Newly republished in a hardcover edition with a 1950s cover, jacket and pictorial endpages. Interior illustrations by Edward Shenton.

Ashenden


W. Somerset Maugham - 1927
    Multilingual and knowledgeable about many European countries, he was dispatched by the Secret Service to Lucerne - under the guise of completing a play. An assignment whose danger and drama appealed both to his sense of romance and of the ridiculous. A collection of stories rooted in Maugham's own experiences as an agent, reflecting the ruthlessness and brutality of espionage, its intrigue and treachery, as well as its absurdity.

Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings


Jonathan Swift - 1962
    Rediscover the immortal story of Lemuel Gulliver and his fantastic voyage. Join him on his journey to the land of the six-inch-high Lilliputians...and into the royal court of the sixty-foot-tall Brobdingnagians. Ascend with him to the flying island of Laputa, whose inhabitants are endowed with uncommon intelligence, but no common sense at all. And follow him into the world of the Houyhnhnms, a race of civilized horses -- lords and masters of the brutish human Yahoos. The tale of a lifetime, "Gulliver's Travels" is filled with action, romance, danger, satirical wit, timeless wisdom, and the high drama only a classic of this caliber can convey. Set sail!

The Warden


Anthony Trollope - 1855
    Harding, a clergyman of great personal integrity who is nevertheless in possession of an income from a charity far in excess of the sum devoted to the purposes of the foundation. On discovering this, young John Bold turns his reforming zeal to exposing what he regards as an abuse of privilege, despite the fact that he is in love with Mr. Harding's daughter Eleanor. It was a highly topical novel (a case regarding the misapplication of church funds was the scandalous subject of contemporary debate), but like other great Victorian novelists, Trollope uses the specific case to explore and illuminate the universal complexities of human motivation and social morality

The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters


Robert Lewis Taylor - 1958
    This million-copy Pulitzer Prize-winning classic details the journey of Jaimie and his father from Kentucky to gold-rush California.

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ


Lew Wallace - 1880
    This faithful New Testament tale combines the events of the life of Jesus with grand historical spectacle in the exciting story of Judah of the House of Hur, a man who finds extraordinary redemption for himself and his family.A classic of faith, fortitude, and inspiration.

The Brothers K


David James Duncan - 1992
    It is a stunning work: a complex tapestry of family tensions, baseball, politics and religion, by turns hilariously funny and agonizingly sad. Highly inventive formally, the novel is mainly narrated by Kincaid Chance, the youngest son in a family of four boys and identical twin girls, the children of Hugh Chance, a discouraged minor-league ballplayer whose once-promising career was curtained by an industrial accident, and his wife Laura, an increasingly fanatical Seventh-Day Adventist. The plot traces the working-out of the family's fate from the beginning of the Eisenhower years through the traumas of Vietnam.

Novels 1881–1886: Washington Square / The Portrait of a Lady / The Bostonians


Henry James - 1886
    Studies in the exercise of power that marks relations between sexes, classes, and cultures, they show James’s special solicitude for the young heroines who occupy the center of his fictional world.Washington Square (1880) examines the life of Catherine Sloper, a plain, sweet, young woman who lives imprisoned by the selfishness of those close to her: her lover, who cares only for her fortune; her aunt, who meddles for the sake of romantic intrigue; and her protective father, who repays her adoration with irony and wit. Set in the New York of the 1840s, Washington Square evokes the still-intimate city of James’s childhood while presenting a frightening moral lesson in the human consequences of manipulation and indifference.The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is the story of Isabel Archer, a beautiful, idealistic, and inexperienced American woman who is made wealthy by her uncle at the instigation of her dying cousin. Surrounded by the seductive pleasures of nineteenth-century Europe, she preserves her idealism despite involvement with some who would divert her life to uses of their own—Caspar Goodwood, virile American captain of industry; Lord Warburton, scion of British aristocracy; Gilbert Osmond, connoisseur and collector of beautiful objects; Madame Merle, subtle and charming expatriate of unknown connections, and indomitable Henrietta Stackpole, roving journalist and steadfast friend. James’s many-layered masterpiece concerns the perilous American pursuit of individual freedom.The Bostonians (1886) presents an unusual contest for the affections of Verena Tarrant, the lovely, naïve, and pliant daughter of a mesmerist lecturer. She is courted by two cousins: Basil Ransom, an impractical Mississippi landowner now pursuing a meager New York legal practice, and Olive Chancellor, a rich young Boston feminist. Against the richly textured backdrop of Boston and New York society, they enact a drama of confused identity and willful calculation that demonstrates the power and the perils engendered by the refusal of self-knowledge.

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History


S.C. Gwynne - 2010
    C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second entails one of the most remarkable narratives ever to come out of the Old West: the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son Quanah, who became the last and greatest chief of the Comanches. Although readers may be more familiar with the tribal names Apache and Sioux, it was in fact the legendary fighting ability of the Comanches that determined just how and when the American West opened up. Comanche boys became adept bareback riders by age six; full Comanche braves were considered the best horsemen who ever rode. They were so masterful at war and so skillful with their arrows and lances that they stopped the northern drive of colonial Spain from Mexico and halted the French expansion westward from Louisiana. White settlers arriving in Texas from the eastern United States were surprised to find the frontier being rolled backward by Comanches incensed by the invasion of their tribal lands. So effective were the Comanches that they forced the creation of the Texas Rangers and account for the advent of the new weapon specifically designed to fight them: the six-gun. The war with the Comanches lasted four decades, in effect holding up the development of the new American nation. Gwynne’s exhilarating account delivers a sweeping narrative that encompasses Spanish colonialism, the Civil War, the destruction of the buffalo herds, and the arrival of the railroads—a historical feast for anyone interested in how the United States came into being. Against this backdrop Gwynne presents the compelling drama of Cynthia Ann Parker, a lovely nine-year-old girl with cornflower-blue eyes who was kidnapped by Comanches from the far Texas frontier in 1836. She grew to love her captors and became infamous as the "White Squaw" who refused to return until her tragic capture by Texas Rangers in 1860. More famous still was her son Quanah, a warrior who was never defeated and whose guerrilla wars in the Texas Panhandle made him a legend. S. C. Gwynne’s account of these events is meticulously researched, intellectually provocative, and, above all, thrillingly told.

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West


Cormac McCarthy - 1985
    Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.

Tanglewood Tales: A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys


Nathaniel Hawthorne - 1851
    Hawthorne wrote these stories for children based on Greek myth and legend. They are incomparable retellings of themes which the Greek dramatists used in creating their immortal plays and literature. Contents: The Gorgon's Head; The Golden Touch; The Paradise of Children; The Three Golden Apples; The Miraculous Pitcher; The Chimaera; The Wayside; The Minotaur; The Pygmies; The Dragon's Teeth; Circe's Palace; The Pomegranate Seeds; and The Golden Fleece.

My Man Jeeves


P.G. Wodehouse - 1919
    My Man Jeeves is sure to please anyone with a taste for pithy buffoonery, moronic misunderstandings, gaffes, and aristocratic slapstick.Contents:"Leave It to Jeeves""Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest" "Jeeves and the Hard-boiled Egg" "Absent Treatment""Helping Freddie""Rallying Round Old George""Doing Clarence a Bit of Good""The Aunt and the Sluggard"Of the eight stories in the collection, half feature the popular characters Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, while the others concern Reggie Pepper, an early prototype for Bertie Wooster.Revised versions of all the Jeeves stories in this collection were later published in the 1925 short story collection Carry On, Jeeves. One of the Reggie Pepper stories in this collection was later rewritten as a Jeeves story, which was also included in Carry On, Jeeves.

Citizens Creek


Lalita Tademy - 2014
    Cow Tom, born into slavery in Alabama in 1810 and sold to a Creek Indian chief before his tenth birthday, possessed an extraordinary gift: the ability to master languages. As the new country developed westward, and Indians, settlers, and blacks came into constant contact, Cow Tom became a key translator for his Creek master and was hired out to US military generals. His talent earned him money--but would it also grant him freedom? And what would become of him and his family in the aftermath of the Civil War and the Indian Removal westward? Cow Tom's legacy lives on--especially in the courageous spirit of his granddaughter Rose. She rises to leadership of the family as they struggle against political and societal hostility intent on keeping blacks and Indians oppressed. But through it all, her grandfather's indelible mark of courage inspires her--in mind, in spirit, and in a family legacy that never dies. Written in two parts portraying the parallel lives of Cow Tom and Rose, Citizens Creek is a beautifully rendered novel that takes the reader deep into a little known chapter of American history. It is a breathtaking tale of identity, community, family--and above all, the power of an individual's will to make a difference.