Girl at War


Sara Nović - 2015
    Ten-year-old Ana Jurić is a carefree tomboy who runs the streets of Croatia's capital with her best friend, Luka, takes care of her baby sister, Rahela, and idolizes her father. But as civil war breaks out across Yugoslavia, soccer games and school lessons are supplanted by sniper fire and air raid drills. When tragedy suddenly strikes, Ana is lost to a world of guerilla warfare and child soldiers; a daring escape plan to America becomes her only chance for survival.Ten years later Ana is a college student in New York. She's been hiding her past from her boyfriend, her friends, and most especially herself. Haunted by the events that forever changed her family, she returns alone to Croatia, where she must rediscover the place that was once her home and search for the ghosts of those she's lost.

Classic Irish Short Stories


Frank O'Connor - 1990
    The stories he has chosen, all written between the end of the last century and the 1950s, illustrate his meaning and demonstrate how the style and approach of these writers changed in response, not only to the demands of a developing aesthetic, but also to the social and political conditions of their day. The volume represents the finest writers of their time with their best work, revealing the variety of styles and approaches within the genre, and ranging from the folk tale to the romance, and from the symbolic to the naturalistic. It contains selections by George Moore, Somerville and Ross, Daniel Corkery, James Joyce, James Stephens, Liam O'Flaherty, L.A.G. Strong, Se�n O'Faol�in, Frank O'Connor, Eric Cross, Michael McLaverty, Bryan MacMahon, Mary Lavin, James Plunkett, and Elizabeth Bowen.

3 Summers


Lisa Robertson - 2016
    What is form's time? Here the form of life called a poem speaks with the body's mortality, its thickness, its play. The 10 poem-sequences in 3 Summers inflect a history of textual voices — Lucretius, Marx, Aby Warburg, Deleuze, the Sogdian Sutras — in a lyricism that insists on analysis and revolt, as well as the pleasures of description. The poet explores the mysterious oddness of the body, its languor and persistence, to test how it shapes the materiality of thinking, which includes rivers and forests. But in these poems' landscapes, the time of nature is inherently political. Now only time is wild, and only time — embodied here in Lisa Robertson’s forceful cadences — can tell.‘Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy. . . . Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt. . . . She wields language expertly, even beautifully.’—The New York Times‘Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture.’— The Village VoiceLisa Robertson's books include Cinema of the Present, Debbie: An Epic, The Men, The Weather, R's Boat and Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip was named one of The New York Times' 100 Notable Books. She lives in France.

To a Fault


Nick Laird - 2005
    Journeying between his native Ulster and his adopted London, he balances ideas of home and flight, the need for belonging and the need to remain outside. Formally deft, rhetorically fresh, these poems never shy from difficult choices, exploring cruelty and vengeance wherever they may be found: in love, in work and against political backdrops. But these are brave, resolute writings that resist despair at all times, affirming instead the need to rebuild and to right oneself, to dust down and carry on.

The Lottery and Other Stories


Shirley Jackson - 1949
    "Power and haunting," and "nights of unrest" were typical reader responses. This collection, the only one to appear during Shirley Jackson's lifetime, unites "The Lottery:" with twenty-four equally unusual stories. Together they demonstrate Jackson's remarkable range--from the hilarious to the truly horrible--and power as a storyteller.

A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing


Eimear McBride - 2013
    Not so much a stream of consciousness, as an unconscious railing against a life that makes little sense, and a shocking and intimate insight into the thoughts, feelings and chaotic sexuality of a vulnerable and isolated protagonist. To read A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing is to plunge inside its narrator's head, experiencing her world first-hand. This isn't always comfortable - but it is always a revelation.Touching on everything from family violence to sexuality and the personal struggle to remain intact in times of intense trauma, McBride writes with singular intensity, acute sensitivity and mordant wit. A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is moving, funny – and alarming. It is a book you will never forget.

Fierce Fairytales: Poems and Stories to Stir Your Soul


Nikita Gill - 2018
    Traditional fairytales are rife with cliches and gender stereotypes: beautiful, silent princesses; ugly, jealous, and bitter villainesses; girls who need rescuing; and men who take all the glory. But in this rousing new prose and poetry collection, Nikita Gill gives Once Upon a Time a much-needed modern makeover. Through her gorgeous reimagining of fairytale classics and spellbinding original tales, she dismantles the old-fashioned tropes that have been ingrained in our minds. In this book, gone are the docile women and male saviors. Instead, lines blur between heroes and villains. You will meet fearless princesses, a new kind of wolf lurking in the concrete jungle, and an independent Gretel who can bring down monsters on her own. Complete with beautifully hand-drawn illustrations by Gill herself, Fierce Fairytales is an empowering collection of poems and stories for a new generation.

Crown Anthology


Analog De Leon - 2018
    Featuring a beautifully diverse and inspirational set of voices from around the world, that includes some of today’s most influential modern poets, with additional contest winners chosen from 4,500 submissions, Crown Anthology is curated to be a light in the wild dark, illuminating the crown that exists in everyone.

The Jack Kerouac Collection


Jack Kerouac - 1990
    Boxed set collecting Poetry For The Beat Generation (1959), Blues and Haikus (1959), and Readings By Jack Kerouac On The Beat Generation (1960), remastered with bonus tracks.

Collected Stories


Raymond Carver - 1985
    In collections such as Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Carver wrote with unflinching exactness about men and women enduring lives on the knife-edge of poverty and other deprivations. Beneath his pared-down surfaces run disturbing, violent undercurrents. Suggestive rather than explicit, and seeming all the more powerful for what is left unsaid, Carver’s stories were held up as exemplars of a new school in American fiction known as minimalism or “dirty realism,” a movement whose wide influence continues to this day. Carver’s stories were brilliant in their detachment and use of the oblique, ambiguous gesture, yet there were signs of a different sort of sensibility at work. In books such as Cathedral and the later tales included in the collected stories volume Where I’m Calling From, Carver revealed himself to be a more expansive writer than in the earlier published books, displaying Chekhovian sympathies toward his characters and relying less on elliptical effects.In gathering all of Carver’s stories, including early sketches and posthumously discovered works, The Library of America’s Collected Stories provides a comprehensive overview of Carver’s career as we have come to know it: the promise of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and the breakthrough of What We Talk About, on through the departures taken in Cathedral and the pathos of the late stories. But it also prompts a fresh consideration of Carver by presenting Beginners, an edition of the manuscript of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love that Carver submitted to Gordon Lish, his editor and a crucial influence on his development. Lish’s editing was so extensive that at one point Carver wrote him an anguished letter asking him not to publish the book; now, for the first time, readers can read both the manuscript and published versions of the collection that established Carver as a major American writer. Offering a fascinating window into the complex, fraught relationship between writer and editor, Beginners expands our sense of Carver and is essential reading for anyone who cares about his achievement.Contents--What We Talk About When We Talk About LoveWhy Don’t You Dance?ViewfinderMr. Coffee and Mr. FixitGazeboI Could See the Smallest ThingsSacksThe BathTell the Women We’re GoingAfter the DenimSo Much Water So Close to HomeThe Third Thing That Killed My Father OffA Serious TalkThe CalmPopular MechanicsEverything Stuck to HimWhat We Talk About When We Talk About LoveOne More ThingStories from FiresThe LieThe CabinHarry’s DeathThe PheasantCathedralFeathersChef’s HousePreservationThe CompartmentA Small, Good ThingVitaminsCarefulWhere I’m Calling FromThe TrainFeverThe BridleCathedralFrom Where I’m Calling FromBoxesWhoever Was Using This BedIntimacyMenudoElephantBlackbird PieErrandOther FictionThe HairThe AficionadosPoseidon and CompanyBright Red ApplesFrom The Augustine NotebooksKindlingWhat Would You Like to See?DreamsVandalsCall If You Need MeSelected EssaysMy Father’s LifeOn WritingFiresAuthor’s Note to Where I’m Calling FromBeginners (The Manuscript Version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love)Why Don’t You Dance?ViewfinderWhere Is Everyone?GazeboWant to See Something?The FlingA Small, Good ThingTell the Women We’re GoingIf It Please YouSo Much Water So Close to HomeDummyPieThe CalmMineDistanceBeginnersOne More Thing--loa.org

Last Tram to Lime Street


Joan Jonker - 1995
    From the author of STAY IN YOUR OWN BACKYARD.

Housekeeping


Marilynne Robinson - 1980
    The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.

Pond


Claire-Louise Bennett - 2015
    Broken bowls, belligerent cows, swanky aubergines, trembling moonrises and horrifying sunsets, the physical world depicted in these stories is unsettling yet intimately familiar and soon takes on a life of its own. Captivated by the stellar charms of seclusion but restless with desire, the woman’s relationship with her surroundings becomes boundless and increasingly bewildering. Claire-Louise Bennett’s startlingly original first collection slips effortlessly between worlds and is by turns darkly funny and deeply moving.

The Poems of T.S. Eliot


T.S. Eliot - 2018
    S. Eliot in all its complexity. Major poems range from 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', through the post-war desolation of 'The Waste Land' and the spiritual struggle of 'Ash-Wednesday', to the enduring charm of 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats'. The Spectator praised Jeremy Irons's interpretation as 'so accessible, reading Eliot as if finding his words for the first time, grappling with them, relishing them, using them to express feelings that we all share as we struggle to accept, to recognise or relinquish'. Dame Eileen Atkins also appears alongside Jeremy Irons in the reading of 'The Waste Land'.These are the readings, as heard on BBC Radio 4 over Christmas 2016/17.Six programmes gather together the verse: Prufrock and Other Observations; Poems (1920); The Waste Land; The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday and Ariel Poems; Four Quartets; and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.

The Easter Parade


Richard Yates - 1976
    We observe the sisters over four decades, watching them grow into two very different women. Sarah is stable and stalwart, settling into an unhappy marriage. Emily is precocious and independent, struggling with one unsatisfactory love affair after another. Richard Yates's classic novel is about how both women struggle to overcome their tarnished family's past, and how both finally reach for some semblance of renewal.