. .After sixty years of marriage and five daughters, Lynn “Lovey” White knows that all of us, from time to time, need to use our little white lies. Her granddaughter, Annabelle, on the other hand, is as truthful as they come. She always does the right thing—that is, until she dumps her hedge fund manager fiancé and marries a musician she has known for three days. After all, her grandparents, who fell in love at first sight, have shared a lifetime of happiness, even through her grandfather’s declining health.But when Annabelle’s world starts to collapse around her, she discovers that nothing about her picture-perfect family is as it seems. And Lovey has to decide whether one more lie will make or break the ones she loves . . .

    O'Leary to Barack Obama. "Flexing impressive literary chops, the beer vendor/creative-writing professor captures both the tough, defensive exterior and the vulnerable, often-broken heart of his city."— Timeout Chicago"Chicago, a page at a time. Michael Czyzniejewski gets right to the point in telling the city's stories." — Chicago Tribune"...Michael Czyzniejewski’s “Chicago Stories,” forty fictional monologues riffing on the common culture of the Windy City’s shared history, projected forward into a possible future. Not quite historical fiction—more like historical jazz." — Newcity Lit"In 'Chicago Stories,' Michael Czyzniejewski summons all of Chicago — its ghosts, living and dead, its heroes and fools, sinners and saints, its people and places and all of its occasions — and in these pages they have gathered, strange and unlikely bedfellows, to sing a new song for Chicago. It will twist your arm behind your back, this song. It will break your fingers."— Billy Lombardo, author of The Man With Two Arms and The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories

    Gwyn Hyman Rubio’s beautifully written first novel revolves around Icy Sparks, an unforgettable heroine in the tradition of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird or Will Treed in Cold Sassy Tree. At the age of ten, Icy, a bright, curious child orphaned as a baby but raised by adoring grandparents, begins to have strange experiences. Try as she might, her "secrets"—verbal croaks, groans, and physical spasms—keep afflicting her. As an adult, she will find out she has Tourette’s Syndrome, a rare neurological disorder, but for years her behavior is the source of mystery, confusion, and deep humiliation.Narrated by a grown up Icy, the book chronicles a difficult, but ultimately hilarious and heartwarming journey, from her first spasms to her self-acceptance as a young woman. Curious about life beyond the hills, talented, and energetic, Icy learns to cut through all barriers—physical, mental, and spiritual—in order to find community and acceptance.

    For each craves a change in her life: Devera desires a break from her humdrum marital routine; BiDi longs to reconnect with her distant fourteen-year-old daughter (the only girl on the high school hockey team), not to mention jump-start a sex drive stuck in neutral. So when Devera’s husband decides to fulfill his longtime dream of opening a nightclub in his basement, Your Oasis on Flame Lake arrives not a moment too soon. Nothing fancy, it’s just a BYOB joint where you can hang out, sing, dance, tell jokes, and be yourself. But then an unexpected crisis throws both families into chaos, forcing them all to take stock of their lives—and learn the power of forgiveness.

    The past also haunts the present in Afternoon of a Faun, where an accusation of historic sexual assault plunges Marco Rosedale, an English journalist in New York, into a series of deepening crises. Together these stories offer a sharply observed vision that will resonate with anyone interested in the clash of power and desire in our embattled contemporary lives.

    In 1967 his town was a poor boy's paradise...untila shotgun blast killed Charlie's father and put his mother on trialfor murder.For mysterious reasons, his mother entrusts his care to an oldblack man named Lacy Albert Coe. Lacy tells simple stories aboutthe good and the bad that compose life's sweetest music. But whena reclusive Korean War veteran is linked to his father's death andLacy is victimized by hate crimes, Charlie hears only silence. It'snot until Charlie embarks on a dangerous midnight journey pittinghim against his darkest fears that he finally hears his own songplaying out.

    Distraught, guilt-stricken and seeking redemption, George buys a broken-down mansion in Looking glass, Oregon, paints it fire-engine red, and begins searching for other old folks to share it with him. Because George has made a new promise that will alter the course of the rest of his life. And, with the help of a miraculous old woman named Grace, he assembles a ragtag bunch of aging strangers, determined to make their last days on earth--and his own--an adventure.

    She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women, mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends, view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't. (jacket flap)Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

    Two government-sponsored documentarians from Cincinnati, Ohio—a writer and photographer—are dispatched to penetrate this wilderness and record what they find for President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration.For photographer Clay Havens, the assignment is his last chance to reboot his flagging career. So when he and his journalist partner are warned away from the remote Spooklight Holler outside of town, they set off eagerly in search of a headline story.What they see will haunt Clay into his old age: Jubilee Buford, a woman whose skin is a shocking and unmistakable shade of blue. From this happenstance meeting between a woman isolated from society and persecuted her whole life, and a man accustomed to keeping himself at lens distance from others, comes a mesmerizing story in which the dark shades of betrayal, prejudice, fear, and guilt, are refracted along with the incandescent hues of passion and courage.Panning across the rich rural aesthetic of eastern Kentucky, The Last Blue is a captivating love story and an intimate portrait of what it is like to be truly one of a kind.

    The lonely young Appalachian woman joins the historical Pack Horse Library Project of Kentucky and becomes a librarian, riding across slippery creek beds and up treacherous mountains on her faithful mule to deliver books and other reading material to the impoverished hill people of Eastern Kentucky.Along her dangerous route, Cussy, known to the mountain folk as Bluet, confronts those suspicious of her damselfly-blue skin and the government's new book program. She befriends hardscrabble and complex fellow Kentuckians, and is fiercely determined to bring comfort and joy, instill literacy, and give to those who have nothing, a bookly respite, a fleeting retreat to faraway lands.

    Then tragedy strikes -- and Lou and her younger brother, Oz, must go with their invalid mother to live on their great-grandmother's farm in the Virginia mountains. Suddenly Lou finds herself coming of age in a new landscape, making her first true friend, and experiencing adventures tragic, comic, and audacious. But the forces of greed and justice are about to clash over her new home...and as their struggle is played out in a crowded Virginia courtroom, it will determine the future of two children, an entire town, and the mountains they love.

    He is entranced by her image, flooded by memories of their teenage summer together, and utterly conpelled to make contact with her again. Charles sends Sian a letter, knowing all the while that "from the very first sentence of the very first note there was nothing innocent about it." Sian writes back - she is now a poet living with her husband and small child on an onion farm in Pennsylvania. She is intrigued that Charles has sought her out after so many years but wary of where their correspondence might lead. For Charles, troubled by financial woes, on the verge of losing his home, and concerned about the security of his family, the letters become a secret obsession and another source of instability in his already complicated life. Despite their reservations, the power of Charles and Sian's attraction leads them to meet again . . . and again. As Charles understands it, "for the two of them, eros is linked with time. It is the very urgency of time he dreads, the sense that their minutes together are short and numbered, that he must say what he has come to say before she leaves, that gestures and words cannot be wasted." Anita Shreve takes the classic theme of "Romeo and Juliet" and gives it an unusual twist: two lovers struggle against formidable odds, reaching across a lifetime to reclaim what they once lost. In doing so, they set in motion a tumultuous series of events that moves inexorably to a shocking conclusion.

    She lost her mother some years before, and her beloved grandmother has just passed away. And now her father has left town to work on a top-secret military project at Oak Ridge during the final months of World War II. Helen is wise beyond her years, but a ten-year-old cannot be left on her own to fend for herself. Her father arranges a summer guardian, Flora, her late mother's twenty-two-year-old first cousin who cries at the drop of a hat. A fiercely imaginative child, Helen is desperate to keep her house intact, with all its ghosts and stories. Flora is the good-hearted, modest cousin who wants to do her best for Helen. Their relationship and its fallout, played out against a backdrop of a lost America, will haunt Helen for the rest of her life.

    Easter finds her life in the Pentecostal Holiness church and its music, while Anneth dances and drinks in less-than-holy honky-tonks. Will the differences in their young lives and in their very natures tear them apart or will the bond of the sisters prevail? In lucid prose with an ear for the voice of the sisters’ time and place, Silas House brings readers a rich and moving story of coal country.This novel was named The Appalachian Book of the Year, and was a finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Prize.Blair brings this novel into a beautiful new paperback edition, along with two other Silas House novels, Clay’s Quilt and A Parchment of Leaves. The three novels, which share a common setting and some characters, are companion novels. They may be read individually, in any order, but collectively, they form a rich tableau of life in rural mountain Kentucky in the last century.

      In 1958, Greenwich Village buzzes with beatniks, jazz clubs, and new ideas—the ideal spot for three ambitious young people to meet. Cliff Nelson, the son of a successful book editor, is convinced he’s the next Kerouac, if only his father would notice. Eden Katz dreams of being an editor but is shocked when she encounters roadblocks to that ambition. And Miles Tillman, a talented black writer from Harlem, seeks to learn the truth about his father’s past, finding love in the process. Though different from one another, all three share a common goal: to succeed in the competitive and uncompromising world of book publishing. As they reach for what they want, they come to understand what they must sacrifice, conceal, and betray to achieve their goals, learning they must live with the consequences of their choices. In Three-Martini Lunch, Suzanne Rindell has written both a page-turning morality tale and a captivating look at a stylish, demanding era—and a world steeped in tradition that’s poised for great upheaval.