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Abide with me : a novel
Elizabeth Strout.
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294 p. ; 25 cm.
In her luminous and long-awaited new novel, bestselling author Elizabeth Strout welcomes readers back to the archetypal, lovely landscape of northern New England, where the events of her first novel, Amy and Isabelle, unfolded. In the late 1950s, in the small town of West Annett, Maine, a minister struggles to regain his calling, his family, and his happiness in the wake of profound loss. At the same time, the community he has served so charismatically must come to terms with its own strengths and failings–faith and hypocrisy, loyalty and abandonment–when a dark secret is revealed. Tyler Caskey has come to love West Annett, “just up the road” from where he was born. The short, brilliant summers and the sharp, piercing winters fill him with awe–as does his congregation, full of good people who seek his guidance and listen earnestly as he preaches. But after suffering a terrible loss, Tyler finds it hard to return to himself as he once was. He hasn’t had The Feeling–that God is all around him, in the beauty of the world–for quite some time. He struggles to find the right words in his sermons and in his conversations with those facing crises of their own, and to bring his five-year-old daughter, Katherine, out of the silence she has observed in the wake of the family’s tragedy. A congregation that had once been patient and kind during Tyler’s grief now questions his leadership and propriety. In the kitchens, classrooms, offices, and stores of the village, anger and gossip have started to swirl. And in Tyler’s darkest hour, a startling discovery will test his congregation’s humanity–and his own will to endure the kinds of trials that sooner or later test us all. In prose incandescent and artful, Elizabeth Strout draws readers into the details of ordinary life in a way that makes it extraordinary. All is considered–life, love, God, and community–within these pages, and all is made new by this writer’s boundless compassion and graceful prose.
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About Alice
Calvin Trillin.
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78 p. ; 21 cm.
In Calvin Trillin’s antic tales of family life, she was portrayed as the wife who had “a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day” and the mother who thought that if you didn’t go to every performance of your child’s school play, “the county would come and take the child.” Now, five years after her death, her husband offers this loving portrait of Alice Trillin off the page–his loving portrait of Alice Trillin off the page–an educator who was equally at home teaching at a university or a drug treatment center, a gifted writer, a stunningly beautiful and thoroughly engaged woman who, in the words of a friend, “managed to navigate the tricky waters between living a life you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are to take pleasure in.” Though it deals with devastating loss, About Alice is also a love story, chronicling a romance that began at a Manhattan party when Calvin Trillin desperately tried to impress a young woman who “seemed to glow.” “You have never again been as funny as you were that night,” Alice would say, twenty or thirty years later. “You mean I peaked in December of 1963?” “I’m afraid so.” But he never quit trying to impress her. In his writing, she was sometimes his subject and always his muse. The dedication of the first book he published after her death read, “I wrote this for Alice. Actually, I wrote everything for Alice.” In that spirit, Calvin Trillin has, withAbout Alice, created a gift to the wife he adored and to his readers. From the Hardcover edition.
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The adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain ; with an introduction by John Seelye ; notes by Guy Cardwell.
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xxxiii, 327 p. : map ; 20 cm.
Of all the contenders for the title of The Great American Novel, none has a better claim than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. More than a century after its publication it remains a major work that can be enjoyed at many levels: as an incomparable adventure story and as a classic of American humor. Introduction by John Seelye and Notes by Guy Cardwell
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Affliction
Russell Banks.
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355 p ; 24 cm.
Wade Whitehouse is an improbable protagonist for a tragedy. A well-digger and policeman in a bleak New Hampshire town, he is a former high-school star gone to beer fat, a loner with a mean streak. It is a mark of Russell Banks' artistry and understanding that Wade comes to loom in one's mind as a blue-collar American Everyman afflicted by the dark secret of the macho tradition. Told by his articulate, equally scarred younger brother, Wade's story becomes as spellbinding and inexorable as a fuse burning its way to the dynamite.
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After this
Alice McDermott.
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279 p. ; 22 cm.
Alice McDermott’s powerful novel is a vivid portrait of an American family in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Witty, compassionate, and wry, it captures the social, political, and spiritual upheavals of those decades through the experiences of a middle-class couple, their four children, and the changing worlds in which they live. nbsp; While Michael and Annie Keane taste the alternately intoxicating and bitter first fruits of the sexual revolution, their older, more tentative brother, Jacob,nbsp;lags behind, until he finds himself on the way to Vietnam. Meanwhile, Clare, the youngest child of their aging parents, seeks to maintain an almost saintly innocence.After This, alive with the passions and tragedies of a determining era in our history, portrays the clash of traditional, faith-bound life and modern freedom, while also capturing, with McDermott’s inimitable understanding and grace, the joy, sorrow, anger, and love that underpin, and undermine, what it is to be a family.
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The age of American unreason
Susan Jacoby.
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xx, 356 p. ; 25 cm.
Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon--one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, she surveys an anti-rationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought." Disdain for logic and evidence defines a pervasive malaise fostered by the mass media, triumphalist religious fundamentalism, mediocre public education, a dearth of fair-minded public intellectuals on the right and the left, and, above all, a lazy and credulous public. Jacoby offers an unsparing indictment of the American addiction to infotainment--from television to the Web--and cites this toxic dependency as the major element distinguishing our current age of unreason from earlier outbreaks of American anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. With reading on the decline and scientific and historical illiteracy on the rise, an increasingly ignorant public square is dominated by debased media-driven language and received opinion. At this critical political juncture, nothing could be more important than recognizing the "overarching crisis of memory and knowledge" described in this impassioned, tough-minded book, which challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what the flights from reason has cost us as individuals and as a nation. From the Hardcover edition.
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The age of innocence
Edith Wharton ; introduction by Louis Auchincloss.
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xxiii, 270 p. ; 21 cm.
Wharton scholars spearheaded by Waid (English, U. of California, Santa Barbara) provide a chronology, background, sources, and reviews of her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1920 novel depicting New York society in transition. Illustrations relate to the book's dramatization and sites of interest. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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The agony and the ecstasy : a biographical novel of Michelangelo
Irving Stone.
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776 p. ; 18 cm.
Fictional depiction of Michelangelo. Includes bibliography, glossary and a list of the artist's works.
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Ahab's wife, or, The star-gazer : a novel
Sena Jeter Naslund.
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668 p.
"Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last." This is destined to be remembered as one of the most-recognized first sentences in literature--along with "Call me Ishmael." Sena Jeter Naslund has created an entirely new universe with a transcendent heroine at its center who will be every bit as memorable as Captain Ahab. Ahab''s Wife is a novel on a grand scale that can legitimately be called a masterpiece: beautifully written, filled with humanity and wisdom, rich in historical detail, authentic and evocative. Melville''s spirit informs every page of her tour de force. Una Spenser''s marriage to Captain Ahab is certainly a crucial element in the narrative of Ahab''s Wife, but the story covers vastly more territory. After a spellbinding opening scene, the tale flashes back to Una''s childhood in Kentucky; her idyllic adolescence with her aunt and uncle''s family at a lighthouse near New Bedford; her adventures disguised as a cabin boy on a whaling ship; her first marriage to a fellow survivor who descends into violent madness; courtship and marriage to Ahab; life as mother and a rich captain''s wife in Nantucket; involvement with Frederick Douglass; and a man who is in Nantucket researching his novel about his adventures on her ex-husband''s ship. Ahab''s Wife is a breathtaking, magnificent, and uplifting story of one woman''s spiritual journey, informed by the spirit of the greatest American novel, but taking it beyond tragedy to redemptive triumph. "Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last." This is destined to be remembered as one of the most-recognized first sentences in literature--along with "Call me Ishmael." Sena Jeter Naslund has created an entirely new universe with a transcendent heroine at its center who will be every bit as memorable as Captain Ahab.Ahab''s Wife is a novel on a grand scale that can legitimately be called a masterpiece: beautifully written, filled with humanity and wisdom, rich in historical detail, authentic and evocative. Melville''s spirit informs every page of her tour de force.Una Spenser''s marriage to Captain Ahab is certainly a crucial element in the narrative of Ahab''s Wife, but the story covers vastly more territory. After a spellbinding opening scene, the tale flashes back to Una''s childhood in Kentucky; her idyllic adolescence with her aunt and uncle''s family at a lighthouse near New Bedford; her adventures disguised as a cabin boy on a whaling ship; her first marriage to a fellow survivor who descends into violent madness; courtship and marriage to Ahab; life as mother and a rich captain''s wife in Nantucket; involvement with Frederick Douglass; and a man who is in Nantucket researching his novel about his adventures on her ex-husband''s ship.Ahab''s Wife is a breathtaking, magnificent, and uplifting story of one woman''s spiritual journey, informed by the spirit of the greatest American novel, but taking it beyond tragedy to redemptive triumph."Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last." This is destined to be remembered as one of the most-recognized first sentences in literature--along with "Call me Ishmael." Sena Jeter Naslund has created an entirely new universe with a transcendent heroine at its center who will be every bit as memorable as Captain Ahab.Ahab''s Wife is a novel on a grand scale that can legitimately be called a masterpiece: beautifully written, filled with humanity and wisdom, rich in historical detail, authentic and evocative. Melville''s spirit informs every page of her tour de force.Una Spenser''s marriage to Captain Ahab is certainly a crucial element in the narrative of Ahab''s Wife, but the story covers vastly more territory. After a spellbinding opening scene, the tale flashes back to Una''s childhood in Kentucky; her idyllic adolescence with her aunt and uncle''s family at a lighthouse near New Bedford; her adventures disguised as a cabin boy on a whaling ship; her first marriage to a fellow survivor who descends into violent madness; courtship and marriage to Ahab; life as mother and a rich captain''s wife in Nantucket; involvement with Frederick Douglass; and a man who is in Nantucket researching his novel about his adventures on her ex-husband''s ship.Ahab''s Wife is a breathtaking, magnificent, and uplifting story of one woman''s spiritual journey, informed by the spirit of the greatest American novel, but taking it beyond tragedy to redemptive triumph.
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The air we breathe : a novel
Andrea Barrett.
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297 p. : ill., geneal. table ; 24 cm.
Detached from the rest of the country on the eve of World War I, the tuberculosis-stricken residents of an Adirondack lakeside sanatorium are housed in accordance with their economic status and languish in their isolation before an enterprising patient initiates a weekly discussion group.
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Alice : Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House princess to Washington power broker
Stacy A. Cordery.
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xiv, 590 p., [32] p. of plates : ill. ; 25 cm.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth lived her entire life on the political stage and in the public eye, earning her the nickname "the other Washington monument." Historian Cordery presents a detailed and entertaining portrait of the witty and whip-smart daughter of Teddy Roosevelt. "Princess Alice" was a tempestuous teenager. Smoking, gambling, and dressing flamboyantly, she flouted social conventions and opened the door for other women to do the same. Her husband was Speaker of the House Nicholas Longworth but--as Cordery documents for the first time--she had a child with her lover, Senator William Borah of Idaho. Alice's political acumen was widely respected in Washington. She was a sharp-tongued critic of her cousin FDR's New Deal programs, and meetings in her drawing room helped to change the course of history, from undermining the League of Nations to boosting Nixon. During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, her legendary salons remained the center of political ferment.--From publisher description.
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All souls' rising
Madison Smartt Bell.
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530 p. : map ; 21 cm.
The 1791 revolt against the French in Haiti through the eyes of the parties in the conflict: mulattos, blacks and whites. The protagonists include its tragic leader, the aristocratic Toussaint L'Ouverture who refused to declare independence from France. A tale of burning plantations, massacres and Byzantine politics.
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