Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Georgia

A spirited homage to the departed literary greats--set in an entrancing English village--this novel tells the tale of a profound autumn term with Poe, Yeats, Whitman, Dickinson, and the Brontës.

"I am walking along a country lane with no earthly idea why . . ."

Poet Glyn Maxwell wakes up in a mysterious village one autumn day. He has no idea how he got there--is he dead? In a coma? Dreaming?--but he has a strange feeling there's a class to teach. And isn't that the poet Keats wandering down the lane? Why not ask him to give a reading, do a Q and A, hit the pub with the students afterwards?

Soon the whole of the autumn term stretches ahead, with Byron, Yeats and Emily Dickinson, the Brontës, the Brownings, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Wilfred Owen, and many more all on their way to give readings in the humble village hall.

And everything these famed personalities say--in class, on stage, at the Cross Keys pub--comes verbatim from these poets' diaries, essays, or letters. A dreamy novel of a profound autumn term with Poe, Yeats, Whitman, Dickinson, and the Brontës.

Drinks with Dead Poets

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#bigred #jeromecharyn #ritahayworth #orsonwelles #citylifefiction #biographicalfiction #historicalfiction #lifefiction #hollywood #hollywoodhotel

Illinois

A Novel

Apple Books * Best Books of the Month
A Publishers Weekly Summer Reads Selection

Narrated by a starry-eyed lesbian, Big Red reimagines the tragic career of Rita Hayworth and her indomitable husband, Orson Welles.


Since he first appeared on the American literary scene, Jerome Charyn has dazzled readers with his "blunt, brilliantly crafted prose" (Washington Post). Yet Charyn, a beloved comedic novelist, also possesses an extraordinary knowledge of Golden Age Hollywood, having taught film history both in the United States and France.

With Big Red, Charyn reimagines the life of one of America's most enduring icons, "Gilda" herself, Rita Hayworth, whose fiery red tresses and hypnotic dancing graced the silver screen over sixty times in her nearly forty-year career. The quintessential movie star of the 1940s, Hayworth has long been objectified as a sex symbol, pin-up girl, and so-called Love Goddess. Here Charyn, channeling the ghosts of a buried past, finally lifts the veils that have long enshrouded Hayworth, evoking her emotional complexity--her passions, her pain, and her inner turmoil.

Charyn's reimagining of Hayworth's story begins in 1943, in a roomette at the Hollywood Hotel, where narrator Rusty Redburn--an impetuous, second-string gossip columnist from Kalamazoo, Michigan--bides her time between working as a gofer in the publicity offices of Columbia Pictures, volunteering at an indie movie house, and pursuing dalliances with young women on the Sunset Strip. Called upon by the manipulative Columbia movie mogul Harry "The Janitor" Cohn to spy on Hayworth--then, the Dream Factory's most alluring "dame," and Cohn's biggest movie star--Rusty becomes Rita's confidante, accompanying her on a series of madcap adventures with her indomitable husband, the "boy genius" Orson Welles.

But Rusty, an outlaw who can see beyond the prejudices of Hollywood's male-dominated hierarchy, quickly becomes disgusted with the way actresses, and particularly Rita, are exploited by men. As she struggles to balance the dangerous politics of Tinseltown with her desire to protect Rita from ruffians and journalists alike, Rusty has her own encounters--some sweet, some bruising--with characters real and imagined, from Julie Tanaka, an interned Japanese-American friend, to superstars like Clark Gable and Tallulah Bankhead, as well as notorious Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons.

Reanimating such classic films as Gilda and The Lady from Shanghai, Big Red is a bittersweet paean to Hollywood's Golden Age, a tender yet honest portrait of a time before blockbusters and film franchises--one that promises to consume both Hollywood cinephiles and neophytes alike. Lauded for his "polymorphous imagination" (Jonathan Lethem), Charyn once again has created one of the most inventive novels in recent American literature.

Big Red

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Texas

Running from her father's brutal legacy, Joseph Stalin's daughter defects to the United States during the turbulence of the 1960s. For fans of We Were the Lucky Ones and A Gentleman in Moscow, this sweeping historical novel and unexpected love story is inspired by the remarkable life of Svetlana Alliluyeva.

"The Red Daughter does exactly what good historical fiction should do: It sends you down the rabbit hole to read and learn more."--The New York Times Book Review

In one of the most momentous events of the Cold War, Svetlana Alliluyeva, the only daughter of the Soviet despot Joseph Stalin, abruptly abandoned her life in Moscow in 1967, arriving in New York to throngs of reporters and a nation hungry to hear her story. By her side is Peter Horvath, a young lawyer sent by the CIA to smuggle Svetlana into America.

She is a contradictory celebrity: charismatic and headstrong, lonely and haunted, excited and alienated by her adopted country's radically different society. Persuading herself that all she yearns for is a simple American life, she attempts to settle into a suburban existence in Princeton, New Jersey. But one day an invitation from the widow of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright arrives, and Svetlana impulsively joins her cultlike community at Taliesin West. When this dream ends in disillusionment, Svetlana reaches out to Peter, the one person who understands how the chains of her past still hold her prisoner. Their relationship changes and deepens, moving from America to England to the Soviet Union and back again, unfolding under the eyes of her CIA minders, and Svetlana's and Peter's private lives are no longer their own.

Novelist John Burnham Schwartz's father was in fact the young lawyer who escorted Svetlana Alliluyeva to the United States. Drawing upon private papers and years of extensive research, Schwartz imaginatively re-creates the story of an extraordinary, troubled woman's search for a new life and a place to belong, in the powerful, evocative prose that has made him an acclaimed author of literary and historical fiction.

Praise for The Red Daughter

"Svetlana Alliluyeva's life was endlessly fascinating, often heartbreaking, and ultimately heroic. I don't think any writer alive could have told her story more beautifully than John Burnham Schwartz."--David Benioff, co-creator of HBO's Game of Thrones and author of City of Thieves

"The Red Daughter is an intimate, intricate look at the collision of geopolitics with a private life: surprising and engaging from beginning to end."--Jennifer Egan

The Red Daughter

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#hardcover #fiction #historical #judygarland #biographicalfiction #contemporarywomen #frankbaum #maudbaum 

Florida

A richly imagined novel that tells the story behind The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the book that inspired the iconic film, through the eyes of author L. Frank Baum's intrepid wife, Maud--from the family's hardscrabble days in South Dakota to the Hollywood film set where she first meets Judy Garland. Maud Gage Baum, widow of the author of the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, met Judy Garland, the young actress playing the role of Dorothy on the set of The Wizard of Oz in 1939. At the time, Maud was seventy-eight and Judy was sixteen. In spite of their age difference, Maud immediately connected to Judy--especially when Maud heard her sing "Over the Rainbow," a song whose yearning brought to mind the tough years in South Dakota when Maud and her husband struggled to make a living--until Frank Baum's book became a national sensation. This wonderfully evocative two-stranded story recreates Maud's youth as the rebellious daughter of a leading suffragette, and the prairie years of Maud and Frank's early days when they lived among the people--especially young Dorothy--who would inspire Frank's masterpiece. Woven into this past story is one set in 1939, describing the high-pressured days on The Wizard of Oz film set where Judy is being badgered by the director, producer, and her ambitious stage mother to lose weight, bind her breasts, and laugh, cry, and act terrified on command. As Maud had promised to protect the original Dorothy back in Aberdeen, she now takes on the job of protecting young Judy.

Finding Dorothy

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#paperback #historicalfiction #vanderbuilts #fiction #drama #socialites #biographicalfiction #vanderbiltfamily 

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Delaware

A Novel of the Vanderbilts

The riveting novel of iron-willed Alva Vanderbilt and her illustrious family as they rule Gilded-Age New York, from the New York Times bestselling author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald. Alva Smith, her southern family destitute after the Civil War, married into one of America’s great Gilded Age dynasties: the newly wealthy but socially shunned Vanderbilts. Ignored by New York’s old-money circles and determined to win respect, she designed and built nine mansions, hosted grand balls, and arranged for her daughter to marry a duke. But Alva also defied convention for women of her time, asserting power within her marriage and becoming a leader in the women's suffrage movement. With a nod to Jane Austen and Edith Wharton, in A Well-Behaved Woman Therese Anne Fowler paints a glittering world of enormous wealth contrasted against desperate poverty, of social ambition and social scorn, of friendship and betrayal, and an unforgettable story of a remarkable woman. Meet Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, living proof that history is made by those who know the rules—and how to break them.

A Well-Behaved Woman

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#hardcover #arthistory #art #mathiasenard #history #historicalfiction #biographicalfiction #michelangelo

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

New York

In 1506, Michelangelo--a young but already renowned sculptor--is invited by the Sultan of Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. The sultan has offered, alongside an enormous payment, the promise of immortality, since Leonardo da Vinci's design had been rejected: "You will surpass him in glory if you accept, for you will succeed where he has failed, and you will give the world a monument without equal."

Michelangelo, after some hesitation, flees Rome and an irritated Pope Julius II--whose commission he leaves unfinished--and arrives in Constantinople for this truly epic project. Once there, he explores the beauty and wonder of the Ottoman Empire, sketching and describing his impressions along the way, and becomes immersed in cloak-and-dagger palace intrigues as he struggles to create what could be his greatest architectural masterwork.

Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants--constructed from real historical fragments--is a story about why stories are told, why bridges are built, and how seemingly unmatched pieces, seen from the opposite sides of civilization, can mirror one another.

Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants

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#paperback #historicalfiction #history #marysharratt #classicalmusic #almamahler #gustavmahler #cautionarytale #biographicalfiction  #amazonbookofthemonth

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

In the glittering hotbed of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Vienna, one woman's life would define and defy an era

Ecstasy

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#paperback #Hollywood #fscotttlfitzgerald #biographicalfiction #fiction #hollywoodsgoldenage 

Michigan

A "mesmerizing and haunting" (The Boston Globe) novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald's last years in Hollywood

In 1937, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a troubled, uncertain man whose literary success was long over. In poor health, with his wife consigned to an asylum and his finances in ruin, he struggled to make a new start as a screenwriter in Hollywood.

Those last three years of Fitzgerald's life are the focus of Stewart O'Nan's graceful and elegiac novel West of Sunset. With flashbacks to Fitzgerald's glamorous Jazz Age past, the story follows him as he arrives on the MGM lot, falls in love with brassy gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, begins work on The Last Tycoon, and tries to maintain a semblance of family life with the absent Zelda and their daughter, Scottie. The Golden Age of Hollywood is brought vividly to life through the novel's romantic cast of characters, from Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway to Humphrey Bogart. Written with striking grace and subtlety, this is a wise and intimate portrait of a man trying his best to hold together a world that's flying apart.

West of Sunset

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Utah

"Dolores del Río bursts to life in this vivid, well-researched portrayal. Her iconic feline elegance and brash spirit dominates every page, but it's her defiance to live life on her own terms that sets her apart--and what an extraordinary life she led."--C.W. Gortner, bestselling author of Marlene



1910, Mexico. As the country's revolution spreads, Dolores, the daughter of a wealthy banker, must flee her comfortable life in Durango or risk death. Her family settles in Mexico City, where, at sixteen, she marries the worldly Jaime del Río. But in a twist of fate, at a party she meets an influential American director who recognizes in her a natural performer. He invites her to Hollywood, and practically overnight, the famous Miss del Río is born.



Dolores's star quickly rises, and her days become a whirlwind of moviemaking and glamorous events. Swept up in L.A.'s glitzy inner circle, she takes her place among film royalty such as Marlene Dietrich and Orson Welles. But as her career soars, her personal life becomes increasingly complicated, with family tragedy, divorce, and real heartache. And when she's labeled box office poison amid growing prejudice before WWII, Dolores must decide what price she's willing to pay to achieve her dreams and if her heart and future instead lie where it all began...in Mexico.



Spanning half a century and narrated by Dolores's fictional hairdresser and longtime friend, Miss del Río traces the life of a trailblazing woman whose legacy in Hollywood and in Mexico still shines bright today.



"Bárbara Mujica dazzles us.... She takes us on a journey through an era of wars and movies, and unforgettable characters that made Hollywood what it is today." --María Amparo Escandón, New York Times bestselling author of L.A. Weather

Miss Del Río

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#fiction #paperback #womensliterature #womensfiction #biographicalfiction # #historicalfiction

Lidia Wardell walked naked through the Newbury meeting house. She was prosecuted, and publicly whipped for this crime. This event is common historical knowledge. The Rose and the Whip is set in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in May 1663, but tells the entire story of systematic persecution of dissenters, by dissenters. Lidia relates the story of her life, and the series of events that culminated in her decision to take this action in protest of the Puritan community leaders' treatment of Quakers. As she is charged, sentenced, and tied to the whipping post, then subsequently thrashed with twenty or thirty lashes, she critically examines each of these events and reflects on how they served to transform her and her perspectives on truth and faith.

The Rose and the Whip

Read once by me. #hardcover #historicalfiction #lincoln #abrahamlincoln #ghost #ghoststories #death #grief #presidents #biographicalfiction First Edition.

California

Lincoln In The Bardo

Ohio

Befriending the doomed Queen Anne Boleyn after the downfall of Cromwell, squire's daughter Kat Ashley agrees to become the governess of the young Elizabeth Tudor and endures the exiled princess's harsh early years before her coronation, after which Kat becomes a trusted confidante.

The Queen's Governess

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#hardcover #historicalfiction #nelliebly #biographicalfiction #blackwellisland #fiction #historicalnovel #insaneasylum 

Based on a true story, a spellbinding historical novel about the world's first female investigative journalist, Nellie Bly.

In 1887, young Nellie Bly sets out for New York and a career in journalism, determined to make her way as a serious reporter, whatever that may take.

But life in the city is tougher than she imagined. Down to her last dime and desperate to prove her worth, she comes up with a dangerous plan: to fake insanity and have herself committed to the asylum on Blackwell's Island. There, she will work undercover to expose the asylum's wretched conditions.

But when the asylum door swings shut behind her, she finds herself in a place of horrors, governed by a cruelty she could never have imagined. Cold, isolated and starving, her days of terror reawaken the traumatic events of her childhood. She entered the asylum of her own free will - but will she ever get out?

An extraordinary portrait of a woman ahead of her time, Madwoman is the story of a quest for the truth that changed the world.

Madwoman

99405bdd-cfd0-4107-a78c-0222b4587916-1

A sweeping debut set in Paris in the 1930's about the love story between Vogue model turned photographer Lee Miller and the artist Man Ray. "I'd rather take a picture than be one," says Lee Miller, after she arrives in Paris in 1929. Gorgeous and talented, Lee has left behind a successful modeling career to pursue her dream of being an artist. She catches the eye of renowned artist Man Ray, and though he wants to use her only as a model, Lee convinces him to teach her photography as well. Man is an egotistical, charismatic force, and soon their personal and professional lives become intimately entwined. Their romance unfolds against the backdrop of bohemian Paris, with nights spent at smoky cabarets, opium dens, and Surrealist parties, and days spent working together to discover radical new photography techniques. But as Lee begins to assert herself, and moves from being a muse to an artist, Man's jealousy spirals out of control, and soon their mutual betrayals threaten to destroy them both. Told in interweaving timelines of 1930s Paris and war-torn Europe during WWII, this richly detailed, sensuous, and captivating debut by Whitney Scharer brings Lee Miller-- a brilliant and pioneering artist in her own right--out of the shadows of a man's legacy and into the light.

The Age of Light

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#paperback #biographicalfiction #alixhawley #danielboone


New Jersey

The story of pioneer Daniel Boone's life, told in his voice--a tall tale like no other, startling, funny, poignant, romantic and brawling--set during the American Revolutionary War

Here is Daniel Boone as you've never seen him: debut novelist Alix Hawley presents Boone's life, from his childhood in a Quaker colony, through two stints captured by Indians as he attempted to settle Kentucky, the death of a son at the hands of the same Indians and the rescue of a daughter. The prose rivals Hilary Mantel's and Peter Carey's, conveying that sense of being inside the head of a storied historical figure about which much nonsense is spoken while also feeling completely contemporary.

Boone was a fabulous hunter and explorer, and a "white Indian," perhaps happiest when he found a place as the captive, adopted son of a chief who was trying to prevent the white settlement of Kentucky. Hawley takes us intimately into the life-and-death survival of people pushing away from security and into Indian lands, despite sense and treaties, just before and into the War of Independence.

The love story between Boone and his wife, Rebecca, is rich and tangled, but mostly it's Boone who fascinates, pushing into places where he imagines he can create a new "clean" world, only to find death and trouble and complication. He is a fabulous character, unrivaled in North American literature, and a prime candidate for the tall tale. The storytelling is taut and expert, the descriptions rich and powerful, the prose full of feeling, but Boone is what drives this outstanding debut.

All True Not a Lie in It

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#hardcover #biographicalfiction #historicalfiction #darwin #fiction #history 

Idaho

The Darwin Conspiracy

#hardcover #fiction #historical #judygarland #biographicalfiction #contemporarywomen #signed #wizardofoz

✒️ Finding Dorothy

#HolidayRomance #BiographicalFiction 
 #hardcover #christianfiction #religious #richardpaulevans #religion #faith #christian 

From one of America's most beloved storytellers comes the inspiring third installment of the bestselling series, The Walk, the ongoing story of one man's unrelenting search for hope.

Join one of America's beloved storytellers on a walk like no other: one man's unrelenting search for hope.

Reeling from the sudden loss of his wife, his home, and his business, Alan Christoffersen, a once-successful advertising executive, has left everything he knew behind and set off on an extraordinary cross-country journey. Carrying only a backpack, he is walking from Seattle to Key West, the farthest destination on his map.

Now almost halfway through his trek, Alan sets out to walk the nearly 1,000 miles between South Dakota and St. Louis, but it's the people he meets along the way who give the journey its true meaning: a mysterious woman who follows Alan's walk for close to a hundred miles, the ghost hunter searching graveyards for his wife, and the elderly Polish man who gives Alan a ride and shares a story that Alan will never forget.

Full of hard-won wisdom and truth, The Road to Grace is a compelling and inspiring novel about hope, healing, grace, and the meaning of life.

The Road to Grace

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#hardcover #histfic #historicalfiction #colinsargent #biographicalfiction #fiction

A Shoshone woman, Sacagawea, leads Lewis and Clark to the Pacific at the turn of the nineteenth century. On her back is a tiny infant. He is her son, Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, the youngest member of the Expedition--a child caught between two worlds who is later raised by Clark as his foster son. When the teenage Baptiste attracts the notice of the visiting Duke Paul, Prince of Württemberg, Clark approves of the duke's "experiment" to educate the boy at court. A gleeful Duke Paul has Baptiste trained as a concert pianist and exhibits him throughout Europe as a "half gentleman-half animal." Eventually Baptiste turns his back on the Old World and returns to the New, determined to find his true place there. He travels into the heart of the American wilderness, and into the depths of his mother's soul, on an epic quest for identity that brings sacrifice, loss, and the distant promise of redemption.

Museum of Human Beings

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#JFK #historicalfiction #drama #biographicalfiction #epistolaryfiction #marypinchotmeyer #diary #paulwolfe

Minnesota

An engrossing debut novel that cannily reimagines the extraordinary life and mysterious death of bohemian Georgetown socialite Mary Pinchot Meyer-- secret lover of JFK, ex-wife of a CIA chief, sexual adventurer, LSD explorer and early feminist living by her own rules. She was a longtime lover of JFK. She was the ex-wife of a CIA chief. She was the sister-in-law of the Washington Post's Ben Bradlee. She believed in mind expansion and took LSD with Timothy Leary. She was a painter, a socialite and a Bohemian in Georgetown during the Cold War. And she ended up dead in an unsolved murder a year after JFK's assassination. The diary she kept was never found. Until now. . . .

The Lost Diary of M

8a7ffa35-df83-4f0a-9cac-8dfa028a49ca

Missouri

A spellbinding debut novel about the trailblazing Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, who defied society's expectations to find her voice and her destiny. "Remember the flight, for the bird is mortal." All through her childhood in Tehran, Forugh Farrokhzad is told that Persian daughters should be quiet and modest. She is taught only to obey, but she always finds ways to rebel, gossiping with her sister among the fragrant roses of her mother's walled garden, venturing to the forbidden rooftop to roughhouse with her three brothers, writing poems to impress her strict, disapproving father, and sneaking out to flirt with a teenage paramour over café glacé. During the summer of 1950, Forugh's passion for poetry takes flight, and tradition seeks to clip her wings. Forced into a suffocating marriage, Forugh runs away and falls into an affair that fuels her desire to write and to achieve freedom and independence. Forugh's poems are considered both scandalous and brilliant; she is heralded by some as a national treasure, vilified by others as a demon influenced by the West. She perseveres, finding love with a notorious filmmaker and living by her own rules, at enormous cost. But the power of her writing only grows stronger amid the upheaval of the Iranian revolution. Inspired by Forugh Farrokhzad's verse, letters, films, and interviews, and including original translations of her poems, this haunting novel uses the lens of fiction to capture the tenacity, spirit, and conflicting desires of a brave woman who represents the birth of feminism in Iran, and who continues to inspire generations of women around the world.--Amazon.

Glyn Maxwell

Drinks with Dead Poets

Jerome Charyn

Big Red

John Burnham Schwartz

The Red Daughter

Elizabeth Letts

Finding Dorothy

Therese Anne Fowler

A Well-Behaved Woman

Mathias Enard; Charlotte Mandell (Translator)

Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants

Mary Sharratt

Ecstasy

Stewart O'Nan

West of Sunset

Bárbara Mujica

Miss Del Río

Jae Hodges

The Rose and the Whip

George Saunders

Lincoln In The Bardo

Karen Harper

The Queen's Governess

Louisa Treger

Madwoman

Louisa Treger

Madwoman

Elizabeth Letts

Finding Dorothy

Whitney Scharer

The Age of Light

Alix Hawley

All True Not a Lie in It

John Darnton

The Darwin Conspiracy

Elizabeth Letts

✒️ Finding Dorothy

Richard Evans

The Road to Grace

Colin Sargent

Museum of Human Beings

Paul Wolfe

The Lost Diary of M

Elizabeth Letts

Finding Dorothy

Jasmin Darznik

Song of a Captive Bird