Jeffrey Eugenides

Creases on spine. Pages in excellent shape.

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Massachusetts

Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: the dazzling international bestseller from the author of The Virgin Suicides . a rollicking family epic like no other!

Middlesex

cbc3038b-6b24-432d-a298-11201ef6f8d2-1

#paperback #nonfiction #biography #president #bestseller #davidmccullough #johnadams #pulitzer 

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Minnesota

The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling biography of America’s founding father and second president that was the basis for the acclaimed HBO series, brilliantly told by master historian David McCullough. In this powerful, epic biography, David McCullough unfolds the adventurous life journey of John Adams, the brilliant, fiercely independent, often irascible, always honest Yankee patriot who spared nothing in his zeal for the American Revolution; who rose to become the second president of the United States and saved the country from blundering into an unnecessary war; who was learned beyond all but a few and regarded by some as “out of his senses”; and whose marriage to the wise and valiant Abigail Adams is one of the moving love stories in American history. This is history on a grand scale—a book about politics and war and social issues, but also about human nature, love, religious faith, virtue, ambition, friendship, and betrayal, and the far-reaching consequences of noble ideas. Above all, John Adams is an enthralling, often surprising story of one of the most important and fascinating Americans who ever lived.

John Adams

ac9a9d72-e871-4c72-99b6-8cc4ad4ed449-1

#paperback #fiction #lgbtq #bestseller #love #pulitzer #pulitzerprize

Arizona

A Novel

A struggling novelist travels the world to avoid an awkward wedding in this hilarious Pulitzer Prize-winning novel full of "arresting lyricism and beauty" (New York Times Book Review). WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE National Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book of 2017 A Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2017 A San Francisco Chronicle Top Ten Book of 2017 Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Lambda Award and the California Book Award "I could not love LESS more."--Ron Charles, Washington Post "Andrew Sean Greer's Less is excellent company. It's no less than bedazzling, bewitching and be-wonderful."--Christopher Buckley, New York Times Book Review Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes--it would be too awkward--and you can't say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world. QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town? ANSWER: You accept them all. What would possibly go wrong? Arthur Less will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Saharan sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and encounter, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to face. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. Through it all, there is his first love. And there is his last. Because, despite all these mishaps, missteps, misunderstandings and mistakes, Less is, above all, a love story. A scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, a bittersweet romance of chances lost, by an author The New York Times has hailed as "inspired, lyrical," "elegiac," "ingenious," as well as "too sappy by half," Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.

Less (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize)

195db1f7-26db-45b8-b933-8b483730516b

Marilynne Robinson

Normal wear from age but good shape.  See photos. 

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Nebraska

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, Gilead is the long-hoped-for second novel by Marilynne Robinson, one of our finest writers--a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part. In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son. This is also the tale of another remarkable vision--not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.

Gilead (Oprah's Book Club)

a968550f-3049-4806-8023-02f9a73d4f2a-1

Junot Díaz

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Oregon

Winner of: The Pulitzer Prize The National Book Critics Circle Award The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award The Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize A Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the Year One of the best books of 2007 according to: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, New York Public Library, and many more... Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fukú—the curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim. Díaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Díaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

f249d02a-7596-4187-9a1f-70f90d154eef-1

#paperback #lgbtq #fiction #bestseller #love #pulitzer Crease in front cover.

New York

Pearl S. Buck

Pennsylvania

A Chinese peasant overcomes the forces of nature and the frailties of human nature to become a wealthy landowner.

The Good Earth

34fa9660-a354-46d5-af83-82569b6ef8b5-1

Thornton Wilder

Tennessee

A Play in Three Acts

Our Town was first produced and published in 1938 to wide acclaim. This Pulitzer Prize–winning drama of life in the town of Grover 's Corners, an allegorical representation of all life, has become a classic. It is Thornton Wilder's most renowned and most frequently performed play. It is now reissued in this handsome hardcover edition, featuring a new Foreword by Donald Margulies, who writes, "You are holding in your hands a great American play. Possibly the great American play." In addition, Tappan Wilder has written an eye-opening new Afterword, which includes Thornton Wilder's unpublished notes and other illuminating photographs and documentary material.

Our Town

a1d4e04a-77df-45d7-a465-e666b3f14963-1

Donna Tartt

Florida

A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE "The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind....Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction."--Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his longing for his mother, he clings to the one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art. As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love--and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle. The Goldfinch is a mesmerizing, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the ruthless machinations of fate.

The Goldfinch

b322fa60-c725-4a3d-b2bc-ebfc0d089cee-1

John Kennedy Toole

Walker Percy

Vermont

An obese New Orleans misanthrope who constantly rebukes society, Ignatius Reilly gets a job at his mother's urging but ends up leading a workers' revolt, in a twentieth anniversary edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Reprint.

A Confederacy of Dunces

d742a5a2-7aad-415c-aeea-069ff1dfa987-1

John Toland

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Ohio

From freezing infantrymen huddled in bloodied trenches on the front lines to intricate political maneuvering and tense strategy sessions in European capitals, noted historian John Toland tells of the unforgettable final year of the First World War. As 1918 opened, the Allies and Central Powers remained locked in a desperate, bloody stalemate, despite the deaths of millions of soldiers over the previous three and a half years. The arrival of the Americans "over there" by the middle of the year turned the tide of war, resulting in an Allied victory in November.

In these pages participants on both sides, from enlisted men to generals and prime ministers to monarchs, vividly recount the battles, sensational events, and behind-the-scenes strategies that shaped the climactic, terrifying year. It's all here--the horrific futility of going over the top into a hail of bullets in no man's land; the enigmatic death of the legendary German ace, the Red Baron; Operation Michael, a punishing German attack in the spring; the Americans' long-awaited arrival in June; the murder of Russian Czar Nicholas II and his family, the growing fear of a communist menace in the east; and the armistice on November 11. The different points of view of Germans, Americans, British, French, and Russians add depth, complexity, and understanding to the tragedies and triumphs of the War to End All Wars.

No Man's Land

f43d7216-6e9a-4394-a304-08aabf48fb04-1

Thomas E. Ricks

California

The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 To 2005

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize * One of the Washington Post Book World's 10 Best Books of the Year * Time's 10 Best Books of the Year * USA Today's Nonfiction Book of the Year * A New York Times Notable Book

"Staggeringly vivid and persuasive . . . absolutely essential reading." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"The best account yet of the entire war." --Vanity Fair

The definitive account of the American military's tragic experience in Iraq

Fiasco is a masterful reckoning with the planning and execution of the American military invasion and occupation of Iraq through mid-2006, now with a postscript on recent developments. Ricks draws on the exclusive cooperation of an extraordinary number of American personnel, including more than one hundred senior officers, and access to more than 30,000 pages of official documents, many of them never before made public. Tragically, it is an undeniable account--explosive, shocking, and authoritative--of unsurpassed tactical success combined with unsurpassed strategic failure that indicts some of America's most powerful and honored civilian and military leaders.

Fiasco

b0c5d03a-8d9e-43cc-ac7a-a74594c5a5db-1

#paperback #pulitzer #blackhistory #africanamerican #nationalbookcriticscircleaward #civilrights

America in the King Years 1954-63

In Parting the Waters, the first volume of his essential America in the King Years series, Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch gives a "compelling...masterfully told" (The Wall Street Journal) account of Martin Luther King's early years and rise to greatness.

Hailed as the most masterful story ever told of the American Civil Rights Movement, Parting the Waters is destined to endure for generations.

Moving from the fiery political baptism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the corridors of Camelot where the Kennedy brothers weighed demands for justice against the deceptions of J. Edgar Hoover, here is a vivid tapestry of America, torn and finally transformed by a revolutionary struggle unequaled since the Civil War.

Taylor Branch provides an unsurpassed portrait of King's rise to greatness and illuminates the stunning courage and private conflict, the deals, maneuvers, betrayals, and rivalries that determined history behind closed doors, at boycotts and sit-ins, on bloody freedom rides, and through siege and murder.

Epic in scope and impact, Branch's chronicle definitively captures one of the nation's most crucial passages.

Parting the Waters

bd60b0d2-bea2-4dc2-a288-e61191a030ea-1

Part science, part history, part sociology, a powerful analysis, winner of Pulitzer Prize #nonfiction #socialscience #paperback #pulitzer #science

Virginia

The Fates of Human Societies

Dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors he feels are responsible for history's broadest patterns

Guns, Germs, and Steel

b7f6d5d2-e84b-45cf-ba91-2b78d7908d9d-1

Alice Walker

The lives of two sisters--Nettie, a missionary in Africa, and Celie, a Southern woman married to a man she hates--are revealed in a series of letters exchanged over thirty years.

The Color Purple

d2266181-3468-423f-b152-55d345990866-1

James Agee

Jay Follet is healthy, robust, and in the prime of life when he sets out from home one hot summer night to tend to his sick father. He leaves behind a wife and two small children, promising to return the next evening if at all possible.

A Death in the Family

d14ac34c-22aa-44ff-9156-82d5d05cb76e-1

New Jersey

As the Reverend John Ames approaches the hour of his own death, he writes a letter to his son chronicling three previous generations of his family, a story that stretches back to the Civil War and reveals uncomfortable secrets about the family of preachers. Reader's Guide available. Reprint.

Michigan

Returning to Gilead to care for her dying father, Glory Boughton is joined by her long-absent brother, with whom she bonds throughout his struggles with alcoholism, unemployment, and their father's traditionalist values.

Home

31c1e188-6361-4011-825e-20029258eac7-1

Annie Dillard

Washington

Expeditions and Encounters

Here, in this compelling assembly of writings, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard explores the world of natural facts and human meanings.

Teaching a Stone to Talk

ccddb048-95be-4c9c-8f69-b7a736466c34-1

Jhumpa Lahiri

Page edges slightly discolored (pictured), and some light edgewear. Really nice shape overall.

A debut collection of short fiction blends elements of Indian traditions with the complexities of American culture in such tales as "A Temporary Matter," in which a young Indian-American couple confronts their grief over the loss of a child, while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. Original. 20,000 first printing.

Interpreter of Maladies

29d21c24-7141-4cca-9e0c-721488145394

Michael Cunningham

The Hours

88e49583-8da3-408b-8dc3-1a44d4f16b7d-1

Toni Morrison

This is one of the books that I have read for the RNL. This volume comes with some personal thoughts on this text. 

Illinois

Artwork copyright Touchstone Pictures At the center of Toni Morrison's fifth novel, which earned her the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is an almost unspeakable act of horror and heroism: a woman brutally kills her infant daughter rather than allow her to be enslaved. The woman is Sethe, and the novel traces her journey from slavery to freedom during and immediately following the Civil War.Woven into this circular, mesmerizing narrative are the horrible truths of Sethe's past: the incredible cruelties she endured as a slave, and the hardships she suffered in her journey north to freedom. Just as Sethe finds the past too painful to remember, and the future just "a matter of keeping the past at bay," her story is almost too painful to read. Yet Morrison manages to imbue the wreckage of her characters' lives with compassion, humanity, and humor. Part ghost story, part history lesson, part folk tale, Beloved finds beauty in the unbearable, and lets us all see the enduring promise of hope that lies in anyone's future.

Beloved

b0046d69-ac22-4bba-b6e2-247718f31d48-1

This is one of the RNL books that comes with personalized comments and an invitation to a conversation. 

Browse by categories

Save this search

Jeffrey Eugenides

Middlesex

David McCullough

John Adams

Andrew Sean Greer

Less (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize)

Marilynne Robinson

Gilead (Oprah's Book Club)

Junot Díaz

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Andrew Sean Greer

Less (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize)

Pearl S. Buck

The Good Earth

Thornton Wilder

Our Town

Donna Tartt

The Goldfinch

John Kennedy Toole; Walker Percy

A Confederacy of Dunces

John Toland

No Man's Land

Thomas E. Ricks

Fiasco

Taylor Branch

Parting the Waters

Jared M. Diamond, Professor of Geography Jared Diamond

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Alice Walker

The Color Purple

James Agee

A Death in the Family

Marilynne Robinson

Gilead (Oprah's Book Club)

Marilynne Robinson

Home

Annie Dillard

Teaching a Stone to Talk

Jhumpa Lahiri

Interpreter of Maladies

Michael Cunningham

The Hours

Toni Morrison

Beloved

Jean Stafford

Collected Stories of Jean Stafford

William Styron

The Confessions of Nat Turner