Published 1987, 1st Edition/2nd Printing/Dust Jacket

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

New Jersey

A Memoir of the Early Years

Mary McCarthy's memoir of her adolescence, highlighting her experiences in education as she recalls in intimate narrative the eight years before her marriage at age 21. 16 pages of black-and-white photographs.

How I Grew

62429c8d-c37c-4d8c-897d-c814ee5f69d8-1

#hardcover #fiction #humor #literature #novel

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Wisconsin

A Novel

The New York Times called Porter Shreve's first novel, The Obituary Writer, "an involving and sneakily touching story whose twists feel less like the conventions of a genre than the convolutions of a heart -- any heart." Newsday hailed the book as "a substantial achievement," and Tim O'Brien described it as "taut, compelling, and moving . . . beautifully written, engrossing from start to finish." Shining with the same heart and humor, Shreve's second novel, Drives Like a Dream, is a smart, wry tale about a modern-day mother in the midst of a lifestyle crisis -- and her outlandish attempts to get her family back.
Lydia Modine is sixty-one and about to come undone. Her three grown-up children have flown the coop. She hasn't seen them together in more than a year, and now her ex-husband is about to remarry a woman half his age. And the insults keep coming: Lydia is stuck on a book she's writing about Detroit's car industry, which uncannily parallels her own life -- out with the old model, in with the new. She's poured her soul into her family, only to be abandoned in the City of Dream Machines. But then a twist of fate introduces her to Norm, an eco-car fanatic out to remake her and the world. Is he the answer to all of her problems, or does he hold the one secret that just might get her children back to Detroit, home for good?
A warm, funny, and affecting novel that's sure to appeal to anyone who has longed for an alternate life, Drives Like a Dream confirms that sometimes when you set out for a spin, the twists and turns can be perfectly rewarding -- and right.

Drives Like a Dream

544dadf8-1077-4508-bb32-8a97e18b5dd8-1

José Saramago

Pennsylvania

A moving and eloquent fable from the 1998 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature offers a unique blend of love and philosophy as a man petitions a boat from the king, finds a crew to volunteer, and sets sail.

The Tale of the Unknown Island

5344b975-e396-452d-9870-a5e4262a1361-1

Jenny Offill

#hardcover #fiction #literature #jennyoffill #nytbestseller 

Texas

From the author of the nationwide best seller Dept. of Speculation--one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year--a shimmering tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. She's become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right-wingers worried about the decline of western civilization. As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience--but still she tries to save everyone, using everything she's learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks . . . And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in--funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.

Weather

71165def-ec9f-4cb7-906c-54549c3f4408-1

Winner of the Mary Higgins Clark Award
One of Publishers Weekly’s Top Ten Fall Mysteries 
Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Summer Reading List
One of The Washington Post’s Five New Thrillers & Mysteries for the Beach
One of Amazon’s Best of the Month
One of Christian Science Monitor’s Ten Best Books of the Month 
One of LitHub’s Five Books You May Have Missed This Month

From the author of the acclaimed Li Du novels comes Elsa Hart's new atmospheric mystery series. 

London, 1703. In a time when the old approaches to science coexist with the new, one elite community attempts to understand the world by collecting its wonders. Sir Barnaby Mayne, the most formidable of these collectors, has devoted his life to filling his cabinets. While the curious-minded vie for invitations to study the rare stones, bones, books, and artifacts he has amassed, some visitors come with a darker purpose.

For Cecily Kay, it is a passion for plants that brings her to the Mayne house. The only puzzle she expects to encounter is how to locate the specimens she needs within Sir Barnaby’s crowded cabinets. But when her host is stabbed to death, Cecily finds the confession of the supposed killer unconvincing. She pays attention to details―years of practice have taught her that the smallest particulars can distinguish a harmless herb from a deadly one―and in the case of Sir Barnaby’s murder, there are too many inconsistencies for her to ignore.


California

A Mystery

Winner of the Mary Higgins Clark Award
One of Publishers Weekly's Top Ten Fall Mysteries
Minneapolis Star Tribune's Summer Reading List
One of The Washington Post's Five New Thrillers & Mysteries for the Beach
One of Amazon's Best of the Month
One of Christian Science Monitor's Ten Best Books of the Month
One of LitHub's Five Books You May Have Missed This Month

From the author of the acclaimed Li Du novels comes Elsa Hart's new atmospheric mystery series.

London, 1703. In a time when the old approaches to science coexist with the new, one elite community attempts to understand the world by collecting its wonders. Sir Barnaby Mayne, the most formidable of these collectors, has devoted his life to filling his cabinets. While the curious-minded vie for invitations to study the rare stones, bones, books, and artifacts he has amassed, some visitors come with a darker purpose.

For Cecily Kay, it is a passion for plants that brings her to the Mayne house. The only puzzle she expects to encounter is how to locate the specimens she needs within Sir Barnaby's crowded cabinets. But when her host is stabbed to death, Cecily finds the confession of the supposed killer unconvincing. She pays attention to details--years of practice have taught her that the smallest particulars can distinguish a harmless herb from a deadly one--and in the case of Sir Barnaby's murder, there are too many inconsistencies for her to ignore.

To discover the truth, Cecily must enter the world of the collectors, a realm where intellect is distorted by obsession and greed. As her pursuit of answers brings her closer to a killer, she risks being given a final resting place amid the bones that wait, silent and still, in the cabinets of Barnaby Mayne.

The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne

ae030161-5172-4fc8-b174-23c6c751cef2-1

Garrison Keillor

Illinois

Leaving his wife to pursue an idealized life as a writer, Larry Wyler finds his early successes quickly deteriorating and returns home to write for an advice column, through which he learns unexpected life lessons. 250,000 first printing.

Love Me

fed7402a-0c43-4f9c-9930-55fc0229021c

#hardcover #fiction #memoir #historical #literature #truthorfiction

Florida

Following on the heels of his New York Times bestselling novel Telegraph Avenue, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon delivers another literary masterpiece: a novel of truth and lies, family legends, and existential adventure—and the forces that work to destroy us. In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother’s home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon’s grandfather shared recollections and told stories the younger man had never heard before, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten. That dreamlike week of revelations forms the basis for the novel Moonglow, the latest feat of legerdemain from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon. Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession of a man the narrator refers to only as “my grandfather.” It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and marriage and desire, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at midcentury, and, above all, of the destructive impact—and the creative power—of keeping secrets and telling lies. It is a portrait of the difficult but passionate love between the narrator’s grandfather and his grandmother, an enigmatic woman broken by her experience growing up in war-torn France. It is also a tour de force of speculative autobiography in which Chabon devises and reveals a secret history of his own imagination. From the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of New York’s Wallkill prison, from the heyday of the space program to the twilight of the “American Century,” the novel revisits an entire era through a single life and collapses a lifetime into a single week. A lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional nonfiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir, Moonglow is Chabon at his most moving and inventive.

Moonglow

a9570365-efa8-48a5-b122-eeb315177b83-1

Name written on inside cover - some discoloration from aging 

Dragon Seed

Names written on inside pages - library stamp on inside page

The Robe

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

South Dakota

Reading & Language Arts

Offers selection suggestions for teachers and librarians in all areas of young adult literature, including novels, short stories, and drama.

Literature for Today's Young Adult

f38cdd70-81a8-4ce3-83c3-d60a9731f3cb-1

Jonathan Carroll

Minnesota

"Jonathan Carroll is no longer just a cult author. His previous novel, After Silence, placed this gifted and award-winning writer squarely in the mainstream. The San Francisco Chronicle raved, "After Silence is filled with people who feel as real as one's closest friends, observed with a penetrating, and sometimes brutally chilling, clarity...a taut, original work whose excellence fulfills the promises made by this remarkable author over the last dozen years." In From the Teeth of Angels, Jonathan Carroll returns to that unique literary landscape that he paves with magic and wonder." "While vacationing in Sardinia, Ian McGann meets Death in a dream. Death promises to answer any of McGann's questions, but if he fails to understand the answers, he will have to pay with his life." "In Los Angeles, successful film actress Arlen Ford is no longer happy living in the Hollywood fast lane. She gives up everything - her career, her house, her glamorous lifestyle - and moves to Austria, where she meets a passionate war correspondent. From the start, their relationship is all-consuming. Arlen realizes she has been waiting for this man all her life." "And in Vienna, the terminally ill Wyatt Leonard suddenly discovers that he has the ability to raise the dead." "How all three of these extraordinary fates converge is at the heart of Jonathan Carroll's most daring and provocative novel, in which he dares to ask - and answer - the ultimate question: What is Death?"--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

From the Teeth of Angels

f8c9084c-4a42-4f2d-99b6-d3b8c7d58bda-1

Former college library copy, vintage copy 

Oregon

Our Mutual Friend

Harold Bloom

Ex-library copy with the usual markings. Modern Critical Views Series.

Gathers critical essays representing literary discussions about Alice Walker and her work, including essays on some of her specific works, Walker's relationship to other authors, and her treatment of gender and race themes.

Alice Walker

763fbfc0-9d6b-4755-be4f-ca6dc5f6f3ec-0

Ethan Hawke

Hawke's narrator is a young man in torment, disgusted with himself after the collapse of his marriage, still half-hoping for a reconciliation that would allow him to forgive himself and move on as he clumsily, and sometimes hilariously, tries to manage the wreckage of his personal life with whiskey and sex. What saves him is theater: in particular, the challenge of performing the role of Hotspur in a production of Henry IV under the leadership of a brilliant director, helmed by one of the most electrifying--and narcissistic--Falstaffs of all time. A novel about shame and beauty and faith, and the moral power of art.

A Bright Ray of Darkness

e808a314-56ec-40a7-8458-12f6bf01ba83-1

Louise Erdrich

New York

In this literary masterwork, Louise Erdrich, the bestselling author of the National Book Award-winning The Round House and the Pulitzer Prize nominee The Plague of Doves wields her breathtaking narrative magic in an emotionally haunting contemporary tale of a tragic accident, a demand for justice, and a profound act of atonement with ancient roots in Native American culture. North Dakota, late summer, 1999. Landreaux Iron stalks a deer along the edge of the property bordering his own. He shoots with easy confidence—but when the buck springs away, Landreaux realizes he’s hit something else, a blur he saw as he squeezed the trigger. When he staggers closer, he realizes he has killed his neighbor’s five-year-old son, Dusty Ravich. The youngest child of his friend and neighbor, Peter Ravich, Dusty was best friends with Landreaux’s five-year-old son, LaRose. The two families have always been close, sharing food, clothing, and rides into town; their children played together despite going to different schools; and Landreaux’s wife, Emmaline, is half sister to Dusty’s mother, Nola. Horrified at what he’s done, the recovered alcoholic turns to an Ojibwe tribe tradition—the sweat lodge—for guidance, and finds a way forward. Following an ancient means of retribution, he and Emmaline will give LaRose to the grieving Peter and Nola. “Our son will be your son now,” they tell them. LaRose is quickly absorbed into his new family. Plagued by thoughts of suicide, Nola dotes on him, keeping her darkness at bay. His fierce, rebellious new “sister,” Maggie, welcomes him as a coconspirator who can ease her volatile mother’s terrifying moods. Gradually he’s allowed shared visits with his birth family, whose sorrow mirrors the Raviches’ own. As the years pass, LaRose becomes the linchpin linking the Irons and the Raviches, and eventually their mutual pain begins to heal. But when a vengeful man with a long-standing grudge against Landreaux begins raising trouble, hurling accusations of a cover-up the day Dusty died, he threatens the tenuous peace that has kept these two fragile families whole. Inspiring and affecting, LaRose is a powerful exploration of loss, justice, and the reparation of the human heart, and an unforgettable, dazzling tour de force from one of America’s most distinguished literary masters.

LaRose

2764e973-156e-4038-bbe7-708d10ad9e18-1

#hardcover #fiction #suspensethrillers #jenniferegan #brooklyn #bookofthemonth #literature #pulitzerprize 

Manhattan Beach opens in Brooklyn during the Great Depression. Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to the house of Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. She is the sole provider for her mother, a farm girl who had a brief and glamorous career with the Ziegfeld Follies, and her lovely, severely disabled sister. At a nightclub, she chances to meet Dexter Styles again, and she begins to understand the complexity of her father's life, the reasons he might have vanished"--

Manhattan Beach

a15b5311-bdf1-4073-95fe-31cb6aac6859-1

#hardcover #fiction #literature #jennyoffill 

Colorado

#hardcover #fiction #novel #classic #classics #classiclit #americanlit #literature 

The Last Tycoon

#hardcover #fiction #novel #classic #classics #classiclit #americanlit #literature

Tender is the Night 

Above the Line Series 

Take Two

Purchased at an estate sale, has blank property stamp in inside cover board, see photo, no dust jacket. Glenco Literature Library

Alabama

The Red Badge of Courage with related readings

Bringing together all of the most popular girl characters from children's literature, this gorgeous anthology features feisty heroines such as Ramona Quimby, Alice in Wonderland, Pippi Longstocking, and Anne of Green Gables. The attractively illustrated extracts offer the perfect introduction to stories that have enchanted generations of young girls.

Indiana

A Treasury of Favorites From Children’s Literature

1999 Kingfisher Book of Classic Girl Stories

#hardcover #british #irish #classics #literature #novel #bookscoffeelove

Browse by categories

Save this search

Mary McCarthy

How I Grew

Porter Shreve

Drives Like a Dream

José Saramago

The Tale of the Unknown Island

Jenny Offill

Weather

Elsa Hart

The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne

Garrison Keillor

Love Me

Michael Chabon

Moonglow

Pearl S. Buck

Dragon Seed

Lloyd C. Douglas

The Robe

Aleen P. Nilsen; Kenneth L. Donelson

Literature for Today's Young Adult

Jonathan Carroll

From the Teeth of Angels

Charles Dickens

Our Mutual Friend

Harold Bloom

Alice Walker

Ethan Hawke

A Bright Ray of Darkness

Louise Erdrich

LaRose

Jennifer Egan

Manhattan Beach

Jenny Offill

Weather

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Last Tycoon

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tender is the Night

Karen Kingsbury

Take Two

Stephen Crane

The Red Badge of Courage with related readings

Rosemary Sandberg

1999 Kingfisher Book of Classic Girl Stories

John Fowles

Daniel Martin

Jennifer Egan

Manhattan Beach