Catalog Search Results
1) In our time
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Series
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English
Description
When In Our Time was published in 1925, it was praised by Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald for its simple and precise use of language to convey a wide range of complex emotions, and it earned Hemingway a place beside Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein among the most promising American writers of that period. In Our Time contains several early Hemingway classics, including the famous Nick Adams stories "Indian Camp," "The...
2) Freshwater
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English
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Description
Freshwater explores the surreal experience of having a fractured self. It centers around a young Nigerian woman, Ada, who develops separate selves within her as a result of being born "with one foot on the other side." Unsettling, heartwrenching, dark, and powerful, Freshwater is a sharp evocation of a rare way of experiencing the world, one that illuminates how we all construct our identities. Ada begins her life in the south of Nigeria as a troubled...
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English
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Description
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel of Irish writer James Joyce and is a key work of twentieth century literature that remains as fresh, challenging and relevant as the day it was first published. It is a autobiographical novel and describes the early life and development of its central character, Stephen Dedalus (representing Joyce). Stephan, an intelligent but frail child, struggles toward maturity in Ireland at the turn of...
4) Big Sur
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Series
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English
Description
Coming down from his carefree youth and unwanted fame, Jack Kerouac undertakes a mature confrontation of some of his most troubling emotional issues: a burgeoning problem with alcoholism, addiction, fear, and insecurity. He dutifully records his ever-changing states of consciousness, which culminate in a powerful religious experience. Big Sur was written some time after Jack Kerouac's best-known works, following a visit to northern California and...
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Description
"The summer of '28 was a vintage season for a growing boy. A summer of green apple trees, mowed lawns, and new sneakers. Of half-burnt firecrackers, of gathering dandelions, of Grandma's belly-busting dinner. It was a summer of sorrows and marvels and gold-fuzzed bees. A magical, timeless summer in the life of a twelve-year-old boy named Douglas Spaulding—remembered forever by the incomparable Ray Bradbury." --
7) On the road
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English
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Description
Behind us lay the whole of America and everything Dean and I had previously known about life, and life on the road. We had finally found the magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamed the extent of the magic. Sal Paradise, a young innocent, joins the slightly crazed Dean Moriarty on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States. Their hedonistic search for release or fulfilment through drink, sex, drugs and jazz...
8) The bell jar
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English
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Classics - St. Charles Public Library
Coming-of-age
Eisenhower Public Library Staff Picks: Literary Fiction
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Coming-of-age
Eisenhower Public Library Staff Picks: Literary Fiction
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Description
[This book] chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under-- maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche...
9) Agnes Grey
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English
Description
When her family becomes impoverished after a disastrous financial speculation, Agnes Grey determines to find work as a governess in order to contribute to their meagre income and assert her independence. But Agnes's enthusiasm is swiftly extinguished as she struggles first with the unmanageable Bloomfield children and then with the painful disdain of the haughty Murray family; the only kindness she receives comes from Mr Weston, the sober young curate....
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English
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Originally published in 1912, this novel was one of the first to present a frank picture of being black in America. Masked in the tradition of the literary confession practiced by such writers as St. Augustine and Rousseau, this "autobiography" purports to be a candid account of its narrator's private views and feelings as well as an acknowledgment of the central secret of his life: that though he lives as a white man, he is, by heritage and experience,...
12) Villette
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English
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With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster, and her own complex feelings, first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor, Paul Emmanuel. Charlotte Brontë's last and most autobiographical novel is a powerfully...
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English
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Fiction Picks for Native American Heritage Month
HPL National Native American Heritage Month
Native American Heritage
HPL National Native American Heritage Month
Native American Heritage
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Description
In his darkly comic short story collection, the author brilliantly weaves memory, fantasy, and stark realism to paint a complex, grimly ironic portrait of life in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation. These twenty-four interlinked tales are narrated by characters raised on humiliation and government-issue cheese, and yet are filled with passion and affection, myth and dream. There is Victor, who as a nine-year-old crawled between his unconscious...
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English
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An anthology of dark, powerful and moving short stories from master storyteller David Almond, inspired by his childhood in the north-east of England. It features coming of age stories on the theme of closeness to home, deftly interwoven with illuminating autobiographical pieces on the inspirations behind the fiction. David Almond says of this unique collection, "Stories on the page are so beautifully neat. All that lovely black print; those lovely...
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English
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Description
An elaborate and moving coming-of-age story about Eugene Gant, a restless and energetic character whose passion to experience life takes him from his small, rural hometown in North Carolina to Harvard University and the city of Boston. The novel's pattern is artfully simple--a small town, a large family, high school and college--yet the characters are monumental in their graphic individuality and personality.
16) The Steppenwolf
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English
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"With its blend of Eastern mysticism and Western culture, Hesse's best-known and most autobiographical work is one of literature's most poetic evocations of the soul's journey to liberation. Harry Haller is a sad and lonely figure, a reclusive intellectual for whom life holds no joy. He struggles to reconcile the wild primeval wolf and the rational man within himself without surrendering to the bourgeois values he despises. His life changes dramatically...
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English
Description
Sixth grade is the worst... and also the best, as Jordan rides the ups and downs of middle-school life in hilarious fashion. Funny, outrageous things didn't stop for Jordan Sonnenblick after he left fourth grade. No, in many ways the events detailed to hilarious effect in The Boy Who Failed Show and Tell were but a prelude to sixth grade, a time when Jordan would have to deal with& A rival named Jiminy (his real name is Jimmy -- but, hey, he looks...
18) Mujercitas
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Description
El señor March se ha marchado a la guerra y sus cuatro hijas deben quedarse en casa con su madre, su tiacutea y sus amigos, en medio del bullicio de la vida burguesa de Nueva Inglaterra.
Chronicles the joys and sorrow of the four March sisters as they grow into young ladies in nineteenth-century New England.
Author
Language
English
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2022 Summer Top Picks for Middle Schoolers
2023 March Book Madness at Blackhawk
Arab American Heritage 2023
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2023 March Book Madness at Blackhawk
Arab American Heritage 2023
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Description
Twelve-year-old Iranian refugee Khosrou moves to Oklahoma where he goes by Daniel and models himself after the legendary storyteller Scheherazade as he weaves tales that reflect his perseverance and reinvention.
At the front of a middle school classroom in Oklahoma, a boy named Khosrou (whom everyone calls "Daniel") stands, trying to tell a story. His story. But no one believes a word he says. To them he is a dark-skinned, hairy-armed boy with a...
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