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Literary Reference Center
Novels, short stories, poems, plot summaries and synopses, and literary criticism. Research guides, lesson plans, and citation tools support student learning.
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Receiving an invitation to his ex-boyfriend's wedding, Arthur, a failed novelist on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, embarks on an international journey that finds him falling in love, risking his life, reinventing himself, and making connections with the past.
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English
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"The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance, and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then from the sisters to each other, the novel draws readers into the experiences of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery, and Sofia"--
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This novel follows a young man's journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world's most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea. The son of an influential father who runs an orphan work camp, Pak Jun Do rises to prominence using instinctive talents and eventually becomes a professional kidnapper and romantic rival to Kim Jong Il. Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother, a singer "stolen" to Pyongyang, and a father...
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Toole's lunatic and sage novel introduces one of the most memorable characters in American literature, Ignatius Reilly, whom Walker Percy dubs "slob extraordinaire, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one." Set in New Orleans, A Confederacy of Dunces outswifts Swift, one of whose essays gives the book its title. As its characters burst into life, they leave the region and literature forever changed by their...
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English
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2023 Summer Reading - Read Outside Your Comfort Zone: Frequently Challenged Books
ALA Most Challenged Books
Banned Books
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ALA Most Challenged Books
Banned Books
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Description
"Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with rich humor and unswerving honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet heroism of one man's struggle for justice--but the weight of history will only tolerate so much." --
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"On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." With this celebrated sentence, Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world. By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper seeks to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths...
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The author's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is the story of four generations in the life of an American family. Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history and author of books about the Western frontier, returns to his ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Wheelchair bound with a crippling bone disease and dependent on others for his every need, he is nonetheless embarking on a search of monumental proportions: to...
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"It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong....
10) Arrowsmith
Author
Series
Signet books
Harbrace modern classics
Signet classic volume CE2225
Signet classic volume CE 2691
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Harbrace modern classics
Signet classic volume CE2225
Signet classic volume CE 2691
More Series...
Language
English
Description
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel recounts the story of a Midwestern physician who is forced to give up his profession due to the ignorance, corruption, and greed of society.
11) The good earth
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English
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Description
When O-lan, a servant girl, marries the peasant Wang Lung, she toils tirelessly through four pregnancies for their family's survival. Reward at first is meagre, but there is sustenance in the land - until the famine comes. Half-starved, the family joins thousands of peasants to beg on the city streets. It seems that all is lost, until O-lan's desperate will to survive returns them home with undreamt of wealth. But they have betrayed the earth from...
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English
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Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month 2023
Asian American & Pacific Islander Month
Asian American and Pacific Islander Month
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Asian American & Pacific Islander Month
Asian American and Pacific Islander Month
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Description
"Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, this stunning debut collection unerring charts the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations. In stories that travel from India to America and back again, Lahiri speaks with universal eloquence to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner."--Provided by publisher.
13) One of ours
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English
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Description
Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist of this beautifully written Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, resembles the youngest son of a peculiarly American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his parents, all but rejected by his wife, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It's only when America enters the First World War that Claude finds...
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English
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What is the true nature of Nature? Is it a harmonious, interconnected system, operating according to the principles of co-dependence and benevolence? Or is it red in tooth and claw -- an unfeeling, unthinking force, in which the individual is overwhelmed and subsumed to serve a larger purpose, one mysterious and obscure? This is what Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is all about: an exploration into the nature of Nature, an attempt to discover...
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English
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Virginia Miner, an unmarried tenured professor, is an Anglophile on leave to research a book. Fred Turner, a teacher at the same university, is recently separated, flat broke and miserable in this city where the rain never seems to end. The separate paths of these two lonely and naive innocents abroad lead them to strikingly similar destinations of newfound passion ... and unexpected love.
16) So Big
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English
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Description
"Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and widely considered to be Edna Ferber's greatest achievement, So Big is a classic novel of turn-of-the-century Chicago. It is the unforgettable story of Selina Peake DeJong, a gambler's daughter, and her struggles to stay afloat and maintain her dignity and her sanity in the face of marriage, widowhood, and single parenthood." --
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English
Description
New York. Today. Corporate lawyer Amir Kapoor is happy, in love, and about to land the biggest career promotion of his life. But beneath the veneer, success has come at a price. When Amir and his artist wife, Emily, host an intimate dinner party at their Upper East Side apartment, what starts out as a friendly conversation soon escalates into something far more damaging.
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