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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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"In her small hometown, librarian Ruth Cornier has always felt like an outsider, even as her beloved father rains fire-and-brimstone warnings from the pulpit at Holy Fire Baptist. Unfortunately for Ruth, the only things the townspeople fear more than the God and the Devil are the myths that haunt the area, like the story of the Low Man, a vampiric figure said to steal into sinners' bedrooms and kill them on moonless nights. When a skull is found deep...
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"Bob Comet is a retired librarian, isolated but not lonely, living out his quiet days in a mint-colored house in Oregon, surrounded by his books and small comforts. One morning, out on his daily walk, he performs an act of kindness that brings him into contact with a nearby senior center, where he soon begins volunteering. Here, as a community of peers and friends gathers around Bob, and following a happenstance brush with a painful complication from...
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"Theo Benton decides to move to the United States to finally finish her novel, and she is soon drawn into a literary labyrinth where identity is something that can be lost and remade for the sake of sales and readership. When her mentor and lover is brutally murdered, Theo wants the killer to be found and justice to be served. But when the prime suspect turns out to be her older brother, Gus, Theo does what is necessary to protect him-to save him....
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An intimate exploration of the life, craft, and legacy of one of the most revered and influential writers, an artist who continues to inspire fans and creatives to cultivate practices of deep attention, rigorous interrogation and beautiful style. Joan Didion was a writer's writer; not only a groundbreaking journalist, essayist, novelist and screenwriter, but a keen observer who honed her sights on life's telling details. Her insights continue to influence...
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NOW THE OSCAR-WINNING MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING EMMA STONE, RAMY YOUSSEF, MARK RUFFALO, AND WILLEM DAFOE, DIRECTED BY YORGOS LANTHIMOS.
"Witty and delightfully written" (New York Times Book Review), Alasdair Gray's Poor Things echoes Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in this novel of a young woman freeing herself from the confines of the suffocating Victorian society she was created to serve.
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"Geno is living out his final days in a nursing home, bored, curmudgeonly, and struggling to connect with his nursing assistant, Angel, who he sees as being different from him in every way possible, and unable to understand him in any way. Perhaps no one really can, since Geno has been telling everyone who will listen that he's not just Geno-in fact, he's lived many past lives, dating back 1000 years, and since that first life in Seville, Spain, he...
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"A new mess. A new mystery. It's up to Molly the maid to uncover the truth, no matter how dirty, in this standalone novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Maid, a Good Morning America Book Club pick. Molly Gray is not like anyone else. With her flair for cleaning and proper etiquette, she has risen through the ranks of the glorious five-star Regency Grand Hotel to become the esteemed Head Maid. But just as her life reaches a pinnacle...
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"The night of London's grandest ball, a bold group of women downstairs launch a daring revenge heist against Mayfair society in this dazzling historical novel about power, gender, and class "Rollicking fun and entirely original... Anyone who relishes a good party gone wrong will devour this." --Sarah Penner, New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Apothecary Mrs. King is no ordinary housekeeper. Born into a world of con artists and thieves,...
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"An unprecedented view of Lincoln's Springfield from the acclaimed and bestselling author of Loving Frank. Nancy Horan, author of the million-copy New York Times bestseller Loving Frank, returns with a sweeping historical novel, which tells the story of Abraham Lincoln's ascendance from rumpled lawyer to U.S. president to the Great Emancipator through the eyes of a young asylum-seeker who arrives in Lincoln's home of Springfield from Madeira, Portugal....
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"No one knows Margo's real name. Her colleagues and patrons at a small-town public library only know her middle-aged normalcy, congeniality, and charm. They have no reason to suspect that she is, in fact, a former nurse with a trail of countless premature deaths in her wake. She has turned a new page, so to speak, and the library is her sanctuary, a place to quell old urges. That is, at least, until Patricia, a recent graduate and failed novelist,...
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April 3, 2024: New Sci-Fi / Fantasy
HPL 2024 Fiction Spotlight
May Fiction
Released This Week - April 2
HPL 2024 Fiction Spotlight
May Fiction
Released This Week - April 2
Description
"Set in a not-too-distant America, I Cheerfully Refuse is the tale of a bereaved and pursued musician embarking under sail on a sentient Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife. Rainy, an endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, seeks refuge in the harbors, fogs, and remote islands of the inland sea. Encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, Rainy finds on land an increasingly desperate...
12) The bee sting
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2023 Best Adult Fiction & Nonfiction (SCPL)
Best Books of 2023 - Adult
Best of 2023 - Fiction
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Best Books of 2023 - Adult
Best of 2023 - Fiction
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"The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie's once-lucrative car business is going under--but rather than face the music, he's spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to...
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2023 Best Adult Fiction & Nonfiction (SCPL)
2023 FPPL Summer Reading--- Pride Reads for Adults
AudioFile's Best Audiobooks of 2023
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2023 FPPL Summer Reading--- Pride Reads for Adults
AudioFile's Best Audiobooks of 2023
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Description
"In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. Among them are Seamus, a frustrated young poet; Ivan, a dancer turned aspiring banker who dabbles in amateur pornography; Fatima, whose independence and work ethic complicate her relationships with friends and a trusted mentor; and Noah, who 'didn’t seek sex out so much as it came...
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"Malaya, 1945. Cecily Alcantara's family is in terrible danger: her fifteen-year-old son, Abel, has disappeared, and her youngest daughter, Jasmin, is confined in a basement to prevent being pressed into service at the comfort stations. Her eldest daughter Jujube, who works at a tea house frequented by drunk Japanese soldiers, becomes angrier by the day. Cecily knows two things: that this is all her fault; and that her family must never learn the...
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"For fans of Before the Coffee Gets Cold, a charming, internationally bestselling Japanese novel about how the perfect book recommendation can change a readers' life. What are you looking for? So asks Tokyo's most enigmatic librarian. For Sayuri Komachi is able to sense exactly what each visitor to her library is searching for and provide just the book recommendation to help them find it. A restless retail assistant looks to gain new skills, a mother...
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"In this work of literary excavation, an award-winning author transcribes, compiles, and organizes a final unfinished novel by celebrated American fiction writer Flannery O'Connor. This book introduces O'Connor's final work to the public for the first time and imagines themes and directions the novel might have taken"--
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2023 Best Adult Fiction & Nonfiction (SCPL)
2023 Eisenhower Staff Favorites
2024 Audie Winners
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2023 Eisenhower Staff Favorites
2024 Audie Winners
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Description
In the spring of 2020, Lara's three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything...
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"When celebrated writer Alma Cruz inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, she turns iut into a place to bury her untold stories--literally. She creates a graveyard for manuscript drafts and revisions and the characters whose lives she tried but failed to bring to life and who still haunt her. Alma wants her characters to rest in peace, but they have other ideas, and the cemetery becomes a nysterious sanctuary for their true narratives."--Provided...
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"India Allwood grew up wanting to be an actress. Armed with a stack of index cards and a hell of a lot of talent, she goes from awkward 16-year-old to Broadway ingenue to tv star. But while promoting her most recent project, a film about adoption, India does what you should never do - she tells a journalist the truth: it's a bad movie. Like so many movies about adoption, it tells only one story, a tragic one. But India's an adoptive mom herself and...
20) Day: a novel
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November LibraryReads
November New Books
Released This Week - November 14
Upcoming Releases: November + December 2023
November New Books
Released This Week - November 14
Upcoming Releases: November + December 2023
Description
"April 5th, 2019: In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and Isabel, troubled husband and wife, are both a little bit in love with Isabel's younger brother, Robbie. Robbie, wayward soul of the family, who still lives in the attic loft; Robbie, who, trying to get over his most recent boyfriend, has created a glamorous avatar online; Robbie, who now has to move out of the house - and whose departure...
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