Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Who was Louki? Did anyone really know? She made her mark on all of us in different ways. We all remember her, some of us more than others, but did any of us truly know her? Can anyone honestly say they know another person? In the Café of Lost Youth is vintage Patrick Modiano, an absorbing evocation of a particular Paris of the 1950s, shadowy and shady, a secret world of writers, criminals, drinkers, and drifters. The novel, which includes vignettes...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
At Ypsilanti State Hospital in 1959, the social psychologist Milton Rokeach brought together three paranoid schizophrenics. The men had one thing in common: each believed himself to be Jesus Christ. Their meeting and the two years they spent in one another's company serves as the basis for an investigation into the nature of human identity, belief, and delusion.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Gerald Middleton is a sixty-year-old self-proclaimed failure. Worse than that, he’s "a failure with a conscience." As a young man, he was involved in an archaeological dig that turned up an obscene idol in the coffin of a seventh-century bishop and scandalized a generation. The discovery was in fact the most outrageous archaeological hoax of the century, and Gerald has long known who was responsible and why. But to reveal the truth is to...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"There was a time when no one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated "its own kind of moral laws," spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and '70s. But there was one man who proved elusive, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book. She also pulled off a remarkable sleight of hand: Slow Days, Fast...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
This PEN/Hemingway Award winner about coming of age in Los Angeles is a “little gem of a novel . . . a masterwork of Hollywood fiction” (Salon).
He’s a child of 1940s Hollywood—specifically, Casa Fiesta, a ranch in the Malibu hills that he shares with his mother, a onetime Broadway headliner, and his father, a star of Westerns. But when his parents fall out of favor in Tinseltown, the narrator...
He’s a child of 1940s Hollywood—specifically, Casa Fiesta, a ranch in the Malibu hills that he shares with his mother, a onetime Broadway headliner, and his father, a star of Westerns. But when his parents fall out of favor in Tinseltown, the narrator...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
"In 1917, after the entry of America into World War I, E. E. Cummings, arecent graduate of Harvard College, volunteered to serve on an ambulance corps in France. Arrived in Paris with a new friend, William Slater Brown, the two young men set about living it up in the big city before heading off to their assignment. Once in the field, they wrote irreverent letters about their experiences which attracted the attention of the censors and ultimately led...
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on these lists
AAPI Heritage Month
Aliens
May Books on Tap: Sci-fi
Thomas Ford Library's Science Fiction Book Club Selections
Aliens
May Books on Tap: Sci-fi
Thomas Ford Library's Science Fiction Book Club Selections
Description
"When massive, intelligent aliens from Mars touch down in Victorian England and threaten to destroy the civilized world, humanity's vaunted knowledge proves to be of little use. First published in 1898, H.G. Wells's masterpiece of speculative fiction has thrilled and delighted generations of readers, spawned countless imitations, and inspired dramatizations by such masters as Orson Welles and Steven Spielberg. The War of the Worlds is a fantasy that...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Natalia Ginzburg, one of Italy's great writers, introduced A Family Lexicon, her most celebrated work, with an unusual disclaimer: "The places, events and people are all real. I have invented nothing. Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy everything thus invented." A Family Lexicon re-creates with extraordinary objectivity the small world of...
10) Paris vagabond
Author
Language
English
Description
"Paris Vagabond is an unclassifiable masterpiece, a book that purports to be a novel but, accompanied as it is by the photographs of Patrice Molinard, is as much a brilliant documentary as a work of the imagination. In rich prose, suffused with the language of the street, and brilliantly rendered in English by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Jean-Paul Clebert captures the essence of a long-gone Paris of the poor, the criminal, and the outcast: a society of...
11) Augustus
Author
Language
English
Description
"In Augustus, the third of his great novels, John Williams took on an entirely new challenge, a historical novel set in classical Rome, exploring the life of the founder of the Roman Empire, whose greatness was matched by his brutality. To tell the story, Williams also turned to a genre, the epistolary novel, that was new to him, transforming and transcending it just as he did the western in Butcher's Crossing and the campus novel in Stoner. Augustus...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Collection of stories by Paul Lafargu including The Right to Be Lazy; A Capitalist Catechism; The Legend of Victor Hugo and Memories of Karl Marx. Paul Lafargue's masterpiece, The Right To Be Lazy, at once funny and serious, witty and profound, elegant and forceful, is a logical expansion of The Right to the Pursuit of Happiness announced by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. It was not only extremely popular but also brought about...
Author
Language
English
Description
"A vivid coming-of-age tale set in a big Nigerian city about a young man trying to make his way as a journalist and band leader in the big city. When People of the City was published in 1954 it was immediately acclaimed as the first major novel in English by a West African to be widely read throughout the English-speaking world. People of the City tells the story of a young crime reporter and dance-band leader in a great West African city who comes...
14) Living pictures
Author
Language
English
Description
"The prolonged German siege of Leningrad during the Second World War was among the most destructive sieges in history, leading to mass starvation and well over a million deaths. The contemporary Russian poet and scholar Polina Barskova, born in Leningrad, has done extensive research on the siege in archives in St. Petersburg, research that has borne fruit in Living Pictures, an extraordinary dramatization of life under the most extreme of circumstances....
Author
Language
English
Description
"Buffalo. A father's funeral. Memory. In Generations, Louise Clifton's formidable poetic gift emerges in prose, giving us a memoir of stark and profound beauty. Her story focuses on the lives of the Sayles family: Caroline, "born among the Dahomey people in 1822," who walked north from New Orleans to Virginia in 1830 when she was eight years old; Lucy, the first black woman to be hanged in Virginia; and Gene, born with a withered arm, the son of a...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Élisabeth Gille was only five when the Gestapo arrested her mother, and she grew up remembering next to nothing of her. Her mother was a figure, a name, Irène Némirovsky , a once popular novelist, a Russian émigré from an immensely rich family, a Jew who didn't consider herself one and who even contributed to collaborationist periodicals, and a woman who died in Auschwitz because she was a Jew. To her daughter she was a tragic enigma and a stranger....
Author
Language
English
Description
"In 1941, when Germany turned against the USSR, tens of thousands of Poles--men, women, and children who were starving, sickly, and impoverished--were released from Soviet prison camps and allowed to join the Polish army being formed in the south of Russia. One of the survivors who made the difficult winter journey was the painter and reserve officer Józef Czapski. General Anders, the army's commander in chief, assigned Czapski the task of receiving...
18) Virgin soil
Author
Language
English
Description
Turgenev was the most liberal-spirited and unqualifiedly humane of all the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists, and in "Virgin Soil, " his biggest and most ambitious work, he sought to balance his deep affection for his country and his people with his growing apprehensions about what their future held in store. At the heart of the book is the story of a young man and a young woman, torn between love and politics, who struggle to make headway...
19) Malicroix
Author
Language
English
Description
"Fans of the style of William Faulkner will want to read Henri Bosco, four-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Available in English for the first time, Malicroix tells the story of a recluse living in the French countryside, unraveling how he came to a life of solitude. Although relatively unknown today by readers of English, Henri Bosco (1888-1976) was a prolific, well-respected, and popular mid-twentieth century French writer. The author...
20) The skin
Author
Language
English
Description
"'It is a shameful thing to win a war.' The reliably unorthodox Curzio Malaparte's own service as an Italian liaison officer with the Allies during the invasion of Italy was the basis for this searing and surreal novel, in which the contradictions inherent in any attempt to simultaneously conquer and liberate a people beset the triumphant but ingenuous American forces as they make their way up the peninsula. Malaparte's account begins in occupied...
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Suggest a purchase. Submit Request