Special Collections
Road Trip
Description: Nothing says freedom and adventure like a road trip! From Alabama to Wyoming, we have reads for every state. So hitch a ride with this collection of fiction and nonfiction books. #adults
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The Virgins
by Pamela ErensIt's 1979, and Aviva Rossner and Seung Jung are notorious at Auburn Academy.
They're an unlikely pair at an elite East Coast boarding school (she's Jewish; he's Korean American) and hardly shy when it comes to their sexuality.
Aviva is a formerly bookish girl looking for liberation from an unhappy childhood; Seung is an enthusiastic dabbler in drugs and a covert rebel against his demanding immigrant parents.
In the minds of their titillated classmates-particularly that of Bruce Bennett-Jones-the couple lives in a realm of pure, indulgent pleasure.
But, as is often the case, their fabled relationship is more complicated than it seems: despite their lust and urgency, their virginity remains intact, and as they struggle to understand each other, the relationship spirals into disaster.
The Virgins is the story of Aviva and Seung's descent into confusion and shame, as re-imagined in richly detailed episodes by their classmate Bruce, a once-embittered voyeur turned repentant narrator.
With unflinching honesty and breathtaking prose, Pamela Erens brings a fresh voice to the tradition of the great boarding school novel.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot DiazOscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who--from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister--dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love.
But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú--a curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA.
Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere--and risk it all--in the name of love.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Bless Me, Ultima
by Rudolfo AnayaStories filled with wonder and the haunting beauty of his culture have helped make Rudolfo Anaya the father of Chicano literature in English, and his tales fairly shimmer with the lyric richness of his prose.
Acclaimed in both Spanish and English, Anaya is perhaps best loved for his classic bestseller ...
Antonio Marez is six years old when Ultima comes to stay with his family in New Mexico. She is a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic.
Under her wise wing, Tony will test the bonds that tie him to his people, and discover himself in the pagan past, in his father's wisdom, and in his mother's Catholicism. And at each life turn there is Ultima, who delivered Tony into the world-and will nurture the birth of his soul.
Open City
by Teju ColeA New York Times Notable Book * One of the ten top novels of the year --Time and NPR NAMED A BEST BOOK ON MORE THAN TWENTY END-OF-THE-YEAR LISTS, INCLUDING The New Yorker * The Atlantic * The Economist * Newsweek/The Daily Beast * The New Republic * New York Daily News * Los Angeles Times * The Boston Globe * The Seattle Times * Minneapolis Star Tribune * GQ * Salon * Slate * New York magazine * The Week * The Kansas City Star * Kirkus ReviewsA haunting novel about identity, dislocation, and history, Teju Cole's Open City is a profound work by an important new author who has much to say about our country and our world. Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor named Julius wanders, reflecting on his relationships, his recent breakup with his girlfriend, his present, his past. He encounters people from different cultures and classes who will provide insight on his journey--which takes him to Brussels, to the Nigeria of his youth, and into the most unrecognizable facets of his own soul."[A] prismatic debut . . . beautiful, subtle, [and] original."--The New Yorker "A psychological hand grenade."--The Atlantic "Magnificent . . . a remarkably resonant feat of prose."--The Seattle Times "A precise and poetic meditation on love, race, identity, friendship, memory, [and] dislocation."--The Economist
Serena
by Ron RashThe year is 1929, and newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton travel from Boston to the North Carolina mountains where they plan to create a timber empire.
Although George has already lived in the camp long enough to father an illegitimate child, Serena is new to the mountains-but she soon shows herself to be the equal of any man, overseeing crews, hunting rattle-snakes, even saving her husband's life in the wilderness.
Together this lord and lady of the woodlands ruthlessly kill or vanquish all who fall out of favor. Yet when Serena learns that she will never bear a child, she sets out to murder the son George fathered without her.
Mother and child begin a struggle for their lives, and when Serena suspects George is protecting his illegitimate family, the Pembertons' intense, passionate marriage starts to unravel as the story moves toward its shocking reckoning.
Rash's masterful balance of violence and beauty yields a riveting novel that, at its core, tells of love both honored and betrayed.
Love Medicine
by Louise ErdrichThe stunning first novel in Louise Erdrich's Native American series, Love Medicine tells the story of two families, the Kashpaws and the Lamartines.
Written in Erdrich's uniquely poetic, powerful style, it is a multi-generational portrait of strong men and women caught in an unforgettable drama of anger, desire, and the healing power that is love medicine.
Boy Erased
by Garrard ConleyA beautiful, raw and compassionate memoir about identity, love and understanding.
The son of a Baptist pastor and deeply embedded in church life in small town Arkansas, as a young man Garrard Conley was terrified and conflicted about his sexuality.
When Garrard was a nineteen-year-old college student, he was outed to his parents, and was forced to make a life-changing decision: either agree to attend a church-supported conversion therapy program that promised to "cure" him of homosexuality; or risk losing family, friends, and the God he had prayed to every day of his life.
Through an institutionalized Twelve-Step Program heavy on Bible study, he was supposed to emerge heterosexual, ex-gay, cleansed of impure urges and stronger in his faith in God for his brush with sin.
Instead, even when faced with a harrowing and brutal journey, Garrard found the strength and understanding to break out in search of his true self and forgiveness.
By confronting his buried past and the burden of a life lived in shadow, Garrard traces the complex relationships among family, faith, and community. At times heart-breaking, at times triumphant, this memoir is a testament to love that survives despite all odds.
With
by Donald HaringtonWith is a sensual, irresistible tale, full of unexpected twists and turns.
What starts out as a suspenseful recounting of child abduction evolves into the story of eight-year-old Robin Kerr growing up in the wilds of the Ozarks, left to fend for herself on a remote, inaccessible mountain-top.
With a dog, a young girl and a ghost as the main viewpoint characters in this remarkable novel, Harington has given us a triumphant story of survival-and the most original love story ever told.
Geek Love
by Katherine DunnGeek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias set out-with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes-to breed their own exhibit of human oddities.
There's Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family's most precious-and dangerous-asset.
As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene.
Family values will never be the same.
Philadelphia Fire
by John Edgar WidemanFrom "one of America's premier writers of fiction" (New York Times) comes this novel inspired by the 1985 police bombing of a West Philadelphia row house owned by the back-to-nature, Afrocentric cult known as Move.
The bombing killed eleven people and started a fire that destroyed sixty other houses.
At the center of the story is Cudjoe, a writer and exile who returns to his old neighborhood after spending a decade fleeing from his past, and his search for the lone survivor of the fire - a young boy who was seen running from the flames.
Bastard Out of Carolina
by Dorothy AllisonThe publication of Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina was a landmark event. The novel's profound portrait of family dynamics in the rural South won the author a National Book Award nomination and launched her into the literary spotlight. Critics have likened Allison to William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Harper Lee, naming her the first writer of her generation to dramatize the lives and language of poor whites in the South.
Since its appearance, the novel has inspired an award-winning film and has been banned from libraries and classrooms, championed by fans, and defended by critics.
Greenville County, South Carolina, is a wild, lush place that is home to the Boatwright family-a tight-knit clan of rough-hewn, hard- drinking men who shoot up each other's trucks, and indomitable women who get married young and age too quickly.
At the heart of this story is Ruth Anne Boatwright, known simply as Bone, a bastard child who observes the world around her with a mercilessly keen perspective. When her stepfather Daddy Glen, "cold as death, mean as a snake," becomes increasingly more vicious toward her, Bone finds herself caught in a family triangle that tests the loyalty of her mother, Anney-and leads to a final, harrowing encounter from which there can be no turning back.
The Personal History of Rachel DuPree
by Ann Weisgarber
It is 1917 in the South Dakota Badlands, and summer has been hard.
Fourteen years have passed since Rachel and Isaac DuPree left Chicago to stake a claim in this unforgiving land.
Isaac, a former Buffalo Soldier, is fiercely proud: black families are rare in the West, and black ranchers even rarer.
But it hasn't rained in months, the cattle bellow with thirst, and supplies are dwindling.
Pregnant, and struggling to feed her family, Rachel is isolated by more than just geography.
She is determined to give her surviving children the life they deserve, but she knows that her husband will never leave his ranch.
Moving and majestic, The Personal History of Rachel DuPree is an unforgettable novel about love and loyalty, homeland and belonging.
Above all, it is the story of one woman's courage in the face of the most punishing adversity.
Short-listed for the Orange Award for New Writers & long-listed for the Orange Prize
Wise Blood
by Flannery O'ConnorFlannery O'Connor's haunting first novel of faith, false prophets, and redemptive wisdom Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature.
It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his inborn, desperate fate.
He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Sabbath Lily.
In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Motes founds the Church Without Christ, but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God.
He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with "wise blood," who leads him to a mummified holy child and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Motes's existential struggles.
This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdom gives us one of the most riveting characters in American fiction.
Lonesome Dove
by Larry McmurtryA love story, an adventure, and an epic of the frontier, Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-- winning classic, Lonesome Dove, the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America.
Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers.
Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic, Lonesome Dove is a book to make us laugh, weep, dream, and remember.
The Known World
by Edward P. JonesIn one of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Edward P. Jones, two-time National Book Award finalist, tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia.
Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline.
But when death takes him unexpectedly, his widow, Caldonia, can't uphold the estate's order and chaos ensues.
In a daring and ambitious novel, Jones has woven a footnote of history into an epic that takes an unflinching look at slavery in all of its moral complexities.
This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
by Sherman AlexieSherman Alexie&’s darkly humorous story collection weaves memory, fantasy, and stark reality to powerfully evoke life on the Spokane Indian Reservation. The twenty-four linked tales in Alexie&’s debut collection—an instant classic—paint an unforgettable portrait of life on and around the Spokane Indian Reservation, a place where &“Survival = Anger x Imagination,&” where HUD houses and generations of privation intertwine with history, passion, and myth. We follow Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the longwinded storyteller no one really listens to; his half-hearted nemesis, Victor, the basketball star turned recovering alcoholic; and a wide cast of other vividly drawn characters on a haunting journey filled with humor and sorrow, resilience and resignation, dreams and reality. Alexie&’s unadulterated honesty and boundless compassion come together in a poetic vision of a world in which the gaps between past and present are not really gaps after all. The basis for the acclaimed 1998 feature film Smoke Signals,the Chicago Tribune noted, &“The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven . . . is for the American Indian what Richard Wright&’s Native Son was for the black American in 1940.&” The collection received a Special Citation for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction. This ebook edition features a new prologue from the author, as well as an illustrated biography and rare photos from Sherman Alexie&’s personal collection.
John Henry Days
by Colson WhiteheadColson Whitehead’s eagerly awaited and triumphantly acclaimed new novel is on one level a multifaceted retelling of the story of John Henry, the black steel-driver who died outracing a machine designed to replace him.
On another level it’s the story of a disaffected, middle-aged black journalist on a mission to set a record for junketeering who attends the annual John Henry Days festival.
It is also a high-velocity thrill ride through the tunnel where American legend gives way to American pop culture, replete with p. r. flacks, stamp collectors, blues men , and turn-of-the-century song pluggers.
John Henry Days is an acrobatic, intellectually dazzling, and laugh-out-loud funny book that will be read and talked about for years to come.
American Dervish
by Ayad AkhtarHayat Shah is a young American in love for the first time. His normal life of school, baseball, and video games had previously been distinguished only by his Pakistani heritage and by the frequent chill between his parents, who fight over things he is too young to understand. Then Mina arrives, and everything changes.
Mina is Hayat's mother's oldest friend from Pakistan. She is independent, beautiful and intelligent, and arrives on the Shah's doorstep when her disastrous marriage in Pakistan disintegrates. Even Hayat's skeptical father can't deny the liveliness and happiness that accompanies Mina into their home. Her deep spirituality brings the family's Muslim faith to life in a way that resonates with Hayat as nothing has before. Studying the Quran by Mina's side and basking in the glow of her attention, he feels an entirely new purpose mingled with a growing infatuation for his teacher.
When Mina meets and begins dating a man, Hayat is confused by his feelings of betrayal. His growing passions, both spiritual and romantic, force him to question all that he has come to believe is true. Just as Mina finds happiness, Hayat is compelled to act -- with devastating consequences for all those he loves most.
American Dervish is a brilliantly written, nuanced, and emotionally forceful look inside the interplay of religion and modern life. Ayad Akhtar was raised in the Midwest himself, and through Hayat Shah he shows readers vividly the powerful forces at work on young men and women growing up Muslim in America. This is an intimate, personal first novel that will stay with readers long after they turn the last page.
Close Range
by Annie ProulxFrom the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes comes one of the most celebrated short story collections of our time.Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in these breathtaking tales of loneliness, quick violence, and the wrong kinds of love. Each of the stunning portraits in Close Range reveals characters fiercely wrought with precision and grace. These are stories of desperation and unlikely elation, set in a landscape both stark and magnificent -- by an author writing at the peak of her craft.
Razor Girl
by Carl HiaasenWhen Lane Coolman's car is bashed from behind on the road to the Florida Keys, what appears to be an ordinary accident is anything but (this is Hiaasen!).
Behind the wheel of the other car is Merry Mansfield--the eponymous Razor Girl--and the crash scam is only the beginning of events that spiral crazily out of control while unleashing some of the wildest characters Hiaasen has ever set loose on the page.
There's Trebeaux, the owner of Sedimental Journeys--a company that steals sand from one beach to restore erosion on another . . .
Dominick "Big Noogie" Aeola, a NYC mafia capo with a taste for tropic-wear . . .
Buck Nance, a Wisconsin accordionist who has rebranded himself as the star of a redneck reality show called Bayou Brethren . . .
a street psycho known as Blister who's more Buck Nance than Buck could ever be . . .
Brock Richardson, a Miami product-liability lawyer who's getting dangerously--and deformingly--hooked on the very E.D. product he's litigating against . . . and Andrew Yancy--formerly Detective Yancy, busted down to the Key West roach patrol after accosting his then-lover's husband with a Dust Buster.
Yancy believes that if he can singlehandedly solve a high-profile murder, he'll get his detective badge back.
That the Razor Girl may be the key to Yancy's future will be as surprising as anything else he encounters along the way--including the giant Gambian rats that are livening up his restaurant inspections.
A New York Times Bestseller
The Lowland
by Jhumpa LahiriTwo brothers bound by tragedy; a fiercely brilliant woman haunted by her past; a country torn by revolution: the Pulitzer Prize winner and #1 New York Times bestselling author gives us a powerful new novel--set in both India and America--that explores the price of idealism, and a love that can last long past death.
Growing up in Calcutta, born just fifteen months apart, Subhash and Udayan Mitra are inseparable brothers, one often mistaken for the other. But they are also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead of them.
It is the 1960s, and Udayan--charismatic and impulsive--finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and poverty: he will give everything, risk all, for what he believes.
Subhash, the dutiful son, does not share his brother's political passion; he leaves home to pursue a life of scientific research in a quiet, coastal corner of America.
But when Subhash learns what happened to his brother in the lowland outside their family's home, he comes back to India, hoping to pick up the pieces of a shattered family, and to heal the wounds Udayan left behind--including those seared in the heart of his brother's wife.
Suspenseful, sweeping, piercingly intimate, The Lowland expands the range of one of our most dazzling storytellers, seamlessly interweaving the historical and the personal across generations and geographies.
This masterly novel of fate and will, exile and return, is a tour de force and an instant classic.
Shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize
True Grit
by Charles PortisCharles Portis has long been acclaimed as one of America's foremost writers.
True Grit, his most famous novel, was first published in 1968, and became the basis for the movie starring John Wayne.
True Grit tells the story of Mattie Ross, who is just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shoots her father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robs him of his life, his horse, and $150 in cash.
Mattie leaves home to avenge her father's blood.
With the one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest available U. S. Marshal, by her side, Mattie pursues the homicide into Indian Territory.
True Grit is eccentric, cool, straight, and unflinching, like Mattie herself. From a writer of true status, this is an American classic through and through.
And She Was
by Cindy DysonSweeping across centuries and into the Aleutian Islands of Alaska's Bering Sea, And She Was begins with a decision and a broken taboo when three starving Aleut mothers decide to take their fate into their own hands. Two hundred and fifty years later, by the time Brandy, a floundering, trashy, Latin-spewing cocktail waitress, steps ashore in the 1980s, Unalaska Island has absorbed their dark secret—a secret that is both salvation and shame. In a tense interplay between past and present, And She Was explores Aleut history, mummies, conquest, survival, and the seamy side of the 1980s in a fishing boomtown at the edge of the world, where a lost woman struggles to understand the gray shades between heroism and evil, and between freedom and bondage.
The Girls
by Emma ClineAn indelible portrait of girls, the women they become, and that moment in life when everything can go horribly wrong--this stunning first novel is perfect for readers of Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad.
Northern California, during the violent end of the 1960s. At the start of summer, a lonely and thoughtful teenager, Evie Boyd, sees a group of girls in the park, and is immediately caught by their freedom, their careless dress, their dangerous aura of abandon.
Soon, Evie is in thrall to Suzanne, a mesmerizing older girl, and is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader. Hidden in the hills, their sprawling ranch is eerie and run down, but to Evie, it is exotic, thrilling, charged--a place where she feels desperate to be accepted. As she spends more time away from her mother and the rhythms of her daily life, and as her obsession with Suzanne intensifies, Evie does not realize she is coming closer and closer to unthinkable violence.
Emma Cline's remarkable debut novel is gorgeously written and spellbinding, with razor-sharp precision and startling psychological insight. The Girls is a brilliant work of fiction.
A New York Times Bestseller