Catalog Search Results
1) Stoner
Author
Language
English
Description
"William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at 19 to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death his colleagues remember him rarely. Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value. Stoner tells of the conflicts, defeats and...
Author
Language
English
Description
In The Summer Book Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer—its sunlight and storms—into twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia’s grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland. The grandmother is unsentimental and wise, if a little cranky; Sophia is...
Author
Language
English
Description
"It is a matter of historical record that in 1823 the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston (active to this day) sought to commission Beethoven to write an oratorio. The premise of Paul Griffith's ingenious and delightful novel is that Beethoven accepted the commission and traveled to the United States to oversee the first performance of the work. Griffiths grants the composer an additional lease on life of several, and starting with his voyage across...
Author
Language
English
Description
Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-racked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding.
Dorothy Baker’s entrancing tragicomic novella follows an unpredictable course of events...
Dorothy Baker’s entrancing tragicomic novella follows an unpredictable course of events...
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Though written at the end of the first half of the twentieth century this is essentially a nineteenth century novel written with a twentieth century sensibility. A few things give it away as a twentieth century novel - regular trains, even to remote rural areas, and a gramophone as well as the fact that, unlike most nineteenth century novels, none of the main characters survives unscarred. Indeed, most of them die, usually relatively unpleasant deaths....
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Formats
Description
"In England half a century ago, well-brought-up young women are meant to aspire to the respectable life. Some things are not to be spoken of; some are most certainly not to be done. There are rules, conventions. Meg Bailey obeys them. She progresses from Home Counties school to un-Bohemian art college with few outward signs of passion or frustration. Her personality is submerged in polite routines; even with her best friend, Roxane, what can't be...
8) My phantoms
Author
Language
English
Description
"Helen Grant, known to her acquaintances as Hen, is a mystery to her daughter. An extrovert with few friends who has sought intimacy in the wrong places; a twice-divorced mother of two now living alone surrounded by her memories, Helen has always haunted Bridget. Now Bridget sees Helen once a year, and considers the problem to be contained. As she looks back on their tumultuous relationship- the performances and small deceptions- she tries to reckon...
9) The outcry
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
This early work by Henry James was originally published in 1911 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. Henry James was born in New York City in 1843. One of thirteen children, James had an unorthodox early education, switching between schools, private tutors and private reading.. James published his first story, 'A Tragedy of Error', in the Continental Monthly in 1864, when he was twenty years old. In 1876, he emigrated...
Author
Language
English
Description
"To become a nun in the fourteenth century was often a business transaction rather than a spiritual calling; it is small wonder, then, that the inhabitants of the Benedictine convent of Oby are prey to worldly ambitions, frustrations, pleasures and jealousies. An outbreak of the Black Death the collapse of the convent spire and a disappearance are the dramas that strike this cloistered community, which is brought vividly to life in Sylvia Townsend...
11) Sleepless nights
Author
Language
English
Description
In Sleepless Nights a woman looks back on her life—the parade of people, the shifting background of place—and assembles a scrapbook of memories, reflections, portraits, letters, wishes, and dreams. An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick’s finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last...
Author
Language
English
Description
Now a major motion picture starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Gabe Polsky.
In his National Book Award–winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America.
It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to...
In his National Book Award–winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America.
It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to...
13) Abigail
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Abigail, the story of a headstrong teenager growing up during World War II, is the most beloved of Magda Szabó's books in her native Hungary. Gina is the only child of a general, a widower who has long been happy to spoil his bright and willful daughter. Gina is devastated when the general tells her that he must go away on a mission and that he will be sending her to boarding school in the country. She is even more aghast at the grim religious institution...
14) The peregrine
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Reissue of J.A. Baker's extraordinary classic of British nature writing, with an exclusive new afterword by Robert Macfarlane. J.A. Baker's extraordinary classic of British nature writing was first published in 1967. Greeted with acclaim, it went on to win the Duff Cooper Prize, the pre-eminent literary prize of the time. Luminaries such as Ted Hughes, Barry Lopez and Andrew Motion have cited it as one of the most important books in twentieth-century...
Author
Language
English
Description
"In ten sun-baked, Santa Ana wind-swept sketches, Babitz re-creates a Los Angeles of movie stars distraught over their success; socialites on three-day drug binges, evading their East Coast banking husbands; soap-opera actors worried that tomorrow's script will kill them off; Italian femme fatales even more fatal than she is. And she even leaves L.A. sometimes, spending an afternoon at the house of flawless Orange County suburbanites, a day among...
16) The door
Author
Language
English
Description
"The Door is an unsettling exploration of the relationship between two very different women. Magda is a writer, educated, married to an academic, public-spirited, with an on-again-off-again relationship with Hungary's Communist authorities. Emerence is a peasant, illiterate, impassive, abrupt, seemingly ageless. She lives alone in a house that no one else may enter, not even her closest relatives. She is Magda's housekeeper and she has taken control...
17) Conundrum
Author
Language
English
Description
One of the first-ever books on gender transition, this poignant memoir by a trans woman is “the best first-hand account ever written by a traveler across the boundaries of sex” (Newsweek).
“A profoundly poetic story.” —The New York Times
“An exquisite read.” —Maria Popova, The Marginalian
The great travel writer Jan Morris was...
“A profoundly poetic story.” —The New York Times
“An exquisite read.” —Maria Popova, The Marginalian
The great travel writer Jan Morris was...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In her earlier works, Helen Keller described the details of the early illness that left her deaf and blind, and in the prevailing opinion of the day, unable to be educated, as well as the methods that were eventually used to teach her how to communicate. In the remarkable memoir The World I Live In, Keller offers a much more personal take on her situation, inviting readers inside her own personal experience.
19) The dud avocado
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
A smart, funny classic about a young and beautiful American woman who moves to Paris determined to live life to the fullest.
The Dud Avocado follows the romantic and comedic adventures of a young American who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the late 1950s. Edith Wharton and Henry James wrote about the American girl abroad, but it was Elaine Dundy’s Sally Jay Gorce who told us what she was really thinking. Charming,...
The Dud Avocado follows the romantic and comedic adventures of a young American who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the late 1950s. Edith Wharton and Henry James wrote about the American girl abroad, but it was Elaine Dundy’s Sally Jay Gorce who told us what she was really thinking. Charming,...
20) All for nothing
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Language
English
Formats
Description
"The last novel by one of Germany's most important postwar writers, All for Nothing was published in Germany in 2006, just before Walter Kempowski's death. It describes with matter-of-fact clarity and acuity, and a roving point of view, the atmosphere in East Prussia during the winter of 1944-1945 as the German forces are in retreat and the Red Army approaches. The von Globig family's manor house, the Georgenhof, is falling into a state of disrepair....
Didn't find it?
Didn't find it in the Minuteman Library Network? Request it from other Massachusetts library systems.
Can't find what you are looking for? Recommend it to your local library as a future purchase. Suggest a Purchase