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Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet are arguably the most famous and beloved letters of the twentieth century. Written when the poet was himself still a young man, with most of his greatest work before him, they were addressed to a student who had sent Rilke some of his own writing, asking for advice on becoming a writer. The two never met, but over a period of several years Rilke wrote him these ten letters, cherished by readers for what translator Mitchell...
Author
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Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered...
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The Greek myths are among the world's most important cultural building blocks and they have been retold many times, but rarely do they focus on the remarkable women at the heart of these ancient stories. Stories of gods and monsters are the mainstay of epic poetry and Greek tragedy, from Homer to Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, from the Trojan War to Jason and the Argonauts. And still, today, a wealth of novels, plays and films draw their inspiration...
Author
Description
Humans live in landscapes of make believe. We spin fantasies. We devour novels, films, and plays. Even sporting events and criminal trials unfold as narratives. Yet the world of story has long remained an undiscovered and unmapped country. It's easy to say that humans are "wired" for story, but why? In this delightful and original book, Jonathan Gottschall offers the first unified theory of storytelling. We know we are master shapers of story. The...
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In 2007, Mary Anne Schwalbe returned from a humanitarian trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan suffering from what her doctors believed was a rare type of hepatitis. Months later she was diagnosed with a form of advanced pancreatic cancer, which is almost always fatal, often in six months or less. This is the inspiring true story of a son and his mother, who start a ?book club? that brings them together as her life comes to a close.
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Broken Wheel, Iowa, has never seen anyone like Sara, who traveled all the way from Sweden just to meet her pen pal, Amy. When she arrives, however, she finds that Amy's funeral has just ended. Luckily, the townspeople are happy to look after their bewildered tourist--even if they don't understand her peculiar need for books. Marooned in a farm town that's almost beyond repair, Sara starts a bookstore in honor of her friend's memory. All she wants...
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Series
Description
Two years after the death of enigmatic and celebrated author Scott Landon, his wife Lisey fields inquiries from academics and private collectors requesting his personal letters and unpublished works--if any exist. Then another interested party makes contact by leaving a dead cat in her mailbox. And then the terrifying phone calls begin. Lisey's only escape comes in the strange fantasy world where her husband found his inspiration. Now she must struggle...
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William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of supposition arranged around scant facts. With his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself. Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, and, emulating the style of his travelogues, records episodes in his own research. He celebrates Shakespeare...
Author
Description
In the summer of 1925, Earnest Hemingway and a clique of raucous companions traveled to Pamplona, Spain, for the town's infamous running of the bulls. Then, over the next six weeks, he channeled that trip's maelstrom of drunken brawls, sexual rivalry, midnight betrayals, and midday hangovers into his groundbreaking novel The Sun Also Rises. This revolutionary work redefined modern literature as much as it did his peers, who would forever after be...
Author
Series
Publisher
Symphony Space
Pub. Date
2016
Description
The number one New York TimesSmile, DramaGhosts. Two sisters move to a new town only to learn that it's haunted - and the time of year when ghosts reunite with their loved ones is fast approaching! Fans of Raina Telgemeier will love this stunning and supernatural story!
12) Reading Genesis
Author
Description
"For generations, the book of Genesis has been treated by scholars as a collection of documents by various hands, expressing different factional interests, with borrowings from other ancient literatures that mark the text as derivative. In other words, academic interpretation of Genesis has centered on the question of its basic coherency, just as fundamentalist interpretation has centered on the question of the appropriateness of reading it as literally...
13) As I lay dying
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Series
Description
A true 20th-century classic from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Sound and the Fury: the famed harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother.
As I Lay Dying is one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama. Narrated in turn by each of the family members, including Addie herself as well as others,...
As I Lay Dying is one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama. Narrated in turn by each of the family members, including Addie herself as well as others,...
Author
Series
Publisher
Symphony Space
Pub. Date
2013
Description
The author of the international best-selling novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit tackles her own reality in her riveting memoir. In this remarkable book she confronts the various paths her childhood took, from being raised by a religious zealot who kept a gun in the dresser to pondering her sexuality and other core parts of her identity and the search for her biological mother. Funny, acute, fierce and celebratory, this is a tough-minded search for...
Author
Description
This book teaches how to read and why, proceeding by a multitude of examples and instances: poems short and long; stories and novels and plays. The selections should not be interpreted as an exclusive list of what to read, but rather as a sampling of works that best illustrate why to read.
20) The light room
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Description
A chronicle of life as a mother of two young daughters in a moment of profound uncertainty about public health, climate change, and the future we can expect of how to live in ways that move away from disenchantment, and toward light and possibility.