books tagged “coming-of-age” (coming of age)

books tagged “coming-of-age”

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  • 10th Grade
    by Joseph Weisberg
    ISBN 0812966627 (0-8129-6662-7)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    For all those times you wished you knew what your high school crush was thinking, Joseph Weisberg's 10th Grade provides a generous--and hilarious--peek inside one boy's journal of a year marked by unrequited lust and awkward social maneuvers. A sophomore at Hutch Falls High School in New Jersey, Jeremy Reskin trolls the halls and writes what he sees from his vantage point as a social nonentity. Not much of a student, not much of a jock, and definitely not much of a ladies' man, Jeremy reveals his talent for expressing himself through writing (even though his every thought reads like a giant run-on sentence, complete with dyslexic spelling and sporadic punctuation). Jeremy's sophomore story is so achingly familiar that it's nearly impossible to put this book down. Weisberg deftly captures a time that readers will feel nostalgic for--even while cringing--and he creates a very real cast of characters that any one of us could have known in class. The complicated, often traumatic limbo between childhood and adulthood rings so true from the beginning to the end of this debut novel that you will want everyone you still talk to from high school to read it. As for Jeremy, all we can hope is that things get easier by the time he graduates. --Emily Russin [via]

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  • Hunt, Irene: Across Five Aprils
    Across Five Aprils
    by Irene Hunt
    ISBN 0813672023 (0-8136-7202-3)
    Softcover, Modern Curriculum Pr

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  • All Quiet on the Western Front
    by Erich Maria Remarque
    ISBN 0791059235 (0-7910-5923-5)
    Hardcover, Chelsea House Pub

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    Book summary:

    Remarque's 1929 novel is among the finest antiwar literature written after the First World War.

    The title, Erich Maria Remarques All Quiet on Western Front, part of Chelsea House Publishers Modern Critical Interpretations series, presents the most important 20th-century criticism on Erich Maria Remarques All Quiet on Western Front through extracts of critical essays by well-known literary critics. This collection of criticism also features a short biography on Erich Maria Remarque, a chronology of the authors life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University. [via]

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  • Anne of Ingleside
    by Lucy Maud Montgomery
    ISBN 0808516957 (0-8085-1695-7)
    Hardcover, Bt Bound

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    FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. Anne, now a joyful wife and mother, returns to visit the fishing village of Avonlea in this portrayal of family life on picturesque Prince Edward Island. [via]

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  • Anne of Windy Poplars
    by L.M. Montgomery
    ISBN 0808516965 (0-8085-1696-5)
    Hardcover, Bt Bound

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    FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. Anne Shirley's love for Gilbert Blythe grows during her three years as a high-school principal. [via]

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  • Bam Bam Bam
    by Eve Merriam, Dan Yaccarino
    ISBN 080505796X (0-8050-5796-X)
    Softcover, Holt & Company, Henry

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    Book summary:

    An exuberant celebration of construction and the noise and confusion that accompany it.
    [via]

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  • The Black Cauldron
    by Lloyd Alexander
    ISBN 080508049X (0-8050-8049-X)
    Softcover, Henry Holt & Co

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    Book summary:

    Since The Book of Three was first published in 1964, young readers have been enthralled by the adventures of Taran the Assistant Pig-keeper and his quest to become a hero. Taran is joined by an engaging cast of characters that includes Eilonwy, the strong-willed and sharp-tongued princess; Fflewddur Fflam, the hyperbole-prone bard; the ever-faithful Gurgi; and the curmudgeonly Doli--all of whom become involved in an epic struggle between good and evil that shapes the fate of the legendary land of Prydain.

    Released over a period of five years, Lloyd Alexander's beautifully written tales not only captured children's imaginations but also garnered the highest critical praise. The Black Cauldron was a Newbery Honor Book, and the final volume in the chronicles, The High King, crowned the series by winning the Newbery Medal for "the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children."

    Henry Holt is proud to present this classic series to a new generation of young readers. Jackets have been handsomely redesigned while retaining the original art of Caldecott Medal-winning artist Evaline Ness. Each retypeset volume now includes a pronunciation guide prepared by Lloyd Alexander. A companion book of short stories, The Foundling and Other Tales of Prydain, is also available in hardcover for the first time in twenty years.

    In their more than thirty years in print, the Chronicles of Prydain have become the standard of excellence in fantasy literature for children.
     
    The Black Cauldron is a 1966 Newbery Honor Book.

    [via]

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  • By the Shore
    by Galaxy Craze
    ISBN 0802136877 (0-8021-3687-7)
    Softcover, Grove Pr

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    Twelve is a dreadful age for almost any girl, with its nonstop insecurity and humiliation. But May, the heroine of Galaxy Craze's By the Shore, seems to suffer considerably more than her share of unhappiness. Ignored by the popular clique at school, dressed by her mother in retro-hippie fashions that are anything but cool, she's a virtual poster child for preteen angst. And if adolescence weren't enough of a burden, May must also contend with a big dose of familial angst. Her mother, Lucy, runs a none-too-successful guesthouse on the English coast. Young and single, she spends more time gossiping and party hopping than tending to May and her brother Eden. And this distracted maternal style has, alas, exposed our heroine to machinations of grown-up life, which she tracks with fascination and horror. Her single remaining pocket of naiveté involves her estranged father, whose return she eagerly anticipates--even after an unassuming writer begins to pay court to her swinging mom. But this dream, too, is crushed when the genuine item shows up: "This is what happens to hope: it gets smaller and smaller." By the Shore does contain some of the typical properties of a coming-of-age drama. But Craze, a first-time novelist and actress, writes with acute insight and sympathy, and she understands one of the great consolations of adolescence: that even the tiniest kernel of hope can be enough to generate almost boundless happiness. --Brangien Davis [via]

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  • Charles Dickens' Great Expectations
    by Charles Dickens, Holly Hughes
    ISBN 0812034147 (0-8120-3414-7)
    Softcover, Barrons Educational Series Inc

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    Book summary:

    Plot synopsis of this classic is made meaningful with analysis and quotes by noted literary critics, summaries of the work's main themes and characters, a sketch of the author's life and times, a bibliography, suggested test questions, and ideas for essays and term papers. [via]

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  • The Chosen
    by Harold Bloom
    ISBN 0791081737 (0-7910-8173-7)
    Hardcover, Facts on File

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    Enjoy a comprehensive analysis and summary of The Chosen. Includes biographical sketches, summaries, an annotated bibliography, contributor profiles and index. [via]

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  • Marshall, Catherine: Christy
    Christy
    by Catherine Marshall
    ISBN 0800780086 (0-8007-8008-6)
    Softcover, Baker Pub Group

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  • A Density of Souls
    by Christopher Rice
    ISBN 0786886463 (0-7868-8646-3)
    Softcover, Miramax

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    Book summary:

    Take the sensuous, fecund New Orleans setting, add a generous helping of tangled Southern family history, and season liberally with a sensitive teenage boy rejected by his friends and frightened of his own homoerotic impulses and you wouldn't be surprised to discover that the novel containing all of the above was written by someone named Rice. But a few paragraphs into the first page, it's clear that Anne Rice's son's first novel isn't about vampires or witches and does not otherwise read like one of her exceedingly popular books. The only family resemblance is in the setting, the sexual orientation of the lovingly described male characters, and the scent of overripe magnolias.

    There's murder, suicide, and madness at the heart of this rather clumsy coming-of-age story, which focuses on the youthful friendship of Stephen Conlin, Meredith Ducote, Greg Darby, and Brandon Charbonnet. This friendship is destroyed by a sexual incident that takes place just before the foursome enters Cannon, an exclusive prep school. There, Stephen is ostracized by his former friends, now the most popular kids on campus, who'd just as soon forget their own complicity in the event. Envy, passion, and rage drive the narrative, but the emotions are as juvenile as the characters, and the long passages depicting the rituals and cruelties of high school, from pep rallies to football games, slow down the pace without really illuminating character or motivation. The novel reads like a roman à clef. Rice might have been wiser to tell someone else's story rather than his own. --Jane Adams [via]

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  • Burgess, Melvin: Doing It
    Doing It
    by Melvin Burgess
    ISBN 0805080791 (0-8050-8079-1)
    Softcover, Henry Holt & Co

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    Melvin Burgess, author of Smack, has written what is potentially the most controversial young adult novel ever. Doing It is an honest and funny book about three teenage British boys learning about themselves and life through their sexual experiences. But here's the catch: the story is told from the point of view of the hormone-sodden young males, naughty bits and all.

    Gorgeous Dino thinks that equally gorgeous Allie should realize that they belong together and is puzzled and frustrated when their passionate lovemaking always ends with her refusing him. Jonathan fancies sensible, sexy Deborah but can't admit it to his friends, even after several steamy grope sessions, because she is&well&plump. And Ben is living every teenage boy's dream, an affair with a lusty teacher--but somehow it's getting to be too much of a good thing.

    Nearly all YA novels about love and sexuality are told by and for girls, like Judy Blume's groundbreaking classic, Forever. The contrast here is striking--as Burgess said in an interview, "I wrote Doing It because I do believe that we have let young men down very badly in terms of the kinds of books written for them. This book is my go at trying to bring young male sexual culture into writing." The result is surprising but educational for female readers. Wisely, the publisher has kept the British slang terms for sexual acts and body parts, rather than using the American four-letter words, a factor that will make the book less of a hot potato for librarians and teachers, but not diminish the reading pleasure for the inevitable hordes of young male readers. (Ages 14 and older) --Patty Campbell [via]

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  • Powell, Padgett: Edisto
    Edisto
    by Padgett Powell
    ISBN 0805013709 (0-8050-1370-9)
    Softcover, Holt & Company, Henry

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  • Fateless
    by Imre Kertész, Christopher Wilson, Katharina Wilson
    ISBN 0810110245 (0-8101-1024-5)
    Hardcover, Northwestern University Press

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    Book summary:

    One of Publishers Weekly's Fifty Best Books of 1992

    Fateless is a moving and disturbing novel about a Hungarian Jewish boys experiences in German concentration camps and his attempts to reconcile himself to those experiences after the war. Upon his return to his native Budapest still clad in his striped prison clothes, fourteen-year-old George Koves senses the indifference, even hostility, of people on the street. His former neighbors and friends urge him to put the ordeal out of his mind, while a sympathetic journalist refers to the camps as "the lowest circle of hell." The boy can relate to neither cliche and is left to ponder the meaning of his experience alone.

    George's response to his experience is curiously ambivalent. In the camps he tries to adjust to his ever-worsening situation by imputing human motives to his inhumane captors. By imposing his logic--that of a bright, sensitive, though in many ways ordinary teenager - he maintains a precarious semblance of normalcy. Once freed, he must contend with the "banality of evil" to which he has become accustomed: when asked why he uses words like "naturally," "undeniably," and "without question" to describe the most horrendous of experiences, he responds, "In the concentration camp it was natural." Without emotional or spiritual ties to his Jewish heritage and rejected by his country, he ultimately comes to the conclusion that neither his Hungarianness nor his Jewishness was really at the heart of his fate: rather, there are only "given situations, and within these, further givens."
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  • Parsell, T.j.: Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man's Prison
    Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man's Prison
    by T.j. Parsell
    ISBN 0786717939 (0-7867-1793-9)
    Hardcover, Carroll & Graf Pub

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  • Lethem, Jonathan: The Fortress of Solitude
    The Fortress of Solitude
    by Jonathan Lethem
    ISBN 0786259965 (0-7862-5996-5)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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  • Frances Hodgson Burnett's the Secret Garden
    by Frances Hodgson Burnett
    ISBN 0812505018 (0-8125-0501-8)
    Softcover, Tor Books

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    Book summary:

    Mistress Mary is quite contrary until she helps her garden grow. Along the way, she manages to cure her sickly cousin Colin, who is every bit as imperious as she. These two are sullen little peas in a pod, closed up in a gloomy old manor on the Yorkshire moors of England, until a locked-up garden captures their imaginations and puts the blush of a wild rose in their cheeks; "It was the sweetest, most mysterious-looking place any one could imagine. The high walls which shut it in were covered with the leafless stems of roses which were so thick, that they matted together.... 'No wonder it is still,' Mary whispered. 'I am the first person who has spoken here for ten years.'" As new life sprouts from the earth, Mary and Colin's sour natures begin to sweeten. For anyone who has ever felt afraid to live and love, The Secret Garden's portrayal of reawakening spirits will thrill and rejuvenate. Frances Hodgson Burnett creates characters so strong and distinct, young readers continue to identify with them even 85 years after they were conceived. (Ages 9 to 12) [via]

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  • The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf
    by Mojha Kahf
    ISBN 0786715197 (0-7867-1519-7)
    Softcover, Public Affairs

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    Syrian immigrant Khadra Shamy is growing up in a devout, tightly knit Muslim family in 1970s Indiana, at the crossroads of bad polyester and Islamic dress codes. Along with her brother Eyad and her African-American friends, Hakim and Hanifa, she bikes the Indianapolis streets exploring the fault-lines between “Muslim and “American.

    When her picture-perfect marriage goes sour, Khadra flees to Syria and learns how to pray again. On returning to America she works in an eastern state — taking care to stay away from Indiana, where the murder of her friend Tayibas sister by Klan violence years before still haunts her. But when her job sends her to cover a national Islamic conference in Indianapolis, shes back on familiar ground: Attending a concert by her brothers interfaith band The Clash of Civilizations, dodging questions from the “aunties and “uncles, and running into the recently divorced Hakim everywhere.

    Beautifully written and featuring an exuberant cast of characters, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf charts the spiritual and social landscape of Muslims in middle America, from five daily prayers to the Indy 500 car race. It is a riveting debut from an important new voice.

    [via]

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  • Farmer, Nancy: A Girl Named Disaster
    A Girl Named Disaster
    by Nancy Farmer
    ISBN 0786280379 (0-7862-8037-9)
    Softcover, Thorndike Pr

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  • Go Tell It on the Mountain
    by James Baldwin
    ISBN 0808514164 (0-8085-1416-4)
    Hardcover, Bt Bound

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    First published in 1953 when James Baldwin was nearly 30, Go Tell It on the Mountain is a young man's novel, as tightly coiled as a new spring, yet tempered by a maturing man's confidence and empathy. It's not a long book, and its action spans but a single day--yet the author packs in enough emotion, detail, and intimate revelation to make his story feel like a mid-20th-century epic. Using as a frame the spiritual and moral awakening of 14-year-old John Grimes during a Saturday night service in a Harlem storefront church, Baldwin lays bare the secrets of a tormented black family during the depression. John's parents, praying beside him, both wrestle with the ghosts of their sinful pasts--Gabriel, a preacher of towering hypocrisy, fathered an illegitimate child during his first marriage down South and refused to recognize his doomed bastard son; Elizabeth fell in love with a charming, free-spirited young man, followed him to New York, became pregnant with his son, and lost him before she could reveal her condition.

    Baldwin lays down the terrible symmetries of these two blighted lives as the ironic context for John's dark night of the soul. When day dawns, John believes himself saved, but his creator makes it clear that this salvation arises as much from blindness as revelation: "He was filled with a joy, a joy unspeakable, whose roots, though he would not trace them on this new day of his life, were nourished by the wellspring of a despair not yet discovered."

    Though it was hailed at publication for its groundbreaking use of black idiom, what is most striking about Go Tell It on the Mountain today is its structure and its scope. In peeling back the layers of these damaged lives, Baldwin dramatizes the story of the great black migration from rural South to urban North. "Behind them was the darkness," Baldwin writes of Gabriel and Elizabeth's lost generation, "nothing but the darkness, and all around them destruction, and before them nothing but the fire--a bastard people, far from God, singing and crying in the wilderness!" This is Baldwin's music--a music in which rhapsody is rooted anguish--and there is none finer in American literature. --David Laskin [via]

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  • A Great And Terrible Beauty
    by Libba Bray
    ISBN 0786280824 (0-7862-8082-4)
    Softcover, Thorndike Pr

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    A Victorian boarding school story, a Gothic mansion mystery, a gossipy romp about a clique of girlfriends, and a dark other-worldly fantasy--jumble them all together and you have this complicated and unusual first novel.

    Gemma, 16, has had an unconventional upbringing in India, until the day she foresees her mothers death in a black, swirling vision that turns out to be true. Sent back to England, she is enrolled at Spence, a girls academy with a mysterious burned-out East Wing. There Gemma is snubbed by powerful Felicity, beautiful Pippa, and even her own dumpy roommate Ann, until she blackmails herself and Ann into the treacherous clique. Gemma is distressed to find that she has been followed from India by Kartik, a beautiful young man who warns her to fight off the visions. Nevertheless, they continue, and one night she is led by a child-spirit to find a diary that reveals the secrets of a mystical Order. The clique soon finds a way to accompany Gemma to the other-world realms of her visions "for a bit of fun" and to taste the power they will never have as Victorian wives, but they discover that the delights of the realms are overwhelmed by a menace they cannot control. Gemma is left wi! th the knowledge that her role as the link between worlds leaves her with a mission to seek out the "others" and rebuild the Order. A Great and Terrible Beauty is an impressive first book in what should prove to be a fascinating trilogy. (Ages 12 up) Patty Campbell [via]

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  • Great Expectations
    by Charles Dickens
    ISBN 0812563115 (0-8125-6311-5)
    Softcover, Tor Books

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    My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip. I give Pirrip as my father's family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my sister. . . . but this is my tale, not my father's. It is the tale of how I lived my life, and thrived -- how I lost my all, and found something again, praiise God, a thing I love. Listen and you'dll hear . . . [via]

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  • Harriet the Spy
    by Louise Fitzhugh, Anne Bobby
    ISBN 0807280690 (0-8072-8069-0)
    Softcover, Listening Library

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  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
    by J. K. Rowling, Jim Dale
    ISBN 0807282073 (0-8072-8207-3)
    Softcover, Listening Library

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    Book summary:

    What makes the Harry Potter series so successful? Maybe it's the fact that J.K. Rowling doesn't write children's books, she writes children's stories, more in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm than Dr. Seuss. The exploits of Harry and his friends captivate even the shortest attention spans by engaging the imagination with vivid characters and fast-moving action, instead of trying to merely catch the eye with colorful pictures or pop-up effects. Not surprisingly, the Potter tales sound wonderful read aloud, and adapt to the audiobook format extremely well. Broadway actor Jim Dale's impressive vocal range gives each character in the book its own distinctive voice--a considerable task, given the pantheon of witches, warlocks, ghosts, ghouls, dwarves, and elves that Harry encounters in his second outing. And thankfully, since the book is read unabridged, no one's favorite character is omitted. Engaging for children without being childish, the audio version of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is worthy addition to the deservedly popular series. (Running time: 9 hours, 7 CDs) --Andrew Nieland [via]

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  • Rosoff, Meg: How I Live Now
    How I Live Now
    by Meg Rosoff
    ISBN 0786288787 (0-7862-8878-7)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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  • I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
    by Maya Angelou
    ISBN 0808510576 (0-8085-1057-6)
    Hardcover, Bt Bound

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    Book summary:

    In this first of five volumes of autobiography, poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence. Sent at a young age to live with her grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou learned a great deal from this exceptional woman and the tightly knit black community there. These very lessons carried her throughout the hardships she endured later in life, including a tragic occurrence while visiting her mother in St. Louis and her formative years spent in California--where an unwanted pregnancy changed her life forever. Marvelously told, with Angelou's "gift for language and observation," this "remarkable autobiography by an equally remarkable black woman from Arkansas captures, indelibly, a world of which most Americans are shamefully ignorant." [via]

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  • I know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Blooms Guides)
    by Harold Bloom
    ISBN 0791077683 (0-7910-7768-3)
    Softcover, Facts on File

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  • O'Dell, Scott: Island of the Blue Dolphins
    Island of the Blue Dolphins
    by Scott O'Dell, Ted Lewin
    ISBN 0786272546 (0-7862-7254-6)
    Softcover, Thorndike Pr

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  • Kim
    by Rudyard Kipling, Pankaj Mishra, Douglas Kerr
    ISBN 0812971345 (0-8129-7134-5)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    One of the particular pleasures of reading Kim is the full range of emotion, knowledge, and experience that Rudyard Kipling gives his complex hero. Kim O'Hara, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier stationed in India, is neither innocent nor victimized. Raised by an opium-addicted half-caste woman since his equally dissolute father's death, the boy has grown up in the streets of Lahore:

    Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white--a poor white of the very poorest.
    From his father and the woman who raised him, Kim has come to believe that a great destiny awaits him. The details, however, are a bit fuzzy, consisting as they do of the woman's addled prophecies of "'a great Red Bull on a green field, and the Colonel riding on his tall horse, yes, and'--dropping into English--'nine hundred devils.'"

    In the meantime, Kim amuses himself with intrigues, executing "commissions by night on the crowded housetops for sleek and shiny young men of fashion." His peculiar heritage as a white child gone native, combined with his "love of the game for its own sake," makes him uniquely suited for a bigger game. And when, at last, the long-awaited colonel comes along, Kim is recruited as a spy in Britain's struggle to maintain its colonial grip on India. Kipling was, first and foremost, a man of his time; born and raised in India in the 19th century, he was a fervid supporter of the Raj. Nevertheless, his portrait of India and its people is remarkably sympathetic. Yes, there is the stereotypical Westernized Indian Babu Huree Chander with his atrocious English, but there is also Kim's friend and mentor, the Afghani horse trader Mahub Ali, and the gentle Tibetan lama with whom Kim travels along the Grand Trunk Road. The humanity of his characters consistently belies Kipling's private prejudices, and raises Kim above the mere ripping good yarn to the level of a timeless classic. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • Alcott, Louisa May: Little Men
    Little Men
    by Louisa May Alcott, Ann M. Magagna, Louis Jambour
    ISBN 0804901945 (0-8049-0194-5)
    Softcover, Airmont Pub Co

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  • The Man of My Dreams
    by Curtis Sittenfeld
    ISBN 0812975391 (0-8129-7539-1)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    A young woman's romantic fantasies collide with the realities of adult life in a new novel from the bestselling author of "Prep". In the summer of 1991, Hannah Gavener is fourteen. In the magazines she reads, celebrities plan elaborate weddings; in Hannah's own life, her parents' marriage is crumbling. Over the next decade and a half, as Hannah moves from Philadelphia to Boston to Albuquerque, she finds that the answers to love's most bewildering questions become more rather than less complicated. At what point can you no longer blame your adult failures on your messed-up childhood? Is settling for someone who's not your soul mate an act of maturity or an admission of defeat? And if you move to another state for a man who might not love you back, are you being brave, or pathetic? Full of honesty and humour, "The Man of My Dreams" is an unnervingly insightful and beautifully written examination of the outside forces and personal choices that make us who we are. [via]

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  • Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
    by Harold Bloom
    ISBN 0791036669 (0-7910-3666-9)
    Hardcover, Facts on File

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    Book summary:

    Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings accomplishes a controlled poignance in representing a portrait of the young artist as a black woman. Her novel is the focus of this edition of Bloom's Notes. Along with a collection of some of the best criticism available on his work, this text includes a brief biography of the author, structural and thematic analysis, an index of themes and ideas, and more. This series is edited by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University; Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English, New York University Graduate School. These texts are the ideal aid for all students of literature, presenting concise, easy-to-understand biographical, critical, and bibliographical information on a specific literary work. Also provided are multiple sources for book reports and term papers with a wealth of information on literary works, authors, and major characters. [via]

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  • My Antonia
    by Willa Cather, James L. Woodress, Kari Ronning, Charles Mignon
    ISBN 0803263724 (0-8032-6372-4)
    Softcover, Univ of Nebraska Pr

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    It seems almost sacrilege to infringe upon a book as soulful and rich as Willa Cather's My Ántonia by offering comment. First published in 1918, and set in Nebraska in the late 19th century, this tale of the spirited daughter of a Bohemian immigrant family planning to farm on the untamed land ("not a country at all but the material out of which countries are made") comes to us through the romantic eyes of Jim Burden. He is, at the time of their meeting, newly orphaned and arriving at his grandparents' neighboring farm on the same night her family strikes out to make good in their new country. Jim chooses the opening words of his recollections deliberately: "I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to be an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America," and it seems almost certain that readers of Cather's masterpiece will just as easily pinpoint the first time they heard of Ántonia and her world. It seems equally certain that they, too, will remember that moment as one of great light in an otherwise unremarkable trip through the world.

    Ántonia, who, even as a grown woman somewhat downtrodden by circumstance and hard work, "had not lost the fire of life," lies at the center of almost every human condition that Cather's novel effortlessly untangles. She represents immigrant struggles with a foreign land and tongue, the restraints on women of the time (with which Cather was very much concerned), the more general desires for love, family, and companionship, and the great capacity for forbearance that marked the earliest settlers on the frontier.

    As if all this humanity weren't enough, Cather paints her descriptions of the vastness of nature--the high, red grass, the road that "ran about like a wild thing," the endless wind on the plains--with strokes so vivid as to make us feel in our bones that we've just come in from a walk on that very terrain ourselves. As the story progresses, Jim goes off to the University in Lincoln to study Latin (later moving on to Harvard and eventually staying put on the East Coast in another neat encompassing of a stage in America's development) and learns Virgil's phrase "Optima dies ... prima fugit" that Cather uses as the novel's epigraph. "The best days are the first to flee"--this could be said equally of childhood and the earliest hours of this country in which the open land, much like My Ántonia, was nothing short of a rhapsody in prairie sky blue. --Melanie Rehak [via]

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  • Oliver Twist
    by Charles Dickens
    ISBN 0812580036 (0-8125-8003-6)
    Softcover, Tor Books

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    Stories to go!

    Children love to listen to stories. Now their favorite Dorling Kindersley children's books are available in convenient book-and-tape packages that are perfect for the car or anywhere. With more than 60 minutes of audio on each tape, these packages will be favorites of children and parents alike. Here, the classic tale of Oliver Twist comes to life via audio, complete with dramatic dialogue, special effects, and music. [via]

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  • Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
    by Jeanette Winterson
    ISBN 0802135161 (0-8021-3516-1)
    Softcover, Grove Pr

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    Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a novel by Jeanette Winterson published in 1985, which she subsequently adapted into a BBC television drama. It is a bildungsroman about a lesbian girl who grows up in an English Pentecostal community. [via]

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  • Peace Like a River
    by Leif Enger
    ISBN 0802139256 (0-8021-3925-6)
    Softcover, Atlantic Monthly Pr

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    To the list of great American child narrators that includes Huck Finn and Scout Finch, let us now add Reuben "Rube" Land, the asthmatic 11-year-old boy at the center of Leif Enger's remarkable first novel, Peace Like a River. Rube recalls the events of his childhood, in small-town Minnesota circa 1962, in a voice that perfectly captures the poetic, verbal stoicism of the northern Great Plains. "Here's what I saw," Rube warns his readers. "Here's how it went. Make of it what you will." And Rube sees plenty.

    In the winter of his 11th year, two schoolyard bullies break into the Lands' house, and Rube's big brother Davy guns them down with a Winchester. Shortly after his arrest, Davy breaks out of jail and goes on the lam. Swede is Rube's younger sister, a precocious writer who crafts rhymed epics of romantic Western outlawry. Shortly after Davy's escape, Rube, Swede, and their father, a widowed school custodian, hit the road too, swerving this way and that across Minnesota and North Dakota, determined to find their lost outlaw Davy. In the end it's not Rube who haunts the reader's imagination, it's his father, torn between love for his outlaw son and the duty to do the right, honest thing. Enger finds something quietly heroic in the bred-in-the-bone Minnesota decency of America's heartland. Peace Like a River opens up a new chapter in Midwestern literature. --Claire Dederer [via]

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  • Ray, Rebbecca: Pure
    Pure
    by Rebbecca Ray
    ISBN 0802137008 (0-8021-3700-8)
    Softcover, Grove Pr

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  • Red and the Black
    by Stendhal, Diane Johnson, Burton Raffel
    ISBN 0812972074 (0-8129-7207-4)
    Softcover, Modern Library

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    Book summary:

    A Major New Translation

    The Red and the Black, Stendhals masterpiece, is the story of Julien Sorel, a young dreamer from the provinces, fueled by Napoleonic ideals, whose desire to make his fortune sets in motion events both mesmerizing and tragic. Sorels quest to find himself, and the doomed love he encounters along the way, are delineated with an unprecedented psychological depth and realism. At the same time, Stendhal weaves together the social life and fraught political intrigues of postNapoleonic France, bringing that world to unforgettable, full-color life. His portrait of Julien and early-nineteenth-century France remains an unsurpassed creation, one that brilliantly anticipates modern literature.

    Neglected during its time, The Red and the Black has assumed its rightful place as one of the worlds great books, and Burton Raffels extraordinary new translation, coupled with an enlightening Introduction by Diane Johnson, helps it shine more brightly than ever before.


    From the Hardcover edition. [via]

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  • Humphries, Jefferson: The Red and the Black: Mimetic Desire and the Myth of Celebrity
    The Red and the Black: Mimetic Desire and the Myth of Celebrity
    by Jefferson Humphries
    ISBN 0805783520 (0-8057-8352-0)
    Hardcover, Gale Group

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  • Crane, Stephen: The Red Badge of Courage
    The Red Badge of Courage
    by Stephen Crane
    ISBN 0812504798 (0-8125-0479-8)
    Softcover, Tor Books

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    Stephen Crane's classic work [via]

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  • Rose in Bloom
    by Louisa May Alcott
    ISBN 0786272945 (0-7862-7294-5)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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    In this sequel to Eight Cousins, Rose Campbell returns to the "Aunt Hill" after two years of traveling around the world. Suddenly, she is surrounded by male admirers, all expecting her to marry them. But before she marries anyone, Rose is determined to establish herself as an independent young woman. Besides, she suspects that some of her friends like her more for her money than for herself. [via]

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  • Austen, Jane: Sense And Sensibility
    Sense And Sensibility
    by Jane Austen
    ISBN 0804900582 (0-8049-0058-2)
    Softcover, Airmont Pub Co

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    Though not the first novel she wrote, Sense and Sensibility was the first Jane Austen published. Though she initially called it Elinor and Marianne, Austen jettisoned both the title and the epistolary mode in which it was originally written, but kept the essential theme: the necessity of finding a workable middle ground between passion and reason. The story revolves around the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne. Whereas the former is a sensible, rational creature, her younger sister is wildly romantic--a characteristic that offers Austen plenty of scope for both satire and compassion. Commenting on Edward Ferrars, a potential suitor for Elinor's hand, Marianne admits that while she "loves him tenderly," she finds him disappointing as a possible lover for her sister:

    Oh! Mama, how spiritless, how tame was Edward's manner in reading to us last night! I felt for my sister most severely. Yet she bore it with so much composure, she seemed scarcely to notice it. I could hardly keep my seat. To hear those beautiful lines which have frequently almost driven me wild, pronounced with such impenetrable calmness, such dreadful indifference!
    Soon however, Marianne meets a man who measures up to her ideal: Mr. Willoughby, a new neighbor. So swept away by passion is Marianne that her behavior begins to border on the scandalous. Then Willoughby abandons her; meanwhile, Elinor's growing affection for Edward suffers a check when he admits he is secretly engaged to a childhood sweetheart. How each of the sisters reacts to their romantic misfortunes, and the lessons they draw before coming finally to the requisite happy ending forms the heart of the novel. Though Marianne's disregard for social conventions and willingness to consider the world well-lost for love may appeal to modern readers, it is Elinor whom Austen herself most evidently admired; a truly happy marriage, she shows us, exists only where sense and sensibility meet and mix in proper measure. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • Siddhartha
    by Hermann Hesse
    ISBN 081120068X (0-8112-0068-X)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    In the shade of a banyan tree, a grizzled ferryman sits listening to the river. Some say he's a sage. He was once a wandering shramana and, briefly, like thousands of others, he followed Gautama the Buddha, enraptured by his sermons. But this man, Siddhartha, was not a follower of any but his own soul. Born the son of a Brahman, Siddhartha was blessed in appearance, intelligence, and charisma. In order to find meaning in life, he discarded his promising future for the life of a wandering ascetic. Still, true happiness evaded him. Then a life of pleasure and titillation merely eroded away his spiritual gains until he was just like all the other "child people," dragged around by his desires. Like Hesse's other creations of struggling young men, Siddhartha has a good dose of European angst and stubborn individualism. His final epiphany challenges both the Buddhist and the Hindu ideals of enlightenment. Neither a practitioner nor a devotee, neither meditating nor reciting, Siddhartha comes to blend in with the world, resonating with the rhythms of nature, bending the reader's ear down to hear answers from the river. --Brian Bruya [via]

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  • Smack
    by Melvin Burgess
    ISBN 080505801X (0-8050-5801-X)
    Hardcover, Henry Holt & Co

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    Like so many teenagers, Tar and Gemma are fed up with their parents. Tar's family is alcoholic and abusive, and Gemma feels her home life is cramped by too many restrictions. The young, British couple runs away to Bristol in search of freedom, and finds it in the form of a "squat." This vacant building is also occupied by two slightly older teens who share everything with Tar and Gemma (including their heroin habits). For a while, everything is parties and adventures, but slowly Tar and Gemma find themselves growing more and more dependent on the drug--whose strict mandates are even less forgiving than those of the parents they fled. As Gemma says, "You take more and more, and more often. Then you get sick of it and give up for a few days. And that's the really nasty thing because then, when you're clean, that's when it works so well."

    With Smack, winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Prize for Fiction, Melvin Burgess brilliantly sketches a gradual descent into drug addiction. There is no preaching here, just the artful revelation of cold, hard facts. Burgess's use of the first-person voice--for not only the main characters but those in the background as well--brings you into the mind of every character in this homeless, hooked culture, offering a (sometimes terrible) glimpse of the motivations and transitions of each person. (Tar's personality changes dramatically over the course of the book, from sweet-natured, lonely boy to hard-edged, hit-seeking addict.) More subtle and less graphic than Beauty Queen, Linda Glovach's tale of a girl's downward spiral into heroin addiction, Smack will linger in the your mind long after its haunting conclusion has been reached. (Ages 13 and older) --Brangien Davis [via]

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  • Speaker for the Dead
    by Orson Scott Card
    ISBN 0812550757 (0-8125-5075-7)
    Softcover, Tor Books

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    Ender Wiggin, the hero and scapegoat of mass alien destruction in Ender's Game, receives a chance at redemption in this novel. Ender, who proclaimed as a mistake his success in wiping out an alien race, wins the opportunity to cope better with a second race, discovered by Portuguese colonists on the planet Lusitania. Orson Scott Card infuses this long, ambitious tale with intellect by casting his characters in social, religious and cultural contexts. Like its predecessor, this book won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. [via]

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  • The Talisman
    by Stephen King, Peter Straub
    ISBN 0808565664 (0-8085-6566-4)
    Hardcover, Bt Bound

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    On a brisk autumn day, a thirteen-year-old boy stands on the shores of the gray Atlantic, near a silent amusement park and a fading ocean resort called the Alhambra. The past has driven Jack Sawyer here: his father is gone, his mother is dying, and the world no longer makes sense. But for Jack everything is about to change. For he has been chosen to make a journey back across Americaand into another realm.

    One of the most influential and heralded works of fantasy ever written, The Talisman is an extraordinary novel of loyalty, awakening, terror, and mystery. Jack Sawyer, on a desperate quest to save his mothers life, must search for a prize across an epic landscape of innocents and monsters, of incredible dangers and even more incredible truths. The prize is essential, but the journey means even more. Let the quest
    begin    . . . .
    [via]

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  • Tam Lin
    by Pamela Dean
    ISBN 0812544501 (0-8125-4450-1)
    Softcover, Tor Books

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    A modern retelling of an ancient Scottish fairy tale sets the story of a girl whose lover is stolen by the Queen of Faeries against the backdrop of a midwestern college campus in the late sixties. Reprint. [via]

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  • Alexander, Lloyd: Taran Wanderer
    Taran Wanderer
    by Lloyd Alexander
    ISBN 0805080511 (0-8050-8051-1)
    Softcover, Henry Holt & Co

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    Since The Book of Three was first published in 1964, young readers have been enthralled by the adventures of Taran the Assistant Pig-keeper and his quest to become a hero. Taran is joined by an engaging cast of characters that includes Eilonwy, the strong-willed and sharp-tongued princess; Fflewddur Fflam, the hyperbole-prone bard; the ever-faithful Gurgi; and the curmudgeonly Doli--all of whom become involved in an epic struggle between good and evil that shapes the fate of the legendary land of Prydain.

    Released over a period of five years, Lloyd Alexander's beautifully written tales not only captured children's imaginations but also garnered the highest critical praise. The Black Cauldron was a Newbery Honor Book, and the final volume in the chronicles, The High King, crowned the series by winning the Newbery Medal for "the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children."

    Henry Holt is proud to present this classic series to a new generation of young readers. Jackets have been handsomely redesigned while retaining the original art of Caldecott Medal-winning artist Evaline Ness. Each retypeset volume now includes a pronunciation guide prepared by Lloyd Alexander. A companion book of short stories, The Foundling and Other Tales of Prydain, is also available in hardcover for the first time in twenty years.

    In their more than thirty years in print, the Chronicles of Prydain have become the standard of excellence in fantasy literature for children.
    [via]

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  • The Tender Bar: A Memoir
    by J. R. Moehringer
    ISBN 0786888768 (0-7868-8876-8)
    Softcover, Hyperion Books

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    "Long before it legally served me, the bar saved me," asserts J.R. Moehringer, and his compelling memoir The Tender Bar is the story of how and why. A Pulitzer-Prize winning writer for the Los Angeles Times, Moehringer grew up fatherless in pub-heavy Manhasset, New York, in a ramshackle house crammed with cousins and ruled by an eccentric, unkind grandfather. Desperate for a paternal figure, he turns first to his father, a DJ whom he can only access via the radio (Moehringer calls him The Voice and pictures him as "talking smoke"). When The Voice suddenly disappears from the airwaves, Moehringer turns to his hairless Uncle Charlie, and subsequently, Uncle Charlie's place of employment--a bar called Dickens that soon takes center stage. While Moehringer may occasionally resort to an overwrought metaphor (the footsteps of his family sound like "storm troopers on stilts"), his writing moves at a quick clip and his tale of a dysfunctional but tightly knit community is warmly told. "While I fear that we're drawn to what abandons us, and to what seems most likely to abandon us, in the end I believe we're defined by what embraces us," Moehringer says, and his story makes us believe it. --Brangien Davis [via]

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  • The Tenth Circle: A Novel
    by Jodi Picoult
    ISBN 0786288345 (0-7862-8834-5)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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    Bestselling author Jodi Picoult's The Tenth Circle is a metaphorical journey through Dante's Inferno, told through the eyes of a small Maine family whose hidden demons haunt every aspect of their seemingly peaceful existence. Woven throughout the novel are a series of dramatic illustrations that pay homage to the family's patriarch (comic book artist Daniel Stone), and add a unique twist to this gripping, yet somewhat rhetorical tale.

    Trixie Stone is an imaginative, perceptive 14 year old whose life begins to unravel when Jason Underhill, Bethel High's star hockey player, breaks up with her, leaving a void that can only be filled by the blood spilled during shameful self-mutilations in the girls' bathroom. While Trixie's dad Daniel notices his daughter's recent change in demeanor, he turns a blind eye, just as he does to the obvious affair his wife Laura, a college professor, is barely trying to conceal. When Trixie gets raped at a friend's party, Daniel and Laura are forced to deal not only with the consequences of their daughter's physical and emotional trauma, but with their own transgressions as well. For Daniel, that means reflecting on a childhood spent as the only white kid in a native Alaskan village, where isolation and loneliness turned him into a recluse, only to be born again after falling in love with his wife. Laura, who blames her family's unraveling on her selfish affair, must decide how to reconcile her personal desires with her loved ones' needs.

    The Tenth Circle is chock full of symbolism and allegory that at times can seem oppresive. Still, Picoult's fans will welcome this skillfully told story of betrayal and its many negative, and positive consequences. --Gisele Toueg [via]

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  • Wolff, Tobias: This Boy's Life
    This Boy's Life
    by Tobias Wolff
    ISBN 0802136680 (0-8021-3668-0)
    Softcover, Grove Pr

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  • This Side of Paradise
    by F. Scott Fitzgerald
    ISBN 0804114803 (0-8041-1480-3)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    First published in 1920, This Side of Paradise marks the beginning of the career of one of the greatest writers of the first half of the twentieth century. In this remarkable achievement, F. Scott Fitzgerald displays his unparalleled wit and keen social insight in his portrayal of college life through the struggles and doubts of Amory Blaine, a self-proclaimed genius with a love of knowledge and a penchant for the romantic. As Amory journeys into adulthood and leaves the aristocratic egotism of his youth behind, he becomes painfully aware of his lost innocence and the new sense of responsibility and regret that has taken its place.
    Clever and wonderfully written, This Side of Paradise is a fascinating novel about the changes of the Jazz Age and their effects on the individual. It is a complex portrait of a versatile mind in a restless generation that reveals rich ideas crucial to an understanding of the 1920s and timeless truths about the human need for--and fear of--change.
    "A very enlivening book indeed, a book really brilliant and glamorous, making as agreeable reading as could be asked . . . There are clever things, keen and searching things, amusingly young and mistaken things, beautiful things and pretty things . . . and truly inspired and elevated things, an astonishing abundance of each, in THIS SIDE OF PARADISE. You could call it the youthful Byronism that is normal in a man of the author's type, working out through a well-furnished intellect of unusual critical force."
    --The Evening Post, 1920
    "An astonishing and refreshing book . . . Mr. Fitzgerald has recorded with a good deal of felicity and a disarming frankness the adventures and developments of a curious and fortunate American youth. . . . [It is] delightful and encouraging to find a novel which gives us in the accurate terms of intellectual honesty a reflection of American undergraduate life. At last the revelation has come. We have the constant young American occupation--the 'petting party'--frankly and humorously in our literature."
    --The New Republic, 1920 [via]

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  • Treasure Island
    by Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Brook, Ian McNee
    ISBN 0794512305 (0-7945-1230-5)
    Softcover, Edc Pub

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    Climb aboard for the swashbuckling adventure of a lifetime. Treasure Islandhas enthralled (and caused slight seasickness) for decades. The names Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins are destined to remain pieces of folklore for as long as children want to read Robert Louis Stevenson's most famous book. With it's dastardly plot and motley crew of rogues and villains, it seems unlikely that children will ever say no to this timeless classic. --Naomi Gesinger [via]

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  • Treasure Island
    by Angela Wilkes, Sam Taplin, Peter Dennis
    ISBN 0794504116 (0-7945-0411-6)
    Softcover, Edc Pub

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    64 pages with colorful photos dispersed throughout book. Great introduction to this classic. Age 8 years and up. [via]

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  • Tuck Everlasting
    by Natalie Babbitt
    ISBN 0786263229 (0-7862-6322-9)
    Softcover, Thorndike Pr

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    Imagine coming upon a fountain of youth in a forest. To live forever--isn't that everyone's ideal? For the Tuck family, eternal life is a reality, but their reaction to their fate is surprising. Award winner Natalie Babbitt (Knee-Knock Rise, The Search for Delicious) outdoes herself in this sensitive, moving adventure in which 10-year-old Winnie Foster is kidnapped, finds herself helping a murderer out of jail, and is eventually offered the ultimate gift--but doesn't know whether to accept it. Babbitt asks profound questions about the meaning of life and death, and leaves the reader with a greater appreciation for the perfect cycle of nature. Intense and powerful, exciting and poignant, Tuck Everlasting will last forever--in the reader's imagination. An ALA Notable Book. (Ages 9 to 12) --Emilie Coulter [via]

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  • McDonell, Nick: Twelve
    Twelve
    by Nick McDonell
    ISBN 0802140122 (0-8021-4012-2)
    Softcover, Grove Pr

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    On the surface, Nick McDonell's debut novel Twelve (written when the well-connected former prep-schooler was 17) feels like an East Coast Less Than Zero: the laconic style and episodic plot; the privileged ennui, drugs, and pop culture sensibility (with sprinklings of Prada, FUBU, North Face, and Nokia replacing Zero's Armani, English Beat T-shirts, Wayfarer sunglasses, and Betamax); the Christmas break setting; even the italicized flashbacks--it's all there. But Twelve also shares its casual, youthful arrogance with the jaded aggressiveness and jagged style of Larry Clark's Kids.

    McDonell has crafted a pulsing narrative that clips along at an after-hours pace, pulling the reader along like an ominous rip tide, shifting easily from the Upper East Side to Harlem to Central Park to introduce a cast of loosely connected characters. White Mike, Twelve's clean-living, Cheerios-loving, milkshake-drinking drug dealer, drives the majority of the barely-there plot. ("Mike uses a teaspoon to eat his cereal, not a big soup spoon, because he likes to have less milk in his mouth with each bite" is about as deep as it gets.) Character development is limited to an easy shorthand ("Long legs, large breasts, blond hair, blue eyes, high cheekbones.") that results in a simple surface-skimming, leaving one too many caricatures of the very youth culture McDonell is writing about. Readers will see the blood-spattered, penultimate set piece coming down Fifth Avenue from page one, but any potential shock value or drama is immediately deflated in Twelve's head-scratching hangover of a denouement. --Brad Thomas Parsons [via]

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  • When Zachary Beaver Came to Town
    by Kimberly Willis Holt
    ISBN 0805061169 (0-8050-6116-9)
    Hardcover, Henry Holt & Co

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    Summer in the tiny Texas town of Antler is traditionally a time for enjoying Wylie Womack's Bahama Mama snow cones and racking up the pins at Kelly's Bowl-a-Rama, but this year it's not going well for Toby Wilson. His 13-year-old heart has been broken twice: once by his mother, who left him and his father to become a country singer in Nashville, and then again by his crush Scarlett Stalling, the town beauty who barely acknowledges Toby's existence. But when Zachary Beaver, "The World's Fattest Boy," comes to Antler as part of a traveling sideshow, Toby begins to realize that there might just be people who have it worse than him. By reaching out to Zachary in small ways--such as helping him realize his lifelong dream of being baptized--Toby is better able to put his own problems into perspective. At the baptism, Toby finally feels at peace: "Zachary smiles and I wonder if he's feeling different. Because standing here waist deep in Gossimer's Lake... I'm feeling different--light and good and maybe even holy." By summer's end, Toby's friendship with Zachary has provided him with the emotional stamina to begin dealing with his mother's decision and to gracefully accept the fact that Scarlett will forever be just beyond his reach.

    With Zachary Beaver, Kimberly Willis Holt, author of the award-winning My Louisiana Sky, further explores southern-flavored small town life. Toby's quirky, yet ultimately rewarding coming of age story will serve as a gentle reminder to teens that sometimes the best way to work through your problems is by helping others with theirs. (Ages 11 to 15) --Jennifer Hubert [via]

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  • The White Dragon
    by Anne McCaffrey
    ISBN 080852142X (0-8085-2142-X)
    Hardcover, Bt Bound

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    Book summary:

    FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. Jaxom, a rebellious youth, and Ruth, his white dragon, fly into another time to retrieve the queen's stolen egg, thereby averting a dragonrider war, and find their planet threatened once again by a Threadfall. [via]

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  • Winesburg, Ohio
    by Sherwood Anderson
    ISBN 0808566245 (0-8085-6624-5)
    Hardcover, Bt Bound

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    Book summary:

    No sooner did _Winesburg, Ohio_ make its appearance than a number of critical labels were fixed on it: the revolt against the village, the espousal of sexual freedom, the deepening of American realism. Such tags may once have had their point, but by now they seem dated and stale. The revolt against the village (about which Anderson was always ambivalent) has faded into history. The espousal of sexual freedom would soon be exceeded in boldness by other writers. And as for the effort to place _Winesburg, Ohio_ in a tradition of American realism, that now seems dubious. Only rarely is the object of Anderson's stories social verisimilitude, or the "photographing" of familiar appearances, in the sense, say, that one might use to describe a novel by Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis. Only occasionally, and then with a very light touch, does Anderson try to fill out the social arrangements of his imaginary town -- although the fact that his stories are set in a mid-American place like Winesburg does constitute an important formative condition. [via]

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  • The Woman Warrior
    by Maxine Hong Kingston
    ISBN 0808589768 (0-8085-8976-8)
    Hardcover, Bt Bound

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    Book summary:

    The Woman Warrior is a pungent, bitter, but beautifully written memoir of growing up Chinese American in Stockton, California. Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men) distills the dire lessons of her mother's mesmerizing "talk-story" tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upward. The author's America is a landscape of confounding white "ghosts"--the policeman ghost, the social worker ghost--with equally rigid, but very different rules. Like the woman warrior of the title, Kingston carries the crimes against her family carved into her back by her parents in testimony to and defiance of the pain. [via]

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  • Dorris, Michael: A Yellow Raft in Blue Water
    A Yellow Raft in Blue Water
    by Michael Dorris
    ISBN 0805000453 (0-8050-0045-3)
    Hardcover, Henry Holt & Co

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