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This is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her psychiatrist, a dead-ringer for Santa and a lunatic in the bargain. Suddenly, at age twelve, the author found himself living in a dilapidated Victorian in perfect squalor. The doctor's bizarre family, a few patients, and a pedophile living in the backyard shed completed the tableau. Here, there were no rules, there was no school. The...
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"Brilliant, heartbreaking, tender, and highly original - poet Ocean Vuong's debut novel is a sweeping and shattering portrait of a family, and a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born--a history whose epicenter is rooted in...
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"An exhilarating debut from a radiant new voice, After Sappho reimagines the intertwined lives of feminists at the turn of the twentieth century. "The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho," so begins this intrepid debut novel, centuries after the Greek poet penned her lyric verse. Ignited by the same muse, a myriad of women break from their small, predetermined lives for seemingly disparate paths: in 1892, Rina Faccio...
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"Delaney Nichols faces off against an elusive arsonist in the seventh Scottish Bookshop Mystery, The Burning Pages, from beloved author Paige Shelton.... One winter's night, bookseller Delaney Nichols and her coworker Hamlet are invited to a Burns Night dinner, a traditional Scottish celebration of the poet Robert Burns. She's perplexed by the invitation, but intrigued. The dinner takes place at Burns House itself, a tiny cottage not far from the...
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"The author met Peter in the spring of 2017. He--calm, puppy-eyed, with the heart of a poet and the soul of, also, a poet--came to her first as a foster. He was unable to stay with his previously assigned foster for reasons that are none of your business, but which we will tell you were related to frequent urination. The rescue needed someone free of the sort of responsibilities that would force her to regularly leave the house for either work or...
68) Punching the air
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From award-winning, bestselling author Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five comes a powerful YA novel in verse about a boy who is wrongfully incarcerated. The story that I thought was my life didn't start on the day I was born. Amal Shahid has always been an artist and a poet. But even in a diverse art school, he's seen as disruptive and unmotivated by a biased system. Then one fateful night, an altercation in a...
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"A fascinating history of the art form that has transformed the cultural landscape, by one of its influential practitioners, an award-winning poet, professor, and slam champion In 2009, when he was twenty years old, Joshua Bennett was invited to perform a spoken word poem for Barack and Michelle Obama, at the same White House "Poetry Jam" where Lin Manuel-Miranda declaimed the opening bars of a work-in-progress that would soon revolutionize American...
71) Birds of America
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A stunning collection of twelve stories by Lorrie Moore, one of our finest authors at work today. With her characteristic wit and piercing intelligence she unfolds a series of portraits of the lost and unsettled of America, and with a trademark humor that fuels each story with pathos and understanding.
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"Dickinson meets Booksmart with a dash of Little Women in Infamous, a Regency-era queer romantic comedy with a deliciously feminist twist, from Lex Croucher, the author of Reputation. Twenty-two-year-old aspiring writer Edith ("Eddie") Miller and her best friend Rose have always done everything together--from climbing trees and sneaking bottles of wine, to extensive kissing practice. But Rose has started talking about marriage, and Eddie is horrified....
73) Felon: poems
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"A searing volume by a poet whose work conveys "the visceral effect that prison has on identity" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems--canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace--and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts...
74) Rosewater
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"Elsie is a sexy, funny, and fiercely independent woman in south London. But, at just twenty-eight, she is also tired. Though she spends her days writing tender poetry in her journal, her nights are spent working long hours for minimum wage at a neighborhood dive bar. Not even sleeping with her alluring coworker, Bea, can quell her existential dread. The difficulty of being estranged from her family, struggle of being continually rejected from jobs,...
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Trust is a delicate thing, and no one knows that better than Rosalind Thorne. Lady Melbourne has entrusted her with recovering a packet of highly sensitive private letters stolen from her desk. The contents of these letters hold great interest for the famous poet Lord Byron, who had carried on a notorious public affair with Lady Melbourne's daughter-in-law, the inconveniently unstable Lady Caroline Lamb. Rosalind is to take up residence in Melbourne...
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"A wildly entertaining debut about a Brooklyn Heights wife and mother who has embezzled a small fortune from her children's private school and makes a run for it, leaving behind her trust fund poet husband, his maybe-secret lover, her two daughters, and a school board who will do anything to find her. Marion Palm prefers not to think of herself as a thief but rather "a woman who embezzles." Over the years she has managed to steal $180,000 from her...
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Julius Caesar is set at a crucial turning point in Roman history, as the Republican gives way to the imperial. Safely removed in time and place from Shakespeare's Elizabethan England, Rome makes the perfect laboratory for the playwright's free-ranging political analysis.
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"From Booker-prize winning author Anne Enright, an astonishing novel about the love between mother and daughter--sometimes fierce, often painful, but always transcendent. "Carmel had been alone all her life. She had been alone since she was twelve years old. The baby knew all this. They looked at each other; one life into another life, and the baby knew exactly how alone her mother had been." Nell--funny, brave and so much loved--is a young woman...
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Ntokaze Shange's most beloved novel, Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, is the story of three "colored girls," three sisters and their mama from Charleston, South Carolina: Sassafrass, the oldest, a poet and a weaver like her mother, gone north to college, living with other artists in Los Angeles and trying to weave a life out of her work, her man, her memories and dreams; Cypress, the dancer, who leaves home to find new ways of moving and easing the contractions...
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"How did a kid whose dad lived in the poorhouse become one of the most successful storytellers in the world? - James nearly died early on the morning he was born. - His grandmother told him something that's been his motto for his entire writing career - 'Hungry dogs run faster'. - When James worked at a psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts, he met the singer James Taylor. And the poet Robert Lowell. - James's first novel, The Thomas Berryman Number,...