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As always, Julia : letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto : food, friendship, and the making of a masterpiece
selected and edited by Joan Reardon.
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xiii, 416 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
Presents more than 200 letters exchanged between Julia and Avis DeVoto, her friend and unofficial literary agent. This collection opens the window on Julia's deepest thoughts and feelings.
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As I lay dying
William Faulkner.
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250 p. ; 19 cm.
"I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first word I knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall." -William Faulkner on As I Lay Dying As I Lay Dying is Faulkner's harrowing account of the Bundren family's odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Narrated in turn by each of the family members-including Addie herself-as well as others the novel ranges in mood, from dark comedy to the deepest pathos.
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Assassination vacation
Sarah Vowell.
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258 p. ; 23 cm.
Sarah Vowell exposes the glorious conundrums of American history and culture with wit, probity, and an irreverent sense of humor. With Assassination Vacation , she takes us on a road trip like no other -- a journey to the pit stops of American political murder and through the myriad ways they have been used for fun and profit, for political and cultural advantage. From Buffalo to Alaska, Washington to the Dry Tortugas, Vowell visits locations immortalized and influenced by the spilling of politically important blood, reporting as she goes with her trademark blend of wisecracking humor, remarkable honesty, and thought-provoking criticism. We learn about the jinx that was Robert Todd Lincoln (present at the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley) and witness the politicking that went into the making of the Lincoln Memorial. The resulting narrative is much more than an entertaining and informative travelogue -- it is the disturbing and fascinating story of how American death has been manipulated by popular culture, including literature, architecture, sculpture, and -- the author's favorite -- historical tourism. Though the themes of loss and violence are explored and we make detours to see how the Republican Party became the Republican Party, there are all kinds of lighter diversions along the way into the lives of the three presidents and their assassins, including mummies, show tunes, mean-spirited totem poles, and a nineteenth-century biblical sex cult.
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Au bonheur des ogres
Daniel Pennac.
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286 p. ; 18 cm.
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The audacity of hope : thoughts on reclaiming the American dream
Barack Obama.
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375 p. ; 25 cm.
In July 2004, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with an address that spoke to Americans across the political spectrum. One phrase in particular anchored itself in listeners' minds, a reminder that for all the discord and struggle to be found in our history as a nation, we have always been guided by a dogged optimism in the future, or what Obama called "the audacity of hope." The Audacity of Hope is Barack Obama's call for a different brand of politics--a politics for those weary of bitter partisanshipand alienated by the "endless clash of armies" we see in congress and on the campaign trail; a politics rooted in the faith, inclusiveness, and nobility of spirit at the heart of "our improbable experiment in democracy." He explores those forces--from the fear of losing to the perpetual need to raise money to the power of the media--that can stifle even the best-intentioned politician. He also writes, with surprising intimacy and self-deprecating humor, about settling in as a senator, seeking to balance the demands of public service and family life, and his own deepening religious commitment. At the heart of this book is Barack Obama's vision of how we can move beyond our divisions to tackle concrete problems. He examines the growing economic insecurity of American families, the racial and religious tensions within the body politic, and the transnational threats--from terrorism to pandemic--that gather beyond our shores. And he grapples with the role that faith plays in a democracy--where it is vital and where it must never intrude. Underlying his stories about family, friends, and members of the Senate is a vigorous search for connection: the foundation for a radically hopeful political consensus. A public servant and a lawyer, a professor and a father, a Christian and a skeptic, and above all a student of history and human nature, Barack Obama has written a book of transforming power. Only by returning to the principles that gave birth to our Constitution, he says, can Americans repair a political process that is broken, and restore to working order a government that has fallen dangerously out of touch with millions of ordinary Americans. Those Americans are out there, he writes--"waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them."
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Autobiography of a face
Lucy Grealy.
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236 p. ; 21 cm.
"I spent five years of my life being treated for cancer, but since then I've spent fifteen years being treated for nothing other than looking different from everyone else. It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy of my life. The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison." At age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates. In this strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit. Vividly portraying the pain of peer rejection and the guilty pleasures of wanting to be special, Grealy captures with unique insight what it is like as a child and young adult to be torn between two warring impulses: to feel that more than anything else we want to be loved for who we are, while wishing desperately and secretly to be perfect.
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The autobiography of an execution
David R. Dow.
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x, 273 p. ; 24 cm.
"A riveting, artfully written memoir of a lawyer's life as he races to prevent death row inmates from being executed"--Provided by the publisher.
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The autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
edited by Leonard W. Labaree ... [et al.] ; with a new foreword by Edmund S. Morgan.
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351 p. ; 20 cm.
Written ostensibly as a letter to his son William, the autobiography offers Franklin's reflections on philosophy and religion, politics, war, education, material success and the status of women.
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Await your reply : a novel
Dan Chaon.
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324 p. ; 25 cm.
While Miles pursues elusive letters and clues in a perpetual search for his missing twin, Ryan struggles with the discovery that he is adopted, and Lucy finds her daring escape from her hometown posing unexpectedly dangerous consequences.
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The awakening : with a selection of short stories
by Kate Chopin ; with an introduction by Marilynne Robinson.
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xxi, 210 p. ; 18 cm.
First published in 1899, this controversial novel of a New Orleans wife's search for love outside a stifling marriage shocked readers. Today, it remains a first-rate narrative with superb characterization.
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Away : a novel
Amy Bloom.
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240 p. ; 25 cm.
Panoramic in scope,Awayis the epic and intimate story of young Lillian Leyb, a dangerous innocent, an accidental heroine. When her family is destroyed in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way in a new land. When word comes that her daughter, Sophie, might still be alive, Lillian embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on New York's Lower East Side, to Seattle's Jazz District, and up to Alaska, along the fabled Telegraph Trail toward Siberia. All of the qualities readers love in Amy Bloom's work-her humor and wit, her elegant and irreverent language, her unflinching understanding of passion and the human heart-come together in the embrace of this brilliant novel, which is at once heartbreaking, romantic, and completely unforgettable. From the Hardcover edition.
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The bad girl
Mario Vargas Llosa ; translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman.
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276 p. ; 24 cm.
Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as "Lily" in Lima in 1950, when she arrives one summer out of the blue, claiming to be from Chile but vanishing the moment her claim is exposed as fiction. He loves her next in Paris, where she appears as the enchanting "Comrade Arlette," an activist en route to Cuba, and becomes his lover, albeit n icy, remote one who denies knowing anything about the ily of years gone by. Whoever the bad girl turns up as--whether t's Madame Robert Arnoux, the wife of a high-ranking UNESCO fficial, or Kuriko, the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman--and however poorly she treats him, Ricardo is doomed to worship her. The protean Lily, gifted liar and irresistible, maddening muse--does Ricardo ever know who she really is? The answer is as unclear s what has become of Ricardo himself, a lifelong expatriate hadowed by the sense that he is only ever drifting. In MarioVargas Llosa's beguiling new novel, the strange bedfellows of good and bad turn out not to be what they appear.
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