NCW Libraries

"Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs gathers together Wallace Stegner's most important and memorable writings on the American West: its landscapes, diverse history, and shifting identity: its beauty, fragility, and power. With subjects ranging from the writer's own "migrant childhood" to the need to protect what remains of the great western wilderness (which Stegner dubs "the geography...

Poet, adventurer, and unapologetic romantic Housden travels to Iran to learn about the people, the culture, and the art of this misunderstood land.

"In thinking about which works of Jewish thought can and should be an essential part of every Jewish library, I conceived of the volume you hold in your hand. Each chapter in this book features a scholar of Jewish studies revisiting a perticularly foundations and salient work of maḥshevet Yisrael (Jewish thought), from medieval to modern, and discussing its themes, its historical context, the circumstances and background of its author (the "person...

"A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country's history. Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in...

"A lavishly comprehensive collection of essays, articles, columns, and interviews from the inimitable intellectual firebrand: tackling topics from Picasso to punk rock, from religion to Rihanna, and covering the full span of her wide-ranging and important career. Much has changed since Camille Paglia first burst onto the scene with her best-selling Sexual Personae, but her laser-sharp insight, matchless wit, and fearless commentary continue to be...

"In 1869, Gustave Flaubert published what he considered to be his masterwork novel, A Sentimental Education, which told a deeply human and deeply pessimistic story of the 1848 revolutions. The book was a critical and commercial flop. Flaubert was devastated. Yet his year was only going to get worse. The summer of 1870 through the spring of 1871 would come to be known as the "Terrible Year" in France. France suffered a humiliating defeat in their war...

Her image appeared in periodicals and advertisements roughly twenty times daily; she rivaled FDR and Edward VIII as the most photographed person in the world. Her portrait brightened the homes of countless admirers: from a black laborer's cabin in South Carolina to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's recreation room in Washington, DC. A few years later her smile cheered the secret bedchamber of Anne Frank in Amsterdam. For four consecutive years Shirley...

"In Onions in the Stew, MacDonald is in unbuttonedly frolicsome form as she describes how, with husband and daughters, she set to work making a life on a rough-and-tumble island in Puget Sound, a ferry-ride from Seattle. "Onions in the Stew" describes Betty MacDonald's years on beautiful Vashon Island in Puget Sound in happy times with her second husband and two daughters. During this time, fame as a writer finally knocked on her door.The book covers...

"From the critically acclaimed author of The Invention of Murder, an extraordinary, revelatory portrait of everyday life on the streets of Dickens' London.The nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented change, and nowhere was this more apparent than London. In only a few decades, the capital grew from a compact Regency town into a sprawling metropolis of 6.5 million inhabitants, the largest city the world had ever seen. Technology--railways, street-lighting,...