NCW Libraries

"Blindsided by her mother's sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she's been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still...

Sunshine State offers a unique look at Florida, a state whose economically and environmentally imperiled culture serves as a lens through which we can examine some of the most pressing issues haunting our nation.

Overview: Alexandre Dumas's novel of justice, retribution, and self-discovery - one of the most enduringly popular adventure tales ever written - appears here in a newly revised translation. "This novel tells the story of Edmond Dantes, wrongfully imprisoned for life in the supposedly impregnable sea fortress the Chateau d'If. After a daring escape, and after unearthing a hidden treasure revealed to him by a fellow prisoner, he devotes the rest...

Comprises forty stories and poems that feature Luke Warmwater, an Ojibwa Vietnam veteran who survived the war but has trouble surviving the peace. Returning to the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation after the war, Warmwater finds poverty, unemployment, and the work of the tribal government may prove greater foes than those he faced in the Vietnam jungle -- yet he finds salvation through family, community, and humor. This twentieth-anniversary edition...

Portland: Alive at the Center captures a slice of the contemporary poetic environment of the Rose City. This collection is drawn from poems assembled and edited by Susan Denning, Jesse Lichtenstein, and Leah Stenson in Portland, Oregon. Curated from a larger anthology, Portland: Alive at the Centeris not just a poetry compilation, it's a cultural conversation between Pacific Northwest urban centers whose unique perspectives share a common landscape....

"Science fiction's supreme masterpiece, Dune will be forever considered a triumph of the imagination. Set on the desert planet Arrakis, it is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, who will become the mysterious man known as Muad'Dib. Paul's noble family is named stewards of Arrakis, whose sands are the only source of a powerful drug called "the spice." After his family is brought down in a traitorous plot, Paul must go undercover to seek revenge, and...

Violette Toussaint is the caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne. Casual mourners, regular visitors, and sundry colleagues-gravediggers, groundskeepers, and a priest-visit her to warm themselves in her lodge, where laughter, companionship, and occasional tears mix with the coffee she offers them. Her life is lived to the rhythms of their funny, moving confidences. Violette's routine is disrupted one day by the arrival of Julien Sole-local...

Germinal, by Emile Zola, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies of contemporary...

"New York Times bestselling author Wally Lamb weaves an evocative, deeply affecting tapestry of one Baby Boomer's life--Felix Funicello, introduced in Wishin' and Hopin'--and the trio of unforgettable women who have changed it, in this radiant homage to the resiliency, strength, and power of women. I'll Take You There centers on Felix, a film scholar who runs a Monday night movie club in what was once a vaudeville theater. One evening, while setting...

"Debating literature's greatest heroines with a friend, playwright Samantha Ellis has a revelation--"My whole life, I'd been trying to be Cathy, when I should have been trying to be Jane." With this discovery, she embarks on a retrospective look at the literary ladies--the characters and the writers--whom she has loved since childhood. From early obsessions with the March sisters to later idolizations of Sylvia Plath, Ellis evaluates how her heroines...