Catalog Search Results
1) Calypso
Author
Language
English
Description
When he buys a beach house on the Carolina coast, David Sedaris envisions long, relaxing vacations spent playing board games and lounging in the sun with those he loves most. And life at the Sea Section, as he names the vacation home, is exactly as idyllic as he imagined, except for one tiny, vexing realization: it's impossible to take a vacation from yourself. Sedaris sets his powers of observation toward middle age and mortality, that vertiginous...
Author
Pub. Date
2013
Language
English
Formats
Description
“Reading How Literature Saved My Life is like getting to listen in on a really great, smart, provocative conversation. The book is not straightforward, it resists any single interpretation, and it seems to me to constitute nothing less than a new form.” ––Whitney Otto
In this wonderfully intelligent, stunningly honest, painfully funny book, acclaimed writer David Shields uses himself as a representative
3) Observer
Author
Publisher
The Story Plant
Language
English
Formats
Description
Dr. Caroline Soames-Watkins's star has been on the rise. But when she accuses a superior of sexual misconduct, the Twitterstorm that follows upends her career. With few professional options and an impoverished sister with a disabled child to support, Caro is willing to consider a mysterious proposal from her great-uncle, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Samuel Watkins. Sam Watkins has invested untold sums of money to build a medical facility in the...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"From the author of the bestselling memoir Wild Game comes a riveting novel about Cape Cod, complicated families, and long-buried secrets-for fans of the New York Times bestsellers The Paper Palace and Ask Again, Yes.Ken and Abby Gardner lost their mother when they were small and they have been haunted by her absence ever since. Their father, Adam, a brilliant oceanographer, raised them mostly on his own in his remote home on Cape Cod, where the attachment...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by...
Author
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
English
Formats
Description
"A beautiful and utterly original novel about making art, love, and children during the twilight of an empire Ben Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was hailed as "one of the truest (and funniest) novels. of his generation" (Lorin Stein, The New York Review of Books), "a work so luminously original in style and form as to seem like a premonition, a comet from the future" (Geoff Dyer, The Observer). Now, his second novel departs from...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
At the age of sixty-one, George Hall settles to a comfortable retirement. His tempestuous daughter, Katie, then announces that she is getting remarried to the deeply inappropriate Ray to her family's displeasure. Her mother, Jean, is disgusted with the huge preparation the wedding entails, which also disrupts her late-life affair with one of her husband's ex-colleagues. The seemingly neat and pleasant life of George and Jean's son, Jamie, disintegrates...
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Each year, approximately forty thousand Americans are killed by gunshot wounds, which is roughly equivalent to the annual rate of traffic deaths on American roads and highways. Of those forty thousand gun fatalities, more than half of them are suicides, which in turn account for half of all suicides per year. Add in the murders caused by guns, the accidental deaths caused by guns, the law enforcement killings caused by guns, and the average comes...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
When every person, all over the globe, receives a small wooden box bearing the same inscription and a single piece of string inside, the world is thrown into a collective frenzy, in this novel told through multiple perspectives that introduces an unforgettable cast of characters.
It seems like any other day: You wake up, pour a cup of coffee, and head out. But today when you open your front door, waiting for you is a small wooden box. This box holds...
10) Dead Wednesday
Author
Language
English
Description
When the school assigns each eighth-grader the name of a teenager who died in the past year as a lesson in mortality, Worm Tarnauer, who thrives on being invisible, doesn't count on Becca Finch, the seventeen-year-old car crash victim who changes everything.
11) The black ice
Author
Series
Harry Bosch mysteries volume 2
Language
English
Description
When an LAPD narcotics officer is found with a fatal bullet wound and a suicide note, Detective Harry Bosch follows a bloody trail of drug murders across the Mexico border. Working the case, LAPD detective Harry Bosch is reminded of the primal police rule he learned long ago: Don't look for the facts, but the glue that holds them together. Soon Harry's making some very dangerous connections, starting with a dead cop and leading to a bloody string...
12) Grimus: a novel
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
“A mixture of science fiction and folktale, past and future, primitive and present-day . . . Thunderous and touching.”
–Financial Times
After drinking an elixir that bestows immortality upon him, a young Indian named Flapping Eagle spends the next seven hundred years sailing the seas with the blessing–and ultimately the burden–of living forever. Eventually, weary of the sameness of life, he journeys to the...
–Financial Times
After drinking an elixir that bestows immortality upon him, a young Indian named Flapping Eagle spends the next seven hundred years sailing the seas with the blessing–and ultimately the burden–of living forever. Eventually, weary of the sameness of life, he journeys to the...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
[2017]
Language
English
Formats
Description
Edwidge Danticat's The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story is at once a personal account of her mother dying from cancer and a deeply considered reckoning with the ways that other writers have approached death in their own work. "Writing has been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses," Danticat notes in her introduction. "I have been writing about death for as long as I have been writing." The book moves outward from the shock...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"You like it darker? Fine, so do I," writes Stephen King in the afterword to this magnificent new collection of twelve stories that delve into the darker part of life--both metaphorical and literal. King has, for half a century, been a master of the form, and these stories, about fate, mortality, luck, and the folds in reality where anything can happen, are as rich and riveting as his novels, both weighty in theme and a huge pleasure to read. King...
Author
Language
English
Description
Eudora Honeysett is done with this noisy, moronic world--all of it. She has witnessed the indignities and suffering of old age and has lived a full life. At eighty-five, she isn't going to leave things to chance. Her end will be on her terms. With one call to a clinic in Switzerland, a plan is set in motion. Then she meets ten-year-old Rose Trewidney, a whirling, pint-sized rainbow of color and sparkling cheer. All Eudora wants is to be left alone...
Author
Language
English
Description
Ehrenreich's core philosophy holds that aging people have the right to determine their quality of life and may choose to forgo painful and generally ineffective treatments. She presents evidence that such tests as annual physicals and Pap smears have little effect in prolonging life; investigates wellness trends, including mindfulness meditation; and questions the doctrine of a harmonious "mindbody" and its supposed natural tendency to prolong life....
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Our narrator's days are numbered. Estranged from his family, living alone with only his cat Cabbage for company, he was unprepared for the doctor's diagnosis that he has only months to live. But before he can set about tackling his bucket list, the Devil appears with a special offer: in exchange for making one thing in the world disappear, he can have one extra day of life. And so begins a very bizarre week ... Because how do you decide what makes...
19) Narc
Publisher
Paramount
Pub. Date
[2003], c2002
Language
English
Description
Suspended from the force following a drug bust gone wrong, undercover narcotics officer Nick Tellis is reluctantly goaded back into active duty when a fellow officer is slain. Promised reinstatement in exchange for his efforts, Tellis is paired with the victim's volatile ex-partner Henry and soon begins to actively seek the killer in an increasingly complex case. Tellis struggles with his conscience as he navigates a twisting road of half-realized...
Author
Publisher
Beacon Press
Language
English
Formats
Description
Presents a scientist's study of one family of orca whales in Prince William Sound, Alaska, and the devastating effects of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill on their ability to reproduce and survive, as she considers the long-term implications the spill has for Alaskan wildlife.
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