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RX
By Rachel Lindsay. 2018
A graphic memoir about the treatment of mental illness, treating mental illness as a commodity, and the often unavoidable choice…
between sanity and happiness.In her early twenties in New York City, diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Rachel Lindsay takes a job in advertising in order to secure healthcare coverage for her treatment. But work takes a strange turn when she is promoted onto the Pfizer account and suddenly finds herself on the other side of the curtain, developing ads for an antidepressant drug. She is the audience of the work she's been pouring over and it highlights just how unhappy and trapped she feels, stuck in an endless cycle of treatment, insurance and medication. Overwhelmed by the stress of her professional life and the self-scrutiny it inspires, she begins to destabilize and while in the midst of a crushing job search, her mania takes hold. Her altered mindset yields a simple solution: to quit her job and pursue life as an artist, an identity she had abandoned in exchange for medical treatment. When her parents intervene, she finds herself hospitalized against her will, and stripped of the control she felt she had finally reclaimed. Over the course of her two weeks in the ward, she struggles in the midst of doctors, nurses, patients and endless rules to find a path out of the hospital and this cycle of treatment. One where she can live the life she wants, finding freedom and autonomy, without sacrificing her dreams in order to stay well.The Magic School Bus Spins A Web: A Book About Spiders
By Joanna Cole. 1997
Rainbow Custodians
By Candice Leathem, Michael Head. 2015
The narrative Rainbow Custodians describes the incredible efforts of creatures to rise against the environmental destruction caused since the European…
invasion of Australia. The central characters Bert and Bennie Koala rally all manner of wildlife to jolt humans into growing a conscience and acting to save endangered creatures and the environment. Rainbow Custodians is designed to link to school curriculum and focuses on important issues such as indigenous people's relationship to land, creation, spiritual connection to mother earth and custodianship. The text exposes environmental degradation, human apathy towards extinct and endangered species and sustainability. Cultural inclusion, sustainability and right relationship are further topics that can be used to enhance the application of this book. Australian wildlife is proudly paraded throughout to familiarise the reader with our unique and wonderful creatures. Poetry is woven throughout the text to enchant the audience with this tale of perplexing complications, intelligent solutions and climactic inspirational codas. The text assumes a life of its own through the brilliant illustrations of Candice Leathem that adorn the cover and each of the ten chapters. These images are designed to delight viewers, provoke discussion and are superb teaching tools. The intended audience ranges from middle - upper primary to early secondary levels, as the text relates to key concepts explored within educational curriculum, but it also has inherent appeal for an older audience. The issues explored within this book have global appeal and it is hoped that a wider audience may enjoy this text and learn from the experience. Thank you for taking the time to read Rainbow Custodians.The Dog That Talked to God
By Jim Kraus. 2012
A wonderfully quirky, heart-breaking, heart-warming and thought-provoking story of a woman's dog who not only talks to her, he talks…
to God. Recently widowed Mary Fassler has no choice except to believe Rufus, the miniature schnauzer, who claims to speak to the Divine. The question is: Will Mary follow the dog's advice, and leave everything she knows and loves? Is this at the urging of God? Or is it something else? Will Mary risk it all or ignore the urgings of her own heart?Some Rain Must Fall
By Don Bartlett, Karl Ove Knausgaard. 2016
The fifth installment in the epic six-volume My Struggle cycle is here, highly anticipated by Karl Ove Knausgaard's dedicated fan…
club--and the first in the cycle to be published separately in Canada.The young Karl Ove moves to Bergen to attend the Writing Academy. It turns out to be a huge disappointment: he wants so much, knows so little, and achieves nothing. His contemporaries have their manuscripts accepted and make their debuts while he begins to feel the best he can do is to write about literature. With no apparent reason to feel hopeful, he continues his exploration of and love for books and reading. Gradually his writing changes; his relationship with the world around him changes too. This becomes a novel about new, strong friendships and a serious relationship that transforms him until the novel reaches the existential pivotal point: his father dies, Karl Ove makes his debut as a writer and everything disintegrates. He flees to Sweden, to avoid family and friends.Funny Misshapen Body
By Jeffrey Brown. 2009
Funny Misshapen Body is the story of Jeffrey Brown's evolution as a cartoonist, from his youthful obsession with superhero comics…
to his disillusionment with fine art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Drawn with Brown's scratchy, spare, trademark style, Funny Misshapen Body resonates with true-to-life observations on love, fear, and ambition. Through his bare bones graphic style, he reveals his most embarrassing personal moments in raw, intimate detail -- including how he survived high school, binge drinking, mild drug experimentation, doomed friendships, and being diagnosed with Crohn's disease. Ultimately coming to terms with his art and identity, Brown describes the ups and downs of his adolescence with understated simplicity, dark humor, and charm.Is Your Dog Gay?
By Victoria Roberts, Charles Kreloff, Patty Brown. 2004
Good Eggs
By Phoebe Potts. 2010
In the tradition of the acclaimed graphic memoirs Fun Home and Persepolis comes a funny, insightful, and deeply moving book…
about learning to appreciate what we have when we can't seem to get what we want. For Phoebe Potts, the path to maternal fulfillment has not been easy. All her friends seem to get pregnant, but she can't conceive for all her trying. As Phoebe and her husband, Jeff, navigate the emotionally and physically fraught world of fertility experts, she takes stock of what matters in the rest of her life and reflects on the winding journey to her true calling as an artist. From her days as an amateur union organizer in Texas to her spiral into paralyzing depression in Mexico; from her soul-shrinking, all-for-the-benefits stint as an administrative assistant at a fancy university in Cambridge to her flirtation with rabbinical school, Phoebe illuminates the bumpy road to vocational and personal contentment. Her wonderful, hilarious, and utterly original drawings capture the truly good eggs-an unforgettably nutty mother; a devoted husband; a team of therapists, hairdressers, and landladies; friends; and a sidekick housecat-that together expand the definition of what really makes a family.Skywater
By Melinda Worth Popham. 2013
"Brand X and his fellow coyotes . . . are meticulously observed in the desert environment that Ms. Popham seems…
to know like her backyard. And so are the people of this fable--old Hallie and Albert . . . and the several varmint-hunters, callous or alcoholic or both. There is a parable of how we might relate to the creatures that share the world with us; and a parable of dreams versus realty; and a parable of home, of known territory with its comparative safety; and a parable of making the best of a world short of everything. The people and the creatures of Ms. Popham's fable are right, they belong, and they mean." --Wallace Stegner "This spare and affecting novel has the precision and the stinging sweetness of a fable. A wonderful book." --Thomas McGuane "Refreshing . . . Life-affirming . . . The first book I've read in a long time that left me with teary eyes at the end."--The San Diego Tribune "Captivating . . . The animals' arduous westward journey down the Colorado River to the Gulf suggests a coyote world view that is subtly sustained by their mysterious ways." --Publishers Weekly "With dramatic urgency and imaginative tenderness, Melinda Popham has given the world a painful, poetic, and delightfully unpredictable story that pulsates with hope and healing meaning." --Al Young, California Poet Laureate Emeritus "Rich with poetic resonance." --Los Angeles Times Book Review "Evoking a rich sense of place and animal behavior, [Popham] lets us see through very different eyes." --The Seattle Times "A daring and visionary tale. [Popham] dares to tell us what a coyote thinks and sees and feels and dreams. . . . A hero of the classic kind--a furry, howling, water-seeking version of the Hero with a Thousand Faces." --James D. Houston "Masterful . . . Astonishing . . . Remarkable . . . Put down the latest technothriller and bask awhile in the descriptive prose of Skywater." --L.A. LifeThe Plume Hunter
By Renée Thompson. 2011
Bird-watchers will love this journey back to the 1880s West Coast when vast populations of wild birds still filled the…
skies in annual migrations. But the birds were imperiled by plume hunters intent on personal fortune. This story of violence, love, and loss portrays the advent of the Audubon Society.A moving story of conflict, friendship, and love, The Plume Hunter follows the life of Fin McFaddin, a late-nineteenth century Oregon outdoorsman who takes to plume hunting - killing birds to collect feathers for women's hats - to support his widowed mother. In 1885, more than five million birds were killed in the United States for the millinery industry, prompting the formation of the Audubon Society. The novel brings to life an era of our country's natural history seldom explored in fiction, and follows Fin's relationships with his lifelong friends as they struggle to adapt to society's changing mores.Renée Thompson writes about wildlife, her love of birds, and the people who inhabit the American West. Her first novel, The Bridge at Valentine, received high praise from Pulitzer Prize-winner Larry McMurtry, author of Lonesome Dove. Renée lives in Northern California with her husband, Steve, and is at work on a short-story collection.The Plume Hunter won the 2012 da Vinci Eye Award, presented by the Eric Hoffer Award for Books, for its superior cover art."I really enjoyed this book. It offers a fascinating glimpse into the life of a bird hunter and the complex social, economic and personal issues swirling around the birth of the conservation movement." --David Sibley, author of THE SIBLEY GUIDE TO BIRDS"...Renée Thompson's gripping novel transports the reader to a time when our nation was trying its best to grow up, yet seemed mired in its own awkward "teen" years...I read this book in one sitting, finding it no easier to put down than Fin did his hunting guns." -- Bill Thompson III, Editor, Bird Watcher's Digest"...Renée Thompson brings us to a place of semi-darkness, with its confused emotions, and allows us to witness the "Hunter" changing from within. This is a story of process and a quest to redeem. I love it." - Fr. Tom Pincelli, Former Chairman, American Birding Association"...A compelling chronicle of avarice, betrayal, and redemption."- Tim Gallagher, author of The Grail BirdAn Enlarged Heart
By Cynthia Zarin. 2013
An Enlarged Heart, the exquisitely written prose debut from prize-winning poet Cynthia Zarin, is a poignantly understated exploration of the…
author's experiences with love, work, and the surprise of time's passage. In these intertwined episodes from her New York world and beyond, she charts the shifting and complicated parameters of contemporary life and family in writing that feels nearly fictional in its richness of scene, dialogue, and mood. The writer herself is the marvelously rueful character at the center of these tales, at first a bewildered young woman, navigating the terrain of new jobs and borrowed apartments and the rapidly fading New York of people like Mr. Ferri, the Upper East Side tailor ("a wren of a man with pins flashing in his teeth"). By the end, whether Zarin is writing about vanished restaurants, her decades-long love affair with her collection of coats, a newlywed journey to Italy, a child's illness, Mary McCarthy's file cabinet, or the inner life of the New Yorker staff she knew as a young woman, this history of the heart shows us how persistent the past is in returning to us with entirely new lessons, and that there are some truths not even a tailor can alter.Invisible Beasts
By Sharona Muir. 2014
"An amazing feat of imagination." -Publishers Weekly (starred review)"Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing,…
a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It's wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original." -ANTHONY DOERR, author of All the Light We Cannot See and The Shell CollectorSophie is an amateur naturalist with a rare genetic gift: the ability to see a marvelous kingdom of invisible, sentient creatures that share a vital relationship with humankind. To record her observations, Sophie creates a personal bestiary and, as she relates the strange abilities of these endangered beings, her tales become extraordinary meditations on love, sex, evolution, extinction, truth, and self-knowledge.In the tradition of E.O. Wilson's Anthill, Invisible Beasts is inspiring, philosophical, and richly detailed fiction grounded by scientific fact and a profound insight into nature. The fantastic creations within its pages-an ancient animal that uses natural cold fusion for energy, a species of vampire bat that can hear when their human host is lying, a continent-sized sponge living under the ice of Antarctica-illuminate the role that all living creatures play in the environment and remind us of what we stand to lose if we fail to recognize our entwined destinies.Sharona Muir is the author of The Book of Telling: Tracing the Secrets of My Father's Lives. The recipient of a Hodder Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, her writing has appeared in Granta, Orion magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is a Professor of Creative Writing and English at Bowling Green State University. Invisible Beasts is her first novel.The First Breath
By Icarus Phaethon. 2009
"Everyone's life is a mountain. You can spend your whole time wandering around the lowlands and foothills of this great…
peak, but unless you make the commitment to get to the top one day, you will never find out who you really are." The First Breath is an astounding work that is a mix of travel narrative, philosophical dialogue, human drama, intrigue, love story and soul-searching personal journey. It will challenge your perception of the world and relationship with it. There's something terribly wrong with the world, at least Icarus thinks so. Something's not quite right and it's something he can't quite put his finger on. It's akin to that fleeting moment when you think of a rose then you actually see one, and can't quite figure out whether it's just a coincidence or something much stranger, deeper and far reaching than you could ever imagine.The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard
By Paul Auster, Ron Padgett. 2012
An artist associated with the New York School of poets, Joe Brainard (1942-1994) was a wonderful writer whose one-of-a-kind autobiographical…
work I Remember ("a completely original book" -Edmund White) has had a wide and growing influence. It is joined in this major new retrospective with many other pieces that for the first time present the full range of Brainard's writing in all its deadpan wit, madcap inventiveness, self-revealing frankness, and generosity of spirit. The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard gathers intimate journals, jottings, stories, one-liners, comic strips, mini-essays, and short plays, many of them available until now only as expensive rarities, if at all. "Brainard disarms us with the seemingly tossed- off, spontaneous nature of his writing and his stubborn refusal to accede to the pieties of self-importance," writes Paul Auster in the introduction to this collection. "These little works . . . are not really about anything so much as what it means to be young, that hopeful, anarchic time when all horizons are open to us and the future appears to be without limits." Assembled by the author's longtime friend and biographer Ron Padgett and including fourteen previously unpublished works, here is a fresh and affordable way to rediscover a unique American artist.The Cat That God Sent
By Jim Kraus. 2013
Jake Wilkerson, a disillusioned young pastor who is an expert at hiding his fears, takes on a new assignment at…
a small rural church in Coudersport, Pennsylvania. It's a far piece from anywhere and full of curiously odd and eccentric people, including Emma Grainger, a single woman and a veterinarian who dismisses all Christians as "those people," and Tassy, a young runaway with a secret. His first day on the job, however, Jake is adopted by Petey - a cat of unknown origins and breed - but of great perception. Petey believes that he is on a mission from God to redeem Jake and bring him and his quirky friends back to the truth.Bees in the City
By Andrea Cheng, Sarah McMenemy. 2017
2018 Green Earth Book Award Finalist Lionel lives in a Paris apartment building but loves keeping bees with his Aunt…
Celine at her farm outside the city. But when her bees start dying, how can he help? The solution, he realizes, is in the rooftop gardens and window boxes of his apartment neighbors, representing a varied and continuously blooming array of flowers that the bees will love. Aunt Celine must bring her bees to Paris! But first he and his friends Alice and Samir must convince their skeptical neighbors and landlord, Mr. Dubi, that this is a good idea. Adorned with Parisian skylines, Bees in the City is a love letter to the City of Light and a celebration of the can-do spirit of kids. Sarah McMenemy’s illustrations recall the Parisian magic of Madeleine. The book’s backmatter explores urban beekeeping and rooftop gardening in greater depth. Fountas & Pinnell Level PThe End (My Struggle #6)
By Karl Knausgaard, Don Bartlett, Martin Aitken. 2018
The sixth and final book in Knausgaard's epic My Struggle cycle--the most talked about literary project of its time. The…
sprawling, intimate, and spectacularly unorthodox literary autobiography that unleashed a media frenzy upon its release in Norway, became a global publishing sensation, and sold millions of copies worldwide, now reaches its climactic conclusion. In My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard examines with ruthless, unsparing rigour his life, his ambitions and frailties, his uncertainties and doubts, and his relationships with friends and exes, his wife and children, his mother and father. It is an opus in which life is described in all its nuances from moments of great drama to the most trivial everyday details. It is also a project that is full of risk, where the borders between private and public worlds cross, not without cost for the author himself and the people portrayed. The End, the sixth and final book, reflects back on the personal fallout from the earlier volumes, with Knausgaard facing growing literary acclaim and the often shattering repercussions that came with it. It is a book about literature itself and its relationship with reality, the capstone on a magnificent achievement. Translated from the Norwegian by superstar literary translators Don Bartlett and Martin Aitken.The Hand and the Paw (Four Tails in Revolt)
By Marco Milani, Louise Loehndorff. 2018
At the foot of the village of Colicchio there is a mysterious laboratory carrying out secret experiments. No one knows…
what is really going on until an extraordinary fact is revealed that will change reality and reverse the roles of humans and animals. A cat, a monkey, a dog and a mouse lead the revolt. A story that knows how to touch people and make them think. An intense and fast-paced book. A manifesto that is not only antivivisectionist but also antispeciesist, it presents us with a truth too often ignored: revenge is never the right path to take.Among our public men there is not one whose life can be studied with more interest and profit by American…
youth than that of Abraham Lincoln. It is not alone that, born in an humble cabin, he reached the highest position accessible to an American, but especially because in every position which he was called upon to fill, he did his duty as he understood it, and freely sacrificed personal ease and comfort in the service of the humblest. This is the story of Lincoln’s boyhood and manhood.The Tiger and the Acrobat
By Susanna Tamaro. 2017
INCLUDES SPECIALLY COMMISSIONED LINE DRAWINGS Little Tiger is not like other tigers. Not content to spend her days alone, roaming…
the snow forests of Siberia hunting prey, she prefers instead to ponder the ways of the world. One day, eager to discover her own place within it, she sets out on a remarkable journey to discover the secret of life, and to meet the creatures she has heard most about: humans. A moving tale of bravery and spirit, The Tiger and the Acrobat is a celebration of the power of friendship, and a testament to the courage it takes to be true to ourselves. 'This book is a beaut.' Cecelia Ahern, author of P.S. I Love You