Service Alert
Website maintenance April 24 10pm ET
On Wednesday April 24 at 10pm ET the CELA website will be unavailable for about 15 minutes for planned maintenance.
On Wednesday April 24 at 10pm ET the CELA website will be unavailable for about 15 minutes for planned maintenance.
Showing 1 - 20 of 43 items
By Sara Lewis Holmes, Sara Holmes. 2009
Gari moves in with her cousin Bo's family when her mother is deployed to Iraq. The cousins enjoy the improvisational…
theater techniques they learn in Miss Loupe's sixth-grade classroom--and put them to good use after Miss Loupe's brother is reported missing in Afghanistan. For grades 4-7. 2009By Laura Amy Schlitz. 2006
New England, 1909. Eleven-year-old orphan Maud is thrilled when the spinster Hawthorne sisters adopt her. But the sisters hide Maud…
away in their house and use her to trick wealthy clients at fake séances. Maud's only true friend is the lame, deaf-mute servant Muffet. For grades 6-9. 2006By Kirby Larson. 2016
New Orleans, 1940s. Polio-survivor Fish Elliot and his neighbor Olympia team up in order to save a starving stray dog…
they call Liberty, and they find other unlikely allies willing to help. For grades 3-6. 2016By Kirby Larson. 2014
When her family is forced into a Japanese internment camp, Mitsi Kashino is separated from her home, her classmates, and…
her beloved dog, Dash. Heartbroken, Mitsi clings to her one connection to Dash: the letters from the kindly neighbor who is caring for him. For grades 3-6. 2014By Gloria Whelan. 2006
Michigan, 1942. With their parents working for the war effort, Mirabelle and her siblings travel to live with their grandparents…
on Turtle Island. Fourteen-year-old Belle is resentful when her more sophisticated fifteen-year-old cousin Caroline joins them, but during the summer they become real family. For grades 6-9. 2006By Gary D. Schmidt. 2007
Long Island, 1967. Seventh-grader Holling Hoodhood knows that Mrs. Baker "hates his guts" because she would have Wednesday afternoons free…
if he went to catechism or Hebrew school like his classmates. Mrs. Baker worries about her husband in Vietnam and introduces a reluctant Holling to Shakespeare. For grades 5-8. Newbery Honor. 2007By Kimberly Holt. 1998
Louisiana, 1950s. Twelve-year-old Tiger Ann Parker begins to feel embarrassed in front of the other kids about the "slowness" of…
her parents. Her grandmother is the one who keeps the family intact. After Granny dies, Tiger has a chance to move to the city with her sophisticated aunt, but she is reluctant to abandon the parents who love her. For grades 6-9By Joanne Levy. 2021
"Twelve-year-old Bea Gelman and her best friend Frankie are planning the BEST SUMMER EVER at Camp Shalom-a sleep-away camp. But…
at the last minute, Frankie bows out, leaving painfully shy Bea on her own. Just talking to strangers causes Bea to break out into ugly, blotchy hives. As if the hives weren't bad enough, Bea gets pranked by a couple of girls in her cabin and is betrayed by someone she thought was a new friend. Bea has had enough! She decides to spend her summer in the infirmary far away from everything that's stressing her out. No more boys (including her crush, Jeremy), no more horrible mean girls, and no more fake friends! At the infirmary, Bea meets Harry, a boy facing challenges way more intense than stress breakouts. Inspired by Harry's strength and positive outlook, Bea decides to face her fears-in a big way." -- Provided by publisherBy Ellen Emerson White. 2002
In 1968 Massachusetts, after her brother Patrick goes to fight in Vietnam, fifteen-year-old Molly records in her diary how she…
misses her brother, volunteers at a Veterans' Administration Hospital, and tries to make sense of the Vietnam War and tumultuous events in the United States. Includes historical notes.By David French. 2000
It's Memorial Day, 1990, and Margaret Ryan has returned from Vermont to the Ontario cottage country where, thirty-two years before,…
she had vacationed with her disintegrating family at a lakeside resort. For herself and her sister Daisy, it was a time of awakening, a time of discovery. Both of the girls fall in love with two of the local boys. Daisy, on the lookout for action, cruising the dances at the resort, can't deal with what she initiates, and falls victim to her own confusion and naiveté. Not even the neighbour, the eccentric, bourbon-drinking, cigar-smoking Mrs. Crump, who knows all the fairy-tale spells to capture the heart of a lover, can save Daisy from drowning in her own misadventure. At the same time, Margaret, bookish and withdrawn, inhabiting a universe defined by poets and novelists, is seduced in spite of herself. As Margaret, the narrator, watches Maggie, her younger self, relive the innocence and beauty of that summer, the play moves inexorably back to the heartbreak of a headlong surrender to experience, both won and lost in a single day. Cinematic in its feel and pacing, recalling the 1950s genre of Dirty Dancing and My American Cousin, That Summer is a meditation on what endures of fleeting moments over time. Cast of 5 women and 2 men.By Kelly Rebar. 2003
Seventeen-year-old Jimmy faces the archetypal Canadian dilemma: stay home in Canada, with all its obvious flaws, or go south (young…
man) to the Land of Opportunity. Should he stay with his mother at the Bordertown Café or haul off with his trucker father? Family history is the border's story writ large. Cast of 2 women and 2 men.By Richard Nelson. 2006
"A full emotional geography of a family . . . Seemingly light conversation scrapes the skins of the characters in…
this sharply etched study of dislocation, loneliness and sexual betrayal."--Ben Brantley, The New York Times"Nelson is a master of the quiet detail, of the oblique rhythm that transforms emotional diffidence into fascinating character."--Linda Winer, Newsday"The early scenes proceed with the closely observed simplicity of Chekhov, whereas the later more wrenching moments evoke the eloquent bitterness of Albee."--David Cote, TimeOut New YorkA new work by leading American playwright Richard Nelson, who for more than 25 years has written prolifically, and with fine detail, on the perplexities of everyday living. In Rodney's Wife, a fading American actor in Rome for the filming of a 1960s spaghetti Western gathers with family and friends at a rented villa. Over the course of one booze-soaked summer night, jealousies and secrets are revealed that crumble the foundations of their relationships. Inspired by Euripides, the play is a tragedy of exiles who continue to need each other, even as they push away.Richard Nelson won Britain's Olivier Award for Best Play for Goodnight Children Everywhere, and the Tony Award for Best Book for his musical James Joyce's The Dead. His plays have been widely produced in the U.S. and Great Britain. He is an Honorary Associate Artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Chair of the Playwriting Department at the Yale School of Drama.By Ayad Akhtar. 2017
*Now on Broadway at Lincoln Center starring Steven Pasquale* From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced, a fast-paced economic thriller…
that exposes the financial deal making behind the mergers and acquisitions boom of the 1980s.Set in 1985, Junk tells the story of Robert Merkin, resident genius of the upstart investment firm Sacker Lowell. Hailed as "America's Alchemist," his proclamation that "debt is an asset" has propelled him to a dizzying level of success. By orchestrating the takeover of a massive steel manufacturer, Merkin intends to do the "deal of the decade," the one that will rewrite all the rules. Working on his broadest canvas to date, Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar chronicles the lives of men and women engaged in financial civil war: insatiable investors, threatened workers, killer lawyers, skeptical journalists, and ambitious federal prosecutors. Although it's set 40 years in the past, this is a play about the world we live in right now; a world in which money became the only thing of real value.By Donald Margulies. 2015
"Margulies is literate and intellectually stimulating. His ideas and language hold our attention and earn our respect."--New York"Donald Margulies has…
an unerring sense of language and the ability to penetrate deeply into the darkness of tangled human emotions."--VarietyGathering in their Berkshire home, a family of actors wrestles with fame, art, and (as always) each other. Brought back together for a melancholy purpose, the solemnity is quickly undercut by restless egos and inflamed temperaments. When the events of the weekend go off-script, secrets are spilled and bonds are broken. Inspired by--and often directly referencing -Chekhov's pastoral comedies, this witty and compelling new comedy unfolds in a fragile old home brimming with memories, new love, and discarded dreams.A funny and poignant comedy about a family of actors, from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies.Donald Margulies has won a Lucille Lortel Award, an American Theatre Critics Award, two Los Angeles Drama Critics Awards, two Obie Awards, two Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Awards, one Tony Award nomination, six Drama Desk Award nominations, two Pulitzer Prize nominations, and one Pulitzer Prize. His works have been performed on and off Broadway, and at major theaters across the United States, as well as a host of international cities.By Tracy Letts. 2008
Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama"A tremendous achievement in American playwriting: a tragicomic populist portrait of a tough…
land and a tougher people."--Time Out New York"Tracy Letts' August: Osage County is what O'Neill would be writing in 2007. Letts has recaptured the nobility of American drama's mid-century heyday while still creating something entirely original."--New York magazineOne of the most bracing and critically acclaimed plays in recent Broadway history, August: Osage County is a portrait of the dysfunctional American family at its finest--and absolute worst. When the patriarch of the Weston clan disappears one hot summer night, the family reunites at the Oklahoma homestead, where long-held secrets are unflinchingly and uproariously revealed. The three-act, three-and-a-half-hour mammoth of a play combines epic tragedy with black comedy, dramatizing three generations of unfulfilled dreams and leaving not one of its thirteen characters unscathed. After its sold-out Chicago premiere, the play has electrified audiences in New York since its opening in November 2007.Tracy Letts is the author of Killer Joe, Bug, and Man from Nebraska, which was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His plays have been performed throughout the country and internationally. A performer as well as a playwright, Letts is a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where August: Osage County premiered.By V. C. Andrews. 2014
The only official stage play of V.C. Andrews's enduring classic of forbidden love--adapted by Andrew Neiderman (The Devil's Advocate). Experience…
in this new format the original story that captured the world's imagination and earned V.C. Andrews a fiercely devoted readership.At the top of the stairs there are four secrets hidden. Blond, beautiful, innocent, and struggling to stay alive . . . They were a perfect family, golden and carefree--until a heartbreaking tragedy shattered their happiness. Now, for the sake of an inheritance that will ensure their future, the children must be hidden away out of sight, as if they never existed. Kept on the top floor of their grandmotherds vast mansion, their loving mother assures them it will be just for a little while. But as brutal days swell into agonizing months and years, Cathy, Chris, and twins Cory and Carrie, realize their survival is at the mercy of their cruel and superstitious grandmother . . . and this cramped and helpless world may be the only one they ever know.Book One of the Dollanganger series, the sequels include Petals in the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, and Garden of Shadows. Then experience the attic from Christopher's point of view in Christopher's Diary: Secrets of Foxworth and Christopher's Diary: Echoes of Dollanganger.By Carole Maso. 1986
"Although author Carole Maso follows the contours of fiction, style is everything in Ghost Dance, a strangely lovely and perplexing…
book . . . she has a fine ear and her literary gift is impressive." —San Francisco ChronicleOriginally published in 1986, Ghost Dance is the first in a line of relentlessly experimental and highly esteemed works by Carole Maso.Vanessa Turin's family has been broken up by an event so devastating she cannot bear to face it straight on. Her mother, the brilliant and beautiful poet Christine Wing, seems simply to have disappeared, and her gentle, silent father also vanishes. In Ghost Dance, the reader experiences firsthand the dimensions of Vanessa's longing, the capabilities of her imagination, the persistence of her memory, and the ferocity of her love as she struggles to retrieve her family, to reclaim her country, and to come to terms with overwhelming sorrow.By Joanna Bourne. 2017
In Beauty Like The Night, Joanna Bourne, 'master of romance and suspense' (Teresa Medeiros) returns to the French Revolution, with…
a stirring tale of intrigue, espionage, and irresistible attraction. For fans of Stephanie Laurens, Elizabeth Hoyt For fans of Stephanie Laurens, Elizabeth Hoyt and Poldark, this is a must-read. Severine de Cabrillac, orphan of the French revolution and sometime British intelligence agent, has tried to leave spying behind her. Now she devotes herself to investigating crimes in London and finding justice for the wrongly accused.Raoul Deverney, an enigmatic half-Spaniard with enough secrets to earn even a spy's respect, is at her door demanding help. She's the only one who can find the killer of his long-estranged wife and rescue her missing fourteen-year-old daughter.Severine reluctantly agrees to aid him, even though she knows the growing attraction between them makes it more than unwise. Their desperate search for the girl unleashes treason and murder...and offers a last chance for two strong, wounded people to find love.For more spellbinding Spymasters romance, look for the other titles by Joanna Bourne: The Forbidden Rose, The Spymaster's Lady, My Lord and Spymaster, The Black Hawk and Rogue Spy.By Laura London. 1984
The classic tale of passion on the high seas, available in print for the first time in 20 years and…
in ebook for the first time ever... Laura London's beloved novel will be adored by fans of Julie Garwood, Jude Deveraux, Loretta Chase, Johanna Lindsey and Kathleen E. Woodiwiss.Merry Wilding is a lady of breeding, of innocence, and of breathtaking beauty. With high hopes for a holiday in England, she sets sail from New York-but the tide of her life is destined to turn. Mistakenly swept aboard an infamous pirate ship, Merry finds herself at the mercy of a wicked crew...and one sinfully handsome pirate. Soon she's spending her days yearning for escape, and her nights learning the pleasures of captivity.Devon Crandall believes Merry is in league with his greatest enemy. He's determined to slowly urge her secrets from her. But along the way, he discovers her beautifully unbreakable spirit...and a desire unlike any he's ever known. She is hiding something from him, and yet, each day that passes brings her deeper into his heart. When fierce arguments give way to fiercer passion, can a pirate learn to love a woman? Or will true love be lost at sea?Fall in love with the richly romantic, classic love stories of Laura London, as her beloved novels are released in ebook for the first time.By Jane Feather. 2007
New York Times bestselling author Jane Feather brings to life the glamour, sophistication, and intrigue of Regency-era London in this…
captivating novel of unexpected passions and dangerous secrets. A perfect book for fans of Mary Balogh, Eloisa James and Stephanie Laurens. Pooling their meager resources, Lady Cornelia Dagenham, her sister-in-law Aurelia, and their friend Liv Lacey arrive in London's Cavendish Square to spend a month at the home Liv has just inherited. But why anyone would show a fervent interest in purchasing the rundown property - particularly the arrogant Viscount Bonham, who clearly could afford the finest of homes - is a puzzle to Cornelia. His charms are undeniable, though - and Cornelia finds her resistance to this mysterious stranger falling away...as a sparking passion clouds her view. But their affair may place her and her friends in danger as Harry Bonham sweeps her into the sparkling whirl of high society. Leading a double life as a code breaker for the Crown, Harry is a man of many secrets. Is it Cornelia whom he truly desires, or something hidden in the house on Cavendish Square?The adventure and romance of the Cavendish Square ladies continues in To Wed A Wicked Prince and A Husband's Wicked Ways. For more of Jane Feather's signature romance check out the Blackwater Brides Trilogy, where three dashing brothers embark on a most im-proper quest.