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Showing 7341 - 7360 of 17833 items
By Fae Myenne Ng. 2008
"We were a family of three girls. By Chinese standards, that wasn't lucky. In Chinatown, everyone knew our story. Outsiders…
jerked their chins, looked at us, shook their heads. We heard things."In this profoundly moving novel, Fae Myenne Ng takes readers into the hidden heart of San Francisco's Chinatown, to the world of one family's honor, their secrets, and the lost bones of a "paper father." Two generations of the Leong family live in an uneasy tension as they try to fathom the source of a brave young girl's sorrow.Oldest daughter Leila tells the story: of her sister Ona, who has ended her young, conflicted life by jumping from the roof of a Chinatown housing project; of her mother Mah, a seamstress in a garment shop run by a "Chinese Elvis"; of Leon, her father, a merchant seaman who ships out frequently; and the family's youngest, Nina, who has escaped to New York by working as a flight attendant. With Ona and Nina gone, it is up to Leila to lay the bones of the family's collective guilt to rest, and find some way to hope again.Fae Myenne Ng's luminous debut explores what it means to be a stranger in one's own family, a foreigner in one's own neighborhood--and whether it's possible to love a place that may never feel quite like home.By Dawn Kurtagich. 2015
Welcome to the Dead House. Three students: dead.Carly Johnson: vanished without a trace.Two decades have passed since an inferno swept…
through Elmbridge High, claiming the lives of three teenagers and causing one student, Carly Johnson, to disappear. The main suspect: Kaitlyn, "the girl of nowhere."Kaitlyn's diary, discovered in the ruins of Elmbridge High, reveals the thoughts of a disturbed mind. Its charred pages tell a sinister version of events that took place that tragic night, and the girl of nowhere is caught in the center of it all. But many claim Kaitlyn doesn't exist, and in a way, she doesn't - because she is the alter ego of Carly Johnson.Carly gets the day. Kaitlyn has the night. It's during the night that a mystery surrounding the Dead House unravels and a dark, twisted magic ruins the lives of each student that dares touch it. Debut author Dawn Kurtagich masterfully weaves together a thrilling and terrifying story using psychiatric reports, witness testimonials, video footage, and the discovered diary - and as the mystery grows, the horrifying truth about what happened that night unfolds.By Joe Ide. 2017
In this hotly anticipated follow-up to the smash hit IQ, a New York Times Critics' Best of the Year and…
nominee for the Best First Novel Edgar Award, Isaiah uncovers a secret behind the death of his brother, Marcus.For ten years, something has gnawed at Isaiah Quintabe's gut and kept him up nights, boiling with anger and thoughts of revenge. Ten years ago, when Isaiah was just a boy, his brother was killed by an unknown assailant. The search for the killer sent Isaiah plunging into despair and nearly destroyed his life. Even with a flourishing career, a new dog, and near-iconic status as a PI in his hometown, East Long Beach, he has to begin the hunt again-or lose his mind.A case takes him and his volatile, dubious sidekick, Dodson, to Vegas, where Chinese gangsters and a terrifying seven-foot loan shark are stalking a DJ and her screwball boyfriend. If Isaiah doesn't find the two first, they'll be murdered. Awaiting the outcome is the love of IQ's life: fail, and he'll lose her. Isaiah's quest is fraught with treachery, menace, and startling twists, and it will lead him to the mastermind behind his brother's death, Isaiah's own sinister Moriarty.With even more action, suspense, and mind-bending mysteries than Isaiah's first adventures, Righteous is a rollicking, ingenious thrill ride.By Anonymous, David Frye, Francisco Quevedo. 2015
"An elegant, precise, and accessible modern-English rendering of the two best examples of the early modern picaresque genre: the paradigmatic…
Lazarillo de Tormes and Quevedo's mordant El Buscón. Frye's translations are triumphant, capturing the cadence of popular early modern speech while remaining faithful to the original texts; his notes illuminate the diverse contexts in which the texts were written. Frye gives careful attention throughout to the historical background that propelled these two parallel but different monuments of Golden Age Spanish literature." --Teofilo Ruiz, UCLABy Monica Brown. 2015
Lola loves writing in her diario and playing soccer with her team, the Orange Smoothies. But when a soccer game…
during recess gets "too competitive," Lola accidentally hurts her classmate Juan Gomez. Now everyone is calling her Mean Lola Levine!Lola feels horrible, but with the help of her family and her super best friend, Josh Blot, she learns how to navigate the second grade in true Lola fashion--with humor and the power of words. In this first book in a series, Lola's big heart and creative spirit will ring true to young readers.By Zachary Lazar. 2014
The stunning new novel by the author of Sway is another "brilliant portrayal of life as a legend" (Margot Livesey).In…
1972, the American gangster Meyer Lansky petitions the Israeli government for citizenship. His request is denied, and he is returned to the U.S. to stand trial. He leaves behind a mistress in Tel Aviv, a Holocaust survivor named Gila Konig.In 2009, American journalist Hannah Groff travels to Israel to investigate the killing of an Israeli writer. She soon finds herself inside a web of violence that takes in the American and Israeli Mafias, the Biblical figure of King David, and the modern state of Israel. As she connects the dots between the murdered writer, Lansky, Gila, and her own father, Hannah becomes increasingly obsessed with the dark side of her heritage. Part crime story, part spiritual quest, I Pity the Poor Immigrant is also a novelistic consideration of Jewish identity.By Blake Nelson. 2014
Robert "'Cali" Callahan is a teen runaway, living on the streets of Venice Beach, California. He's got a pretty sweet…
life: a treehouse to sleep in, a gang of surf bros, a regular basketball game...even a girl who's maybe-sorta interested in him.What he doesn't have is a plan.All that changes when a local cop refers Cali to a private investigator who is looking for a missing teenager. After all, Cali knows everyone in Venice. But the streets are filled with people who don't want to be found, and when he's hired to find the beautiful Reese Abernathy, who would do anything to stay hidden, Cali must decide where his loyalties truly lie.By William H Gass. 2013
A literary event--the long-awaited novel, almost two decades in work, by the acclaimed author of The Tunnel ("The most beautiful,…
most complex, most disturbing novel to be published in my lifetime."--Michael Silverblatt, Los Angeles Times; "An extraordinary achievement"--Michael Dirda, The Washington Post); Omensetter's Luck ("The most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation"--Richard Gilman, The New Republic); Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife; and In the Heart of the Heart of the Country ("These stories scrape the nerve and pierce the heart. They also replenish the language."--Eliot Fremont-Smith, The New York Times).Gass's new novel moves from World War II Europe to a small town in postwar Ohio. In a series of variations, Gass gives us a mosaic of a life--futile, comic, anarchic--arranged in an array of vocabularies, altered rhythms, forms and tones, and broken pieces with music as both theme and structure, set in the key of middle C.It begins in Graz, Austria, 1938. Joseph Skizzen's father, pretending to be Jewish, leaves his country for England with his wife and two children to avoid any connection with the Nazis, who he foresees will soon take over his homeland. In London with his family for the duration of the war, he disappears under mysterious circumstances. The family is relocated to a small town in Ohio, where Joseph Skizzen grows up, becomes a decent amateur piano player, in part to cope with the abandonment of his father, and creates as well a fantasy self--a professor with a fantasy goal: to establish the Inhumanity Museum . . . as Skizzen alternately feels wrongly accused (of what?) and is transported by his music. Skizzen is able to accept guilt for crimes against humanity and is protected by a secret self that remains sinless.Middle C tells the story of this journey, an investigation into the nature of human identity and the ways in which each of us is several selves, and whether any one self is more genuine than another.William Gass set out to write a novel that breaks traditional rules and denies itself easy solutions, cliff-edge suspense, and conventional surprises . . . Middle C is that book; a masterpiece by a beloved master.Around the world, black handprints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit…
in the sky.In a dark and dusty shop, a devil's supply of human teeth grown dangerously low.And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherwordly war.Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she's prone to disappearing on mysterious "errands"; she speaks many languages--not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out.When one of the strangers--beautiful, haunted Akiva--fixes his fire-colored eyes on her in an alley in Marrakesh, the result is blood and starlight, secrets unveiled, and a star-crossed love whose roots drink deep of a violent past. But will Karou live to regret learning the truth about herself?By Hari Kunzru. 2017
White Tears is a ghost story, a terrifying murder mystery, a timely meditation on race, and a love letter to…
all the forgotten geniuses of American music.Two twenty-something New Yorkers. Seth is awkward and shy. Carter is the glamorous heir to one of America's great fortunes. They have one thing in common: an obsession with music. Seth is desperate to reach for the future. Carter is slipping back into the past. When Seth accidentally records an unknown singer in a park, Carter sends it out over the Internet, claiming it's a long lost 1920s blues recording by a musician called Charlie Shaw. When an old collector contacts them to say that their fake record and their fake bluesman are actually real, the two young white men, accompanied by Carter's troubled sister Leonie, spiral down into the heart of the nation's darkness, encountering a suppressed history of greed, envy, revenge, and exploitation.By Elizabeth Craft, Sarah Fain. 2008
Best friends Harper Waddle, Sophie Bushell, and Kate Foster committed the ultimate suburban sin: bailing on college to pursue their…
dreams. Middlebury-bound Becca Winsberg was convinced her friends had gone insane until they reminded her she just might have a dream of her own. Now the year is half-way through and their dreams seem within reach. Well, almost. Harper has managed to gain the freshman fifteen without ever being a freshman, though locked in her basement bathroom she finds inspiration and finally seems to be writing from the heart. Sophie is forced to leave her cushy Beverly Hills quarters and crashes on Sam's couch while looking for her big Hollywood break. Kate is doing aid work in Ethiopia, where she encounters family ghosts - along with Darby, the handsome but antagonistic Princeton student who thinks she's a dumb blonde who couldn't possibly care about Ethiopia "since there are no celebrities here." And when Becca finally emerges from her lovers' nest, it seems her relationship with Stuart isn't as perfect as she thought. Even if "the year that changed everything" has sometimes been less than dreamy, these four best friends will always have each other.By Sara Zarr. 2008
As children, Jennifer Harris and Cameron Quick were both social outcasts. They were also one another's only friend. So when…
Cameron disappears without warning, Jennifer thinks she's lost the only person who will ever understand her. Now in high school, Jennifer has been transformed. Known as Jenna, she's popular, happy, and dating, everything "Jennifer" couldn't be---but she still can't shake the memory of her long-lost friend. When Cameron suddenly reappears, they are both confronted with memories of their shared past and the drastically different paths their lives have taken. Sweethearts is a story about the power of memory, the bond of friendship, and the quiet resilience of our childhood hearts.By Diana Lopez. 2009
Apolonia "Lina" Flores is a sock enthusiast, a volleyball player, a science lover, and a girl who's just looking for…
answers. Even though her house is crammed full of books (her dad's a bibliophile), she's having trouble figuring out some very big questions, like why her dad seems to care about books more than her, why her best friend's divorced mom is obsessed with making cascarones (hollowed eggshells filled with colorful confetti), and, most of all, why her mom died last year. Like colors in cascarones, Lina's life is a rainbow of people, interests, and unexpected changes.In her first novel for young readers, Diana López creates a clever and honest story about a young Latina girl navigating growing pains in her South Texan city.By Shelly Ellis. 2016
"Shelly Ellis is a new favorite to our list." --Christina Lauren, New York Times bestselling authorsSecrets and scandals are a…
way of life for the Murdochs of Chesterton, Virginia. But the lies that bind them may end up tearing them apart...With his drama-filled marriage behind him, Evan Murdoch has finally found happiness with his longtime friend turned fiancée, Leila Hawkins. But when his party boy brother, Terrence, is seriously injured in a car accident, a gossiping press puts the family back in the spotlight. Soon Terrence could face a lawsuit--and much worse, if his vengeful half-brother, Dante, has his way. Terrence's only bright spot is journalist C.J. Aston--but is she really on his side, or does she have another motive?. . . While Terrence struggles to recover from his injuries, Paulette, the little sister of the family, is struggling with a secret: she's pregnant, and unsure whether the father is her blackmailing ex or her husband. Amid the turmoil, Evan does his best to stay above the fray, but a shocking revelation makes that impossible--he's a Murdoch after all, and trouble seems to be their business...Praise for Another Woman's ManNominated for a NAACP Image Award "A fast-paced and very gratifying story." --RT Book Reviews, 4 StarsBy Elaine Meryl Brown. 2006
"Playing by the rules isn't always easy-but in this quirky, self-cloistered community, Lemon City's peculiarly delightful, eccentric residents do their…
best to follow the town's ten mandates-even with outsiders. Elaine Meryl Brown's storytelling is new and fresh, yet warmly familiar."-Virginia DeBerry, co-author of Tryin' to Sleep in the Bed You MadeWhen there's a knock on the Dunlap's door in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner, Nana knows it can't be good. The last time an outsider managed to worm his way into Lemon City, mischief followed. But despite her doubts, she can't turn away the young man who's kidnapped his baby sister from an unfit foster mother. Before long, Jeremiah and Ruby Rose are practically part of the family. But that's not sitting well with everyone-especially Medford, the boyfriend of Nana's spunky granddaughter, Louise. It seems Louise has taken a shine to Jeremiah, and Medford's suddenly got some stiff competition. Of course he's too busy tracking down his birth mother-who left him on a doorstep when he was a baby-to be bothered with Louise's flirtatious nature. As Medford moves closer to the truth about his mom, young Ruby Rose finds comfort in her newfound home, Louise wavers between love and lust, and Nana prepares to give her feisty old neighbor a run for her money at the annual fair's tomato contest. By summer's end, a mystery will be solved as Lemon City secrets reveal themselves-and bring about more than a few changes of heart.From the Trade Paperback edition.By Bonnie Glover. 2005
"As Kwai Chang moved through the arid desert of the American West, I would move through the equally desolate ghettos…
of Brooklyn, and we would each search: he for his family and I for my father. . . ."The middle of three sisters, Pamela is a quiet, thoughtful girl with a huge hole in her life-the space her father used to fill before her mother kicked him out. Occasionally, Pamela conjures up Kwai Chang, David Carradine's character, from the Western action series Kung Fu, to give her spiritual guidance and advice she would normally turn to her parents for. But with her father gone, her mother has fallen into a pit of confusion and mental disarray. So it is up to Pamela and her sisters, Nona and Theresa, to run the household. When their money runs out, the family must leave their beloved East New York house and move to the projects. It is a change that will alter their lives forever-and even wise Kwai Chang cannot alter their destiny. But as Pamela discovers, "Everyone searches. The real challenge is in the finding and the keeping." In this powerful literary debut, vividly set in the 1970s, Bonnie Glover has written a marvelous story about a young black woman struggling to define her identity-and make her family whole.From the Trade Paperback edition.By Elia Kazan. 1982
In his powerful new novel, Elia Kazan takes up the life of the young Greek from Anatolia whose early years…
he chronicled in his first and highly acclaimed novel, America America, giving us the story of a man caught between two worlds and fighting to make a place for himself within them. We enter the story of 1909. Stavros Topouzoglou--Joe Arness to his American friends--is meeting the freighter that has brought his family to America. This day marks the culmination of a lifetime of responsibility. Steeled by his harsh life, proud and resourceful, he has nonetheless been governed by the age-old rules of filial duty: putting aside his own needs and desires, he obediently took on the fulfillment of his father's dream of safety and salvation for their family. For a decade he has worked to bring his family to America--an America that has hypnotized and motivated him with its promise of money and power and privilege. But as the family disembarks there is one person missing: his father is dead. Suddenly, Stavros is caught between two powerful and opposing influences. On one side is his family: seven brothers and sisters and his mother look to him for guidance, strength, and support, drawing him back into the ways and tenets of the "old" country. On the other side, the bright-seeming, golden possibilities of the "new" world of America, possibilities that Stavros has only glimpsed from afar, but that he has determined to attain. Stavros is not prepared for this clash of cultures, nor for the emotional turmoil it produces in him. He has always believed that through sheer will and energy he could achieve anything, but now even his ferocious, unswerving drive cannot sustain him. And so we see him dutifully assume the patriarchal position in the family, only to witness the foundation of family devotion, respect, and love broken down by the terrifying yet heady exigencies of this new life. We see Stavros passionately drawn to Althea Perry, imagining her to be a key to his acceptance into the society he yearns for, but finding instead that she is a constant reminder of the obstacles he must continually face and the sacrifices of pride he must be prepared to make. We see Stavros slowly ingratiating himself with Fernand Sarrafian--the man he most admires, the man with the kind of power Stavros wants for himself--only to learn that Sarrafian's power is tainted with greed, deceit, and an almost total lack of humaneness. We see how often Stavros must invoke the words his father said to him as a boy: "If you don't allow yourself to feel it, the shame does not exist." We see him confronted by his brother--just returned from fighting for a Greater Greece--whose words to Stavros reverberate with both love and accusation: "I'm thinking of you at night. What you were once, what you are now. . . . When we first came here, I was so proud of you. . . . Now all you care about is how to make money." And it is these words that finally force Stavros to acknowledge the devastating impurities in his dream of an American life, to see how completely he's lost himself in his blind attempt to attain that dream. And he is compelled to devise a plan by which he can redeem not only himself, his family, and the memory of his father, but also--even if only in the smallest measure--the love for his homeland that he begins to feel with renewed fervor and empassioned dedication. In the story of Stavros, Elia Kazan not only gives us a vividly wrought picture of one man's struggle to understand his dreams, but he reveals, as well, what it has meant for the immigrant to confront America, and, more importantly, what it has meant for him to confront himself in this seductive, yet often inimical, culture.By Lenore Look. 1999
In this touching storybook, Katie experiences her Chinese grandmother's hard life when she spends a day with her at work…
at a crab cannery. She sees her "GninGnin" laboring from sun up to sundown to earn just enough money for bus fare, dinner, and a bit left over to help her granddaughter go to college. Katie also catches the twinkle in her grandmother's eye and realizes that she has inherited the strength to fulfill the dreams her grandmother has for her.By Frank, Morrison, Melissa, Thomson. 2010
The third book about the spunky second-grader, perfect for fans of Ramona Quimby, Junie B. Jones, and Frankly, Frannie! Keena…
Ford loves writing in her journal. She keeps all of her thoughts in there, even if they are sometimes not-so-nice. One day, Keena accidentally leaves her journal in Tiffany Harris's apartment, and Tiffany tells Keena that she's going to tell all of Keena's secrets! With help from her brother, some classic fables, and a visiting author, Keena discovers what she must do to stand up to Tiffany and make things right with her friends. "Young readers will relate to her friendship dilemma and appreciate her vibrant personality. Readers of Sharon Draper's Sassy series will enjoy meeting Keena. " - School Library JournalBy Celeste O. Norfleet. 2009
In this sequel to "Pushing Pause" Kenisha is moving way too fast as she copes with a family tragedy and…
being kicked out of her private school. She makes new friends (and enemies) in public school and meets a hot guy who might be mixed up in something serious.