Ardis Cameron

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Massachusetts

English

A Biography of Peyton Place

In this lively account of the writing, publication, and legacy of the 1956 bestselling novel, "Peyton Place," Ardis Cameron tells how the story of a patricide in a small New England village became a cultural phenomenon.

Unbuttoning America

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New Jersey

Phrases Borrowed from the Classics and the Stories Behind Them

Are you known to strike like a thunderbolt when things don't go your way?
Are you fortunate enough to have the Midas touch?
Have you ever been struck by Cupid's arrow?

Classically derived expressions are commonly used in our everyday language, yet many of us have little knowledge of the Greek and Roman influences that inspired them. With Opening Pandora's Box you'll discover the fascinating stories behind familiar phrases like Achilles' Heel, a Nemesis, To Fly too Close to the Sun, and more. For example, did you know that...


 * The lifesaving operation known as the Caesarean section is so named because Julius Caesar was delivered by being cut out of his mother's womb?
 * The original labyrinth was built on the orders of King Minos of Crete after Aphrodite cursed his wife to fall in love with a bull and produce a monstrous baby? The king locked the baby in a maze so complicated and tangled that, once in, he would never emerge.
 * The word cereal is derived from the Italian corn goddess Ceres?

Pry open the lid of the English language to find the secrets behind classical phrases we use every day.

Opening Pandora's Box

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#hardcover #fiction #suspensethrillers #jenniferegan #brooklyn #literature 

Wisconsin

A Novel

Manhattan Beach opens in Brooklyn during the Great Depression. Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to the house of Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. She is the sole provider for her mother, a farm girl who had a brief and glamorous career with the Ziegfeld Follies, and her lovely, severely disabled sister. At a nightclub, she chances to meet Dexter Styles again, and she begins to understand the complexity of her father's life, the reasons he might have vanished"--

Manhattan Beach

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Texas

Church Choir Mysteries 

The Unsuitable Suitor 

#hardcover #literature #homeschool #school #childrens #stories #treasury

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Reading & Language Arts

Up One Hill and down Another

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José Saramago

Pennsylvania

A moving and eloquent fable from the 1998 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature offers a unique blend of love and philosophy as a man petitions a boat from the king, finds a crew to volunteer, and sets sail.

The Tale of the Unknown Island

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#hardcover #thesecretgarden #classics #youngreaders
The Secret Garden, adapted for young readers and illustrated.

Treasury of Illustrated Classics

The Secret Garden

E. B. White

Roger Angell

California

This short essay, written in the sweltering summer heat of 1949, describes the author's stroll around Manhattan, and remains the quintessential love letter to the city, by one of America's foremost literary figures. This edition, published last year in the U.S. to mark the 100 anniversary of E.B. White's birth in 1899, includes a brief foreword by White, written in 1976, and a new introduction by Roger Angell of the New Yorker.

Here Is New York

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Slight wear on outside - library stamp inside page 

Treasure Island 

Harold Bloom

Ex-library copy with the usual markings. Modern Critical Views Series.

Gathers critical essays representing literary discussions about Alice Walker and her work, including essays on some of her specific works, Walker's relationship to other authors, and her treatment of gender and race themes.

Alice Walker

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Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

The Woman Behind Little Women

A vivid, energetic account of the life of Louisa May Alcott, whose work has delighted millions of readers

Louisa May Alcott portrays a writer as worthy of interest in her own right as her most famous character, Jo March, and addresses all aspects of Alcott's life: the effect of her father's self-indulgent utopian schemes; her family's chronic economic difficulties and frequent uprootings; her experience as a nurse in the Civil War; the loss of her health and frequent recourse to opiates in search of relief from migraines, insomnia, and symptomatic pain. Stories and details culled from Alcott's journals; her equally rich letters to family, friends, publishers, and admiring readers; and the correspondence, journals, and recollections of her family, friends, and famous contemporaries provide the basis for this lively account of the author's classic rags-to-riches tale.

Alcott would become the equivalent of a multimillionaire in her lifetime based on the astounding sales of her books, leaving contemporaries like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry James in the dust. This biography explores Alcott's life in the context of her works, all of which are to some extent autobiographical. A fresh, modern take on this remarkable and prolific writer, who secretly authored pulp fiction, harbored radical abolitionist views, and completed heroic service as a Civil War nurse, Louisa May Alcott is in the end also the story of how the all-time beloved American classic Little Women came to be. This revelatory portrait will present the popular author as she was and as she has never been seen before.

Louisa May Alcott

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Oregon

The Golden Bowl 

John Updike

Ink spot on base, dust jacket has edge clipped. See photos. Otherwise pristine. Fitst Trade Edition 

Michigan

Trista+a1o, an African-Brazilian street kid, and Isabel, an upper-class teen fresh from convent school, fall in love and flee from her rich father and the toughs he has sent in pursuit of them. Simultaneous.

Brazil

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Published 1987, 1st Edition/2nd Printing/Dust Jacket

A Memoir of the Early Years

Mary McCarthy's memoir of her adolescence, highlighting her experiences in education as she recalls in intimate narrative the eight years before her marriage at age 21. 16 pages of black-and-white photographs.

How I Grew

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#hardcover #fiction #humor #literature #novel

The New York Times called Porter Shreve's first novel, The Obituary Writer, "an involving and sneakily touching story whose twists feel less like the conventions of a genre than the convolutions of a heart -- any heart." Newsday hailed the book as "a substantial achievement," and Tim O'Brien described it as "taut, compelling, and moving . . . beautifully written, engrossing from start to finish." Shining with the same heart and humor, Shreve's second novel, Drives Like a Dream, is a smart, wry tale about a modern-day mother in the midst of a lifestyle crisis -- and her outlandish attempts to get her family back.
Lydia Modine is sixty-one and about to come undone. Her three grown-up children have flown the coop. She hasn't seen them together in more than a year, and now her ex-husband is about to remarry a woman half his age. And the insults keep coming: Lydia is stuck on a book she's writing about Detroit's car industry, which uncannily parallels her own life -- out with the old model, in with the new. She's poured her soul into her family, only to be abandoned in the City of Dream Machines. But then a twist of fate introduces her to Norm, an eco-car fanatic out to remake her and the world. Is he the answer to all of her problems, or does he hold the one secret that just might get her children back to Detroit, home for good?
A warm, funny, and affecting novel that's sure to appeal to anyone who has longed for an alternate life, Drives Like a Dream confirms that sometimes when you set out for a spin, the twists and turns can be perfectly rewarding -- and right.

Drives Like a Dream

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#fiction #mystery #hardcover #thriller #charlesdickens #literature 

Georgia

a novel

The Last Dickens

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Winner of the Mary Higgins Clark Award
One of Publishers Weekly’s Top Ten Fall Mysteries 
Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Summer Reading List
One of The Washington Post’s Five New Thrillers & Mysteries for the Beach
One of Amazon’s Best of the Month
One of Christian Science Monitor’s Ten Best Books of the Month 
One of LitHub’s Five Books You May Have Missed This Month

From the author of the acclaimed Li Du novels comes Elsa Hart's new atmospheric mystery series. 

London, 1703. In a time when the old approaches to science coexist with the new, one elite community attempts to understand the world by collecting its wonders. Sir Barnaby Mayne, the most formidable of these collectors, has devoted his life to filling his cabinets. While the curious-minded vie for invitations to study the rare stones, bones, books, and artifacts he has amassed, some visitors come with a darker purpose.

For Cecily Kay, it is a passion for plants that brings her to the Mayne house. The only puzzle she expects to encounter is how to locate the specimens she needs within Sir Barnaby’s crowded cabinets. But when her host is stabbed to death, Cecily finds the confession of the supposed killer unconvincing. She pays attention to details―years of practice have taught her that the smallest particulars can distinguish a harmless herb from a deadly one―and in the case of Sir Barnaby’s murder, there are too many inconsistencies for her to ignore.


A Mystery

Winner of the Mary Higgins Clark Award
One of Publishers Weekly's Top Ten Fall Mysteries
Minneapolis Star Tribune's Summer Reading List
One of The Washington Post's Five New Thrillers & Mysteries for the Beach
One of Amazon's Best of the Month
One of Christian Science Monitor's Ten Best Books of the Month
One of LitHub's Five Books You May Have Missed This Month

From the author of the acclaimed Li Du novels comes Elsa Hart's new atmospheric mystery series.

London, 1703. In a time when the old approaches to science coexist with the new, one elite community attempts to understand the world by collecting its wonders. Sir Barnaby Mayne, the most formidable of these collectors, has devoted his life to filling his cabinets. While the curious-minded vie for invitations to study the rare stones, bones, books, and artifacts he has amassed, some visitors come with a darker purpose.

For Cecily Kay, it is a passion for plants that brings her to the Mayne house. The only puzzle she expects to encounter is how to locate the specimens she needs within Sir Barnaby's crowded cabinets. But when her host is stabbed to death, Cecily finds the confession of the supposed killer unconvincing. She pays attention to details--years of practice have taught her that the smallest particulars can distinguish a harmless herb from a deadly one--and in the case of Sir Barnaby's murder, there are too many inconsistencies for her to ignore.

To discover the truth, Cecily must enter the world of the collectors, a realm where intellect is distorted by obsession and greed. As her pursuit of answers brings her closer to a killer, she risks being given a final resting place amid the bones that wait, silent and still, in the cabinets of Barnaby Mayne.

The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne

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Name written on inside cover - some discoloration from aging 

Dragon Seed

Ethan Hawke

Hawke's narrator is a young man in torment, disgusted with himself after the collapse of his marriage, still half-hoping for a reconciliation that would allow him to forgive himself and move on as he clumsily, and sometimes hilariously, tries to manage the wreckage of his personal life with whiskey and sex. What saves him is theater: in particular, the challenge of performing the role of Hotspur in a production of Henry IV under the leadership of a brilliant director, helmed by one of the most electrifying--and narcissistic--Falstaffs of all time. A novel about shame and beauty and faith, and the moral power of art.

A Bright Ray of Darkness

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#hardcover #fiction #novel #classic #classics #classiclit #americanlit #literature 

Illinois

The Last Tycoon

#hardcover #fiction #novel #classic #classics #classiclit #americanlit #literature

Tender is the Night 

Purchased at an estate sale, has blank property stamp in inside cover board, see photo, no dust jacket. Glenco Literature Library

Alabama

The Red Badge of Courage with related readings

Ship of Fools 

Diane Cook

Delaware

Helen Phillips meets Miranda July in this daring and imaginative debut novel that explores a moving mother-daughter relationship in a world ravaged by climate change and overpopulation, a suspenseful second book from the author of the acclaimed story collection, Man V. Nature. Bea's five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away. The smog and pollution of the City--an over-populated, over-built metropolis where most of the population lives--is destroying her lungs. But what can Bea do? No one leaves the City anymore, because there is nowhere else to go. But across the country lies the Wilderness State, the last swath of open, protected land left. Here forests and desert plains are inhabited solely by wildlife. People are forbidden. Until now. Bea, Agnes, and eighteen others volunteer to live in the Wilderness State as part of a study to see if humans can co-exist with nature. Can they be part of the wilderness and not destroy it? Living as nomadic hunter-gatherers, this new community wanders through the grand country, trying to adhere to the strict rules laid down by the Rangers, whose job it is to remind them they must Leave No Trace. As the group slowly learns to live and survive on the unpredictable and often dangerous land, its members battle for power and control and betray and save each other. The farther they roam, the closer they come to their animal soul. To her dismay, Bea discovers that, in fleeing to the Wilderness State to save Agnes, she is losing her in a different way. Agnes is growing wilder and closer to the land, while Bea cannot shake her urban past. As she and Agnes grow further apart, the bonds between mother and daughter are tested in surprising and heartbreaking ways. Yet just as these modern nomads come to think of the Wilderness State as home, its future is threatened when the Government discovers a new use for the land. Now the migrants must choose to stay and fight for their place in the wilderness, their home, or trust the Rangers and their promises of a better tomorrow elsewhere.

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Ardis Cameron

Unbuttoning America

Ferdie Addis

Opening Pandora's Box

Jennifer Egan

Manhattan Beach

Nicola Furlong

The Unsuitable Suitor

Roger C. Farr

Up One Hill and down Another

José Saramago

The Tale of the Unknown Island

Frances Hodgson Burnett

The Secret Garden

E. B. White; Roger Angell

Here Is New York

Robert Louis Stevenson

Treasure Island

Harold Bloom

Alice Walker

Harriet Reisen

Louisa May Alcott

Henry James

The Golden Bowl

John Updike

Brazil

Mary McCarthy

How I Grew

Porter Shreve

Drives Like a Dream

Matthew Pearl

The Last Dickens

Elsa Hart

The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne

Pearl S. Buck

Dragon Seed

Ethan Hawke

A Bright Ray of Darkness

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Last Tycoon

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tender is the Night

Stephen Crane

The Red Badge of Courage with related readings

Katherine Ann Porter

Ship of Fools

Diane Cook

The New Wilderness