Catalog Search Results
1) On the road
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Behind us lay the whole of America and everything Dean and I had previously known about life, and life on the road. We had finally found the magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamed the extent of the magic. Sal Paradise, a young innocent, joins the slightly crazed Dean Moriarty on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States. Their hedonistic search for release or fulfilment through drink, sex, drugs and jazz...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
" Like so many fond parents I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child," wrote Charles Dickens. "And his name is David Copperfield."
Of all of Dickens's novels, David Copperfield most closely reflects the events of his own life. The story of an abandoned waif who discovers life...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Originally published in serial format in "The Egoist" between 1914 and 1915, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," is the semi-autobiographical portrayal of James Joyce's early upbringing as an Irish Catholic in late 19th century and early 20th-century Dublin. The novel was originally planned as a 63-chapter autobiographical novel in a realistic style entitled "Stephen Hero" however Joyce reworked the novel into five condensed chapters, dispensing...
4) Freshwater
Author
Pub. Date
2018
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Formats
Description
An extraordinary debut novel, Freshwater explores the surreal experience of having a fractured self. It centers around a young Nigerian woman, Ada, who develops separate selves within her as a result of being born "with one foot on the other side." Unsettling, heartwrenching, dark, and powerful, Freshwater is a sharp evocation of a rare way of experiencing the world, one that illuminates how we all construct our identities. Ada begins her life in...
Author
Publisher
Open Road Media
Pub. Date
2013
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
Sherman Alexie’s darkly humorous story collection weaves memory, fantasy, and stark reality to powerfully evoke life on the Spokane Indian Reservation.
The twenty-four linked tales in Alexie’s debut collection—an instant classic—paint an unforgettable portrait of life on and around the Spokane Indian Reservation, a place where “Survival = Anger x Imagination,” where HUD houses and generations of privation...
The twenty-four linked tales in Alexie’s debut collection—an instant classic—paint an unforgettable portrait of life on and around the Spokane Indian Reservation, a place where “Survival = Anger x Imagination,” where HUD houses and generations of privation...
7) Little women
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Chronicles the joys and sorrows of the four March sisters as they grow into young women in mid-nineteenth-century New England.
8) The bell jar
Author
Language
English
Description
The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under--maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experiece as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche...
9) Hippie
Author
Pub. Date
2018
Language
English
Formats
Description
A Brazilian man and a Dutch woman embark on an extraordinary journey of self-discovery as they travel by bus from Amsterdam to Kathmandu against a backdrop of the protests and sexual-liberation experiments of the 1960s.
Drawing on the rich experience of his own life, best-selling author Paulo Coelho takes us back in time to relive the dreams of a generation that longed for peace and dared to challenge the established social order. In Hippie, he tells...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2011
Language
English
Formats
Description
In the historic town of Norvelt, Pennsylvania, twelve-year-old Jack Gantos spends the summer of 1962 grounded for various offenses until he is assigned to help an elderly neighbor with a most unusual chore involving the newly dead, molten wax, twisted promises, Girl Scout cookies, underage driving, lessons from history, typewriting, and countless bloody noses.
Author
Pub. Date
2013
Language
English
Formats
Description
A memoir by the bestselling author of The Prince of Tides about his father--the inspiration for The Great Santini--and a reaffirmation that love can conquer even the meanest of men.
While the publication of The Great Santini brought Conroy much acclaim, the rift it caused with his father brought even more attention. Their long-simmering conflict burst into the open, fracturing an already battered family. But in the final days of Don Conroy's life,...
Author
Language
English
Description
Overview: When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it. In the irreverent Let's Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson's long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the surprising...
Author
Publisher
Scribner
Pub. Date
2009
Language
English
Formats
Description
A true-life novel about Lily Casey Smith (the author's grandmother) who at age six helped her father break horses, at age fifteen left home to teach in a frontier town, and later as a wife and mother runs a vast ranch in Arizona where she survived tornadoes, droughts, floods, the Great Depression, and the most heartbreaking personal tragedy--but despite a life of hardscrabble drudgery still remains a woman of indomitable spirit.
14) Tropic of Cancer
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
A stream-of-consciousness story of a poverty-stricken young American, living in Paris.
Miller's groundbreaking first novel, banned in Britain for almost thirty years. A penniless and as yet unpublished writer, Henry Miller arrived in Paris in 1930. Leaving behind a disintegrating marriage and an unhappy career in America, he threw himself into the low-life of bohemian Paris with unwavering gusto. A fictional account of Miller's adventures amongst...
Author
Publisher
Macmillan Audio
Pub. Date
2022
Language
English
Description
"In the wake of Hilary Mantel's brilliant conclusion to her award-winning Wolf Hall trilogy, this collection of loosely autobiographical stories locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood. Sharp and funny, these drawn-from-life stories begin in the 1950s in an insular northern village "scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues." For the child narrator, the only way to survive is to get up, get on, get out. In "King Billy Is a Gentleman,"...
Author
Series
Holland family saga volume 5
Publisher
Simon & Schuster Audio
Pub. Date
2022
Language
English
Description
"Novelist Aaron Holland Broussard is shattered when his daughter Fannie Mae dies suddenly. As he tries to honor her memory by saving two young men from a life of crime amid their opioid-ravaged community, he is drawn into a network of villainy that includes a violent former Klansman, a far-from-holy minister, a biker club posing as evangelicals, and a murderer who has been hiding in plain sight. Aaron's only ally is state police officer Ruby Spotted...
17) Shantaram
Author
Series
Shantaram volume 1
Language
English
Formats
Description
Now a major television series from Apple TV+ starring Charlie Hunnam!
"It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured."
An escaped convict with a false passport, Lin flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of Bombay, where he can disappear.
Author
Pub. Date
2020
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
From age six through her high school valedictory speech, believing she and her mother are wizards helps young Echo cope with poverty, hunger, her mother's drug abuse, and much more.
Echo Brown is a wizard from the East Side of Cleveland, where apartments are small and parents suffer addiction to the white rocks. Yet there is magic everywhere. Every day Echo travels between worlds, attending a rich white school on the West Side. But there are dangers...
Author
Pub. Date
2021
Language
English
Formats
Description
"From "the most captivating voice to come out of the West since Annie Proulx" (Vogue), the furious, hilarious, soul-rending story of one woman's reckoning with marriage, work, sex, and motherhood. Since my baby was born, I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things. a) As much as I ever did. b) Not quite as much now. c) Not so much now. d) Not at all. Leaving behind her husband, Theo, and their young daughter, Claire, a writer, gets...
Author
Publisher
Crown
Pub. Date
2010
Language
English
Formats
Description
A collection of humorous and nostalgic Americana stories—the beloved, bestselling classics that inspired the movie A Christmas Story
Before Garrison Keillor and Spalding Gray there was Jean Shepherd: a master monologist and writer who spun the materials of his all-American childhood into immensely resonant—and utterly hilarious—works of comic art. In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash represents one of the...
Before Garrison Keillor and Spalding Gray there was Jean Shepherd: a master monologist and writer who spun the materials of his all-American childhood into immensely resonant—and utterly hilarious—works of comic art. In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash represents one of the...