Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Description
"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligence greater than man's; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied. Yet across the gulf of space, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. Then, late one night, in the middle...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In this collection of hilarious literary satires, Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock jaunts from genre to genre, gleefully skewering mysteries, ghost stories, detective novels, and virtually every other type of fiction you can think of. It's a light but surprisingly insightful look at the excesses of twentieth-century prose that will amuse and delight readers.
3) Grand hotel
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"A grand hotel in the center of 1920s Berlin serves as a microcosm of the modern world in Vicki Baum's celebrated novel, a Weimar-era bestseller that retains all its verve and luster today. Among the guests of the hotel is Dr. Otternschlag, a World War I veteran whose face has been sliced in half by a shell. Day after day he emerges to read the paper in the lobby, discreetly inquiring at the desk if the letter he's been awaiting for years has arrived....
4) Storm
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"A violent storm sweeps through California, taking on a life of her own. Making her way from the Pacific Coast, she gains momentum as she approaches the Sierra and transforms into a blizzard of great strength, covering mountain ranges and roads with twenty feet of snow. Originally published in 1941, Storm is a rare combination of fiction and science by a master storyteller, drawing upon a deep knowledge of geography, meteorology, and human nature"--...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
A young woman returns to California for her sister’s wedding in this “brilliantly told” classic that stands alongside The Catcher in the Rye and The Member of the Wedding (New York Times).
“I stayed up all night reading . . . I can only . . . be overwhelmed by Dorothy Baker’s continuing brilliance.” —Carson McCuller
Cassandra Edwards is a graduate...
“I stayed up all night reading . . . I can only . . . be overwhelmed by Dorothy Baker’s continuing brilliance.” —Carson McCuller
Cassandra Edwards is a graduate...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
"From fall to spring, J.A. Baker set out to track the daily comings and goings of a pair of peregrine falcons across the flat fenlands of eastern England. He followed the birds obsessively, observing them in the air and on the ground, in pursuit of their prey, making a kill, eating, and at rest, actitivies he describes with an extraordinary fusion of precision and poetry. And as he continued his mysterious private quest, his sense of human self...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"Patrick McGrath's revelatory new selection of du Maurier's stories shows her at her most chilling and most psychologically astute: a dead child reappears in the alleyways of Venice; routine eye surgery reveals the beast within to a meek housewife; nature revolts against man's abuse by turning a benign species into an annihilating force; a dalliance with a beautiful stranger offers something more dangerous than a broken heart. McGrath draws on the...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"On a rainy Sunday afternoon in January the recently widowed Mrs. Palfrey moves to the Claremont Hotel in South Kensington. "If it's not nice, I needn't stay," she promises herself, as she settles into this haven for the genteel and the decayed. "Three elderly widows and one old man who seemed to dislike female company and seldom got any other kind" serve for her fellow residents, and there is the staff, too, and they are one and all lonely. What...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Formats
Description
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize
The real-life Guinness heiress offers an inside look at the lives of eccentric aristocrats in this “masterful . . . macabre fairy-tale and blackly humorous family portrait” (Literary Hub).
This macabre, mordantly funny, partly auto-biographical novel reveals the gothic craziness behind the scenes in the great houses of the aristocracy, as witnessed through the...
The real-life Guinness heiress offers an inside look at the lives of eccentric aristocrats in this “masterful . . . macabre fairy-tale and blackly humorous family portrait” (Literary Hub).
This macabre, mordantly funny, partly auto-biographical novel reveals the gothic craziness behind the scenes in the great houses of the aristocracy, as witnessed through the...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
In the 1870s, Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek "an original relation to nature," drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. One of these men regales Will with tales of the immense buffalo herds hidden away in the Colorado Rockies and convinces him to join an expedition to track them down. At the end of a grueling journey,...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Winner of the National Book Critics Award for Fiction
This “classic of historical fiction” takes readers to 18th-century Ireland when French troops supported Irish rebels in their struggle for independence from Britain (The Times, London).
In 1798, Irish patriots, committed to freeing their country from England, landed with a company of French troops in County Mayo, in westernmost Ireland. They...
This “classic of historical fiction” takes readers to 18th-century Ireland when French troops supported Irish rebels in their struggle for independence from Britain (The Times, London).
In 1798, Irish patriots, committed to freeing their country from England, landed with a company of French troops in County Mayo, in westernmost Ireland. They...
14) Slow homecoming
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
"The book begins in America. Writing with the jarring intensity of his early work, Handke introduces Valentin Sorger, a troubled geologist who has gone to Alaska to lose himself in his work, but now feels drawn back home: on his way to Europe he moves in ominous disorientation through the great cities of America. The second part of the book, “The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire,” identifies Sorger as a projection of the author, who now writes directly...
16) Fat city
Author
Language
English
Description
Fat City is a vivid novel of allegiance and defeat, of the potent promise of the good life and the desperation and drink that waylay those whom it eludes. Stockton, California, is the setting: the Lido Gym, the Hotel Coma, Main Street lunchrooms and dingy bars, days like long twilights in houses obscured by untrimmed shrubs and black walnut trees. When two men meet in the ringthe retired boxer Billy Tully and the newcomer Ernie Mungertheir brief bout...
17) My dog Tulip
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Heartwarming and profound, this account of one writer’s relationship with his beloved German Shepherd is “one of the bonafide dog-lit classics” (New Yorker)
The distinguished British man of letters J. R. Ackerley hardly thought of himself as a dog lover when, well into middle age, he came into possession of a German Shepherd. To his surprise, she turned out to be the love of his life, the “ideal friend”...
The distinguished British man of letters J. R. Ackerley hardly thought of himself as a dog lover when, well into middle age, he came into possession of a German Shepherd. To his surprise, she turned out to be the love of his life, the “ideal friend”...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
A short, spellbinding novel about a WWI veteran finding a way to re-enter—and fully embrace—normal life while spending the summer in an idyllic English village.
In J. L. Carr’s deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the...
In J. L. Carr’s deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the...
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Try our Materials Request Service. Submit Request