Displaying the top 100 results that match your query. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/rssapi.jsp?Re=3295&N=3+5189+6645 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1722579 Essays revisiting themes the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist, and activist has addressed throughout her career, exploring her conflicting impulses to retreat into inner contemplation and to remain deeply engaged with the world: racism, Africa, solidarity with the Palestinian people, the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, Cuba, health care, and the work of Aung San Suu Kyi. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1679969 The author puts forth a hard and somber interpretation of our times. Our civilization has turned into entertainment, gossip, enjoyment, and has adopted a carefree, devil-may-care attitude, ignoring what is happening as long as it has its fix of soccer, bull fighting, baseball, cheap entertainment, talk shows, irresponsible yellow journalism, and exploitation of the poor. The idea is: have fun, keep boredom at bay, and avoid what bothers, worries and anguishes us. In fact modern culture makes it a social mandate. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1576392 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1577860 Reading for My Life is a monumenal collection of Leonards most significant writings--spanning five decades--from his earliest columns for the Harvard Crimson to his final essays for the New York Review of Books.--Jacket. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1372040 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1278500 From the bestselling editor of The Reagan Diaries come the newly disclosed notebooks of Ronald Reagan that bring to light his most intimate thoughts and favorite quotations. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1307123 When it comes to sex, what do women want? In this eye-opening collection, Erica Jong reveals that every woman has her own answer. Susan Cheever talks about the excruciating hazards of casual sex, while Gail Collins recounts her Catholic upbringing in Cincinnati and the nuns who passionately forbade her from having carnal relations. Jennifer Weiner explores how, in love, the body can play just as big a role as the heart. The octogenarians in Karen Abbotts sharp-eyed piece possess a passion that could give Betty White a run for her money. Molly Jong-Fast reflects on her unconventional upbringing and why a whole generation of young women have rejected free love in favor of Bugaboo strollers and Mommy-and-me yoga. Sex, it turns out, can be as fleeting, heavy, mundane, and intense as the rest of life. Indeed, as Jong states in her powerful introduction: the truth is--sex is life.--From publisher description. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1375529 Essayist Christopher Hitchens ruminates on why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and the worst of men, the haunting science fiction of J.G. Ballard, the enduring legacies of Thomas Jefferson and George Orwell, the persistent agonies of anti-Semitism and jihad, the enduring relevance of Karl Marx, and how politics justifies itself by culture--and how the latter prompts the former. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1110013 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1196568 Presents more than 200 letters exchanged between Julia and Avis DeVoto, her friend and unofficial literary agent. This collection opens the window on Julias deepest thoughts and feelings. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=820987 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=594891 This is a book about people who wear funny things on their heads, throw rocks into houses and break out into scream of Hurray! Hurray! No, this is not about the Gaza Strip, but about curling in Canada, among many other things. William Thomas doesnt stop at curling - he also takes you with him on his wacky adventures in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Japan, takes an off-centre look at public breast feeding, drinking and driving in Buffalo, New York, a visit to the endodontist - and more! Book jacket.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=591410 In 1984, the late great Edward Abbey compiled this reader, endeavoring, as he says in his preface, to present what I think is both the best and most representative of my writing - so far. Two decades later, it remains the only major collection of his work chosen by Abbey himself, a feast of fiction and prose. Devoted Abbey fans along with readers just discovering his work will find a mother lode of treasures here: generous chunks of his best novels, including The Brave Cowboy, Black Sun, and his classic The Monkey Wrench Gang, and more than a score of his evocative, passionate, trenchant essays - a genre in which he produced acknowledged masterpieces such as Desert Solitaire. There is even an excerpt from a novel he was working on in 1984, eventually published as The Fools Progress. Scattered throughout are the authors own petroglyph-style sketches. Abbey went on publishing new work until his untimely death in 1989 at age sixty, so this new edition includes a selection of later Abbey: a chapter from Hayduke Lives!, the hilarious sequel to The Monkey Wrench Gang; excerpts from his revealing journals; a little-known account of a trip to the Sea of Cortez; and examples of his poetry.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=427838 Arranged by season, this collection showcases the best-loved vignettes from Wilsons USA Today column. In a tone thats a little Erma Bombeck, a little Charles Kurault, the author maintains that the greatest pleasures in life are the simple ones. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=375317 The best of the best: the first collection spanning the history of The Talk of the Town, edited by the New Yorker staff member with the longest memory of all, Lillian Ross, who wrote her first Talk story in 1945 and remains one of the magazines wittiest reporters. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=323523 This collection is a political, spiritual, and intensely personal record of Americas tumultuous modern age by our foremost critics, commentators, activists, and artists. In her introduction to this volume, Joyce Carol Oates describes her project as a search for the expression of personal experience within the historical, the individual talent within the tradition. Along with Robert Atwan, Oates has chosen a list of works that are both intimate and important, essays that take on subjects of profound and universal significance while retaining the power and spirit of a personal address. This collection honors some of the twentieth centurys best-known and best-loved writers on a breathtaking variety of topics. In a journalistic mode, Ernest Hemingway covers the bullfights in Pamplona, H. L. Mencken reacts to the Scopes trial, and Michael Herr dodges bullets in a helicopter over Vietnam. Nowhere is the intersection of our personal and political histories more meaningful than when the subject is Americas enduring legacy of racial strife, as shown by Richard Wrights The Ethics of Living Jim Crow, James Baldwins Notes of a Native Son, Zora Neale Hurstons How It Feels to Be Colored Me, and others. The wonders and horrors of science, nature, and the cosmos are explored with eloquence, bravery, and beauty when Lewis Thomas writes about The Lives of a Cell, Rachel Carson mulls The Marginal World, and Stephen Jay Gould preaches evolution and baseball in The Creation Myths of Cooperstown. Taken together, these essays fit, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates, into a kind of mobile mosaic suggest[ing] where weve come from, and who we are, and where we are going. Book jacket.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=272195 A funny and moving story told through the letters of two women nurturing a friendship as they are separated by distance, experience, and time. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=154185 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=143368 Philip Gonzalez had lost all interest in living after an industrial accident left him disabled. A friend suggested he adopt a dog. Reluctantly he went to the shelter, where Ginny, a badly abused one-year-old pup, quickly won him over. Philip realized immediately that Ginny was no ordinary dog--she had an amazing sixth sense that enabled her to find and rescue stray and ailing cats. There is Madame, who is completely deaf; Revlon, who has only one eye; Betty Boop, who has no hind feet; and Topsy, a paralyzed kitten whom Ginny found abandoned in an empty building. Ginny and Philip have now rescued and found homes for over two hundred cats, and they have over sixty outdoor cats whom they visit and feed twice daily. Even more extraordinary, Ginnys angelic mission has given Philip a sense of purpose and a new lease on life. This is a dog--and cat--story almost too wonderful to be true. You will never forget the true adventures of Ginny, the dog who rescues cats. Book jacket.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=60094 In The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Joyce Carol Oates offers a sweeping survey of American short fiction. This collection of fifty-six tales combines classic works with many different, unexpected gems, inviting readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers. Some selections simply cant be improved on, Oates admits, and she happily includes such time-honored works as Poes The Tell-Tale Heart, and Hemingways A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. But alongside these classics, Oates introduces such little-known stories as Mark Twains Cannibalism in the Cars, and Melvilles juxtaposed tales The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids. From Flannery OConnor we find A Late Encounter With the Enemy, and from John Cheever, The Death of Justina. The reader will also delight in the range of authors found here, from Jean Toomer and Sarah Orne Jewett, to William Carlos Williams and Zora Neale Hurston. Contemporary artists abound, including Bharati Mukherjee and Amy Tan, Bobbie Ann Mason and Tim OBrien, Louise Erdrich and John Edgar Wideman. Oates provides fascinating introductions to each writer, blending biographical information with her own trenchant observations about their work, plus an in-depth introductory essay, in which she offers the fruit of years of reflection on a genre in which she herself is a master. Brimming with surprises, this is a fascinating portrait of American short fiction, as filtered through the sensibility of a major modern writer. Book jacket.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=253971 From ancient Egypt through the nineteenth century, Sexual Personae explores the provocative connections between art and pagan ritual; between Emily Dickinson and the Marquis de Sade; between Lord Byron and Elvis Presley. It ultimately challenges the cultural assumptions of both conservatives and traditional liberals. 47 photographs.