Displaying the top 100 results that match your query. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/rssapi.jsp?browse=true&Ne=7236&N=3+7240 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1511975 The son of an influential father who runs an orphan work camp, Pak Jun Do rises to prominence using instinctive talents and eventually becomes a professional kidnapper and romantic rival to Kim Jong Il. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1302341 Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs confront their pasts in this powerful story about how rebellion ages, influence corrupts, habits turn to addictions, lifelong friendships fluctuate and turn, and how art and music have the power to redeem. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1252022 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=991271 At the edge of the continent, in the small town of Crosby, Maine, lives Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher who deplores the changes in her town and in the world at large but doesnt always recognize the changes in those around her. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=725001 Living with an old-world mother and rebellious sister, an urban New Jersey misfit dreams of becoming the next J. R. R. Tolkien and believes that a long-standing family curse is thwarting his efforts to find love and happiness. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=417840 In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls school in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking strawberry blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them - along with Callies failure to develop - leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all. The explanation for this shocking state of affairs is a rare genetic mutation - and a guilty secret - that have followed Callies grandparents from the crumbling Ottoman Empire to Prohibition-era Detroit and beyond, outlasting the glory days of the Motor City, the race riots of 1967, and the familys second migration, into the foreign country known as suburbia. Thanks to the gene, Callie is part girl, part boy. And even though the genes epic travels have ended, her own odyssey has only begun.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=315177 It is New York City in 1939. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat to date: smuggling himself out of Nazi-occupied Prague. He is looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyns own Sammy Clay, is looking for a collaborator to create the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Out of their fantasies, fears, and dreams, Joe and Sammy weave the legend of that unforgettable champion the Escapist. And inspired by the beautiful and elusive Rosa Saks, a woman who will be linked to both men by powerful ties of desire, love, and shame, they create the otherworldly mistress of the night, Luna Moth. As the shadow of Hitler falls across Europe and the world, the Golden Age of comic books has begun.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=291208 Traveling from India to New England and back again, the stories in this debut collection unerringly chart the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations. Imbued with the sensual details of Indian culture, they also speak with universal eloquence to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner. Like the interpreter of the title story - Lahiri translates between the strict traditions of her ancestors and the baffling New World.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=133840 In The Hours, Michael Cunningham draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters who are struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. The novel opens with an evocation of Woolfs last days before her suicide in 1941, and moves to the stories of two modern American women who are trying to make rewarding lives for themselves in spite of the demands of friends, lovers, and family. Clarissa Vaughan is a book editor who lives in present-day Greenwich Village; when we meet her, she is buying flowers to display at a party for her friend Richard, an ailing poet who has just won a major literary prize. Laura Brown is a housewife in postwar California who is bringing up her only son and looking for her true life outside of her stifling marriage. With rare ease and assurance, Cunningham makes the two womens lives converge with Virginia Woolfs in an unexpected and heart-breaking way during the party for Richard.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=115278 Frank Bascombe is no longer a sportswriter, yet hes still living in Haddam, New Jersey, where he now sells real estate. Hes still divorced, though his ex-wife, to his dismay, has remarried and moved, along with their two children, to Connecticut. (He bought her old house and made it his home.) In the midst of his so-called Existence Period, Frank is happy enough in his peculiar way, more or less sheltered from fresh pain and searing regret. And he has high hopes for this 4th of July weekend (while the nation lurches toward another election, Bush vs. Dukakis, in uncertain prosperity). As a realtor hes seeking a house and a lifes accommodation for deeply hapless clients relocating from Vermont; in his free time he takes pride in managing his entrepreneurial, and civic, sidelines. Then he will travel to the Jersey Shore, where his girlfriend and delight awaits him. Finally, up the Northeast Corridor, to Connecticut, there to pick up his larcenous and emotionally troubled teenage son, and together they will visit as many sports halls of fame as they can in two days. But Franks Independence Day turns out not as hed planned. This decent, appealingly bewildered, profoundly observant man is wrenched, gradually and inevitably, out of his private refuge. And in this embattled ascent Richard Ford captures the mystery of life - in all its conflicted glory - with grand humor, intense compassion and transfixing power.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=224860 The Stone Diaries is one ordinary womans story of her journey through life. Born in 1905, Daisy Stone Goodwill drifts through the roles of child, wife, widow, and mother, and finally into her old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her place in her own life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography. Her life is vivid with incident, and yet she feels a sense of powerlessness. She listens, she observes, and through sheer force of imagination she becomes a witness of her own life: her birth, her death, and the troubling misconnections she discovers between. Daisys struggle to find a place for herself in her own life is a paradigm of the unsettled decades of our era. A witty and compassionate anatomist of the human heart, Carol Shields has made distinctively her own that place where the domestic collides with the elemental. With irony and humor she weaves the strands of The Stone Diaries together in this, her richest and most poignant novel to date.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=28856 Butlers acclaimed first novel, The Alleys of Eden, is one of the finest books ever written about the tragic American experience in Vietnam. Now, in his first book of short fiction, Butler offers a compelling chorus of voices that together depict the experiences of the many Vietnamese expatriates living in America.