Displaying the top 100 results that match your query. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/rssapi.jsp?browse=true&Ne=7236&N=3+7514 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1660762 When his mother, a tribal enrollment specialist living on a reservation in North Dakota, slips into an abyss of depression after being brutally attacked, 14-year-old Joe Coutz sets out with his three friends to find the person that destroyed his family. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1368824 Enduring a hardscrabble existence as the children of alcoholic and absent parents, four siblings from a coastal Mississippi town prepare their meager stores for the arrival of Hurricane Katrina while struggling with such challenges as a teen pregnancy and a dying litter of prize pups. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1198585 At the rock-bottom end of the sport of kings sits the ruthless and often violent world of cheap horse racing, where trainers and jockeys, grooms and hotwalkers, loan sharks and touts all struggle to take an edge, or prove their luck, or just survive. Equal parts Nathanael West, Damon Runyon and Eudora Welty, Lord of Misrule follows five characters, scarred and lonely dreamers in the American grain, through a year and four races at Indian Mount Downs, downriver from Wheeling, West Virginia.--book jacket http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=988072 A rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s. A radical young Irish monk struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. A 38-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth. Weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCanns allegory comes alive in the voices of the citys people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the artistic crime of the century--a mysterious tightrope walker dancing between the Twin Towers.--From publisher description. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=931111 Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son.--From publisher description. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=724674 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=716436 In this novel of social drama, a casual murder in the small Georgia town of Cotton Point just after World War II and the resulting court case cleave open the ugly divisions of race and class. The man accused of shooting a black girl, a storekeeper named Paris Trout, has no great feeling of guilt, nor fear that the system will fail to work his way. Trout becomes an embarrassment to the polite white society that prefers to hold itself high above such primitive prejudice. But the trial does not allow any hiding from the stark reality of social and racial tensions. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=676630 Describes the devastating effect of the Vietnam War on a wounded soldier. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=767115 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=661697 On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near-fatal accident. His older sister, Karin, his only near kin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a protracted coma, Mark believes that this woman - who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister - is really an impostor. Shattered by her brothers refusal to recognize her, Karin contacts the cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber, famous for his case histories describing the infinitely bizarre world of brain disorders. Weber recognizes Marks condition as a rare case of Capgras syndrome - the delusion that people in ones life are doubles or imposters - and eagerly investigates. What he discovers in Mark slowly undermines even his own sense of being. Meanwhile, Mark, armed only with a note left by an anonymous witness, attempts to learn what happened the night of his inexplicable accident. The truth of that evening will change the lives of all three beyond recognition.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=502268 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=554682 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=252283 Mr. Artur Sammler, a survivor of the Holocaust, haunted by memories of his literal escape from the grave, is living out his days in New York City. An intellectual who once thrived on the great works of Western literature and philosophy, he now occasionally lectures at Columbia University. A registrar of madness, he records the degradations of city life while looking deep into the sufferings of the human soul. While the world anticipates the first lunar landing and visions of utopia vie with predictions of imminent apocalypse, Sammler finds himself intrigued by the possibilities of the future, and edges closer toward empathy with his fellow mortals.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=463770 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=412516 Three Junes is a novel set on both sides of the Atlantic during three fateful summers in the lives of a Scottish family. In June of 1989, Paul McLeod, the recently widowed patriarch, becomes infatuated with a young American artist while traveling through Greece and is compelled to relive the secret sorrows of his marriage. Six years later, Pauls death reunites his sons at Tealing, their idyllic childhood home, where Fenno, the eldest, faces a choice that puts him at the center of his familys future. A lovable, slightly repressed gay man, Fenno leads the life of an aloof expatriate in the West Village, running a shop filled with books and birdwatching gear. He believes himself safe from all emotional entanglements - until a worldly neighbor presents him with an extraordinary gift and a seductive photographer makes him an unwitting subject. Each man draws Fenno into territories of the heart he has never braved before, leading him toward an almost unbearable loss that will reveal to him the nature of love. Love in its limitless forms - between husband and wife, between lovers, between people and animals, between parents and children - is the force that moves these characters lives, which collide again, in yet another June, over a Long Island dinner table. This time it is Fenno who meets and captivates Fern, the same woman who captivated his father in Greece ten years before. Now pregnant with a son of her own, Fern, like Fenno and Paul before him, must make peace with her past to embrace her future. Elegantly detailed yet full of emotional suspense, often as comic as it is sad, Three Junes is a glorious triptych about how we learn to live, and live fully, beyond incurable grief and betrayals of the heart - how family ties, both those were born into and those we make, can offer us redemption and joy.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=389531 After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinsons disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed. The middle child, Chip, has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly at his new line of work. And Denise, the youngest, has escaped a disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and heart down the drain of an affair with a married man - or so her mother fears. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=466102 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=632450 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=292993 In America is about many things: a womans search for self-transformation; the fate of idealism; a life in the theatre; the many varieties of love; and, not least of all, stories and storytelling itself. Operatic in the scope and intensity of the emotions it depicts (Minnie from Puccinis Girl of the Golden West makes a startling appearance), richly detailed and visionary in its account of America, and peopled with unforgettable characters, In America is Susan Sontags largest achievement.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=285178 This is the story of Lin Kong, a man living in two worlds, struggling with the conflicting claims of two utterly different women as he moves through the political minefields of a society designed to regulate his every move and stifle the promptings of his innermost heart. For more than seventeen years this devoted and ambitious doctor has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family chose for him when he was young - a humble and touchingly loyal woman, whom he visits in order to ask, again and again, for a divorce. In a culture in which the ancient ties of tradition and family still hold sway and where adultery discovered by the Party can ruin lives forever, Lins passionate love is stretched ever more taut by the passing years. Every summer, his compliant wife agrees to a divorce but then backs out. This time, Lin promises, will be different. Tracing these lives through their summer of decision and beyond, Ha Jin vividly conjures the texture of daily life in a place where the demands of human longing must contend with the weight of centuries of custom.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=803301 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=239452 Everyone loved him. If you knew Billy at all, then you loved him. The late Billy Lynchs family and friends, a party of forty-seven, gather at a small bar and grill somewhere in the Bronx to remember better times in good company, and to redeem the pleasure of a drink or two from the miserable thing that a drink had become in Billys life. His widow, Maeve, is there and everyone admires the way she is holding up, just as they always admired the way she cared for Billy after the alcohol had ruined him. But one cannot think of Billy Lynchs life, ones own relentless affection for him, without saying at some point, There was that girl. The Irish girl. And one cant help but think that the real story of his life lay there.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=311445 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=25558 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=124354 As much as he wants to be the Marquis de Sade, he is not. As much as he wants to be seventeen, he is not. As much as he wants to be dead, he is not. He is Mickey Sabbath, the aging, raging powerhouse whose savage effrontery and mocking audacity are at the heart of Philip Roths new novel. Once a scandalously inventive puppeteer, Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But after the death of his long-time mistress - an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring exceeds even his own - Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past. Bereft and grieving, besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most, he contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=151502 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=213895 With the publication of the Recognitions in 1955, William Gaddis was hailed as the American heir to James Joyce. His two subsequent novels, J R (winner of the National Book Award) and Carpenters Gothic, have secured his position among Americas foremost contemporary writers. Now A Frolic of His Own, his long-anticipated fourth novel, adds more luster to his reputation, as he takes on life in our litigious times. Justice? - You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. So begins this mercilessly funny, devastatingly accurate tale of lives caught up in the toils of the law. Oscar Crease, middle-aged college instructor, savant, and playwright, is suing a Hollywood producer for pirating his play Once at Antietam, based on his grandfathers experiences in the Civil War, and turning it into a gory blockbuster called The Blood in the Red White and Blue. Oscars suit, and a host of others - which involve a dog trapped in an outdoor sculpture, wrongful death during a river baptism, a church versus a soft drink company, and even Oscar himself after he is run over by his own car - engulf all who surround him, from his freewheeling girlfriend to his well-to-do stepsister and her ill-fated husband (a partner in the white-shoe firm of Swyne & Dour), to his draconian, nonagenarian father, Federal Judge Thomas Crease, who has just wielded the long arm of the law to expel God (and Satan) from his courtroom. And down the tortuous path of depositions and decrees, suits and countersuits, the most lofty ideas of our culture - questions about the value of art, literature, and originality - will be wrung dry in the meticulous, often surreal logic and language of the law, leaving no party unscathed. Gaddis has created a whirlwind of a novel, which brilliantly reproduces the Tower of Babel in which we conduct our lives. In A Frolic of His Own we hear voices as they speak at and around one another: lawyers, family members, judges, rogues, hucksters, and desperate men (and women) looking for a buck. Above all these is Oscars voice - the outraged cry of the new anachronism, the self-proclaimed last civilized man rendered frail before the behemoth of the law, the servant and warrior of the soul of our century: money.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=85786 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=194671 Joe Allston is a retired literary agent whose parents and only son are dead, and who feels that he has been a mere spectator through life. Than a postcard from a friend causes him to return to the journals of a trip he took to his mothers birthplace to search for his roots; memories of that journey reveal tha t he is not quite spectator enough. Winner of the National Book Award. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=193570 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=124049 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=196457 Small-time journalist John Converse thinks to cash in on the last days of the Vietnam War by becoming involved in a major drug deal, but things go very wrong when he gets back to the U.S. and finds himself hunted by a corrupt government agent. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=58651 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=13155 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=242475 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=54091 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=194882 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1077735