“In the fall of 1967, a schlemiel named Don Bessemer from Short Pump, Virginia, got me pregnant. Well, okay, I got myself pregnant with his assistance. I fell for this superficial clod one rainy October afternoon when we were the only two patrons in a hole-in-the-wall called Café Ludovico off Astor Place. . . .” So begins the journey into adulthood of 19-year-old Erica “Pooh” (as in Winnie the) Bollinger from Oyster Bay, Long Island. She’s a sophomore at NYU and nothing is working out there. She’s knocked up. She hates the city. The Vietnam War is making America crazy, not to mention the sit-com looniness of everyday existence on the home-front. Pooh desperately wants out. She hears about a magical place up in Vermont where you can leave all this crap behind, a commune called Sunrise Village founded by the mysterious, charismatic figure known in the hippie underground only as “Songbird.” Maybe she ought to go up there and check the situation out. . . .

With The Rebel , acclaimed award-winning author Jack Dann pulls James Dean from the twisted wreckage and offers him a second chance to make an indelible mark on his art, his culture, and his time in an era of profound change and devastating social upheaval. Surviving the horrific crash that leaves him permanently scarred, both physically and emotionally, the haunted, brooding, and complex young star finds himself charged with a feeling of responsibility to do "something wonderful and important." Yet for Jimmy Dean, the glory road will be winding and broken, littered with the detritus of exploded dreams and destroyed love, as it passes through the holiest cultural sites of postwar twentieth-century America -- the genius-and-drug pumped world of the Beats, the protected inner sanctum of Graceland, the darkest shadows of Camelot. The lives and futures of Kerouac, Sinatra, Elvis, and the Kennedys will all be touched by him -- yet perhaps none so deeply as the fragile sex goddess who will always be his greatest burden and true soul mate, a dazzling and tragically lost phenomenon named Marilyn -- as he moves toward an astonishing destiny that will reconfigure the world. Ingeniously blending historical fact with brilliant invention, The Rebel is a hip, fast, and mesmerizing ride through the fifties and sixties -- an unforgettable road trip across a nation with an American legend at the wheel.

Book by Johnson, Haynes, Simons, Howard

Tommi, Kate, and Zara, teen equestrians on horseback riding's elite A circuit, should be preparing for the biggest show of the season, but boyfriend problems, a road trip, and a gossip blog interfere with their training.

When the beautiful Jessica Pruitt arrives in Venice to star in a film based on The Merchant of Venice, she is preoccupied: she has recently lost custody of her daughter, and as an older actress she is increasingly aware of the difficulty of landing leading roles. One day, as she wanders through an old Jewish ghetto, Jessica is magically transported to sixteenth-century Venice where she finds herself the heroine of "Will" Shakespeare's play. Immediately attracted to the younger playwright, Jessica enters into an intensely passionate love affair that defies time and place. Reading group guide included.

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Never before available in English, Judgment is a work of startling power by David Bergelson, the most celebrated Yiddish prose writer of his era. Originally published in 1929 and set in 1920 during the Russian civil war, Judgment traces the death of the shtetl and the birth of the “new, harsher world” created by the 1917 revolution. Jews and non-Jews smuggle people, goods, and anti-Bolshevik literature back and forth across the new political border. Filipov acts as the arbiter of "judgment" to prisoners in a Bolshevik outpost, who include Spivak, a counterrevolutionary; Lemberger, a pious and wealthy Jew; a seductive woman referred to as "the blonde"; and a memorable cast of smugglers and criminals. Ordinary people, depicted in a grotesque and modernist style—comparable to Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry —confront the overwhelming forces of history, whose ultimate outcome remains unknown.

Amidst the lights and glamour of the New York theater district during the 1950s, two Holocaust survivors confront each other in order to reckon with a common past - one that hides an awful secret. Jud Kramer, a successful stage director, is in the midst of mounting his most painful and personal play while trying to enjoy the happiness he has found with his beautiful actress wife and baby daughter. Into his life comes Carl Walkowitz, a brooding, charismatic drifter who displays the scars of his concentration camp past in his wounded leg and half-closed eye. It is the relationship of these two men, one who lives in the past and the other trying to grasp hold of the present, that drives the story of Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die to its terrifying conclusion. Step by step, inexorably, Walkowitz strips Jud of everything dear to him, until finally, standing on an empty stage, the two men, with a woman between them, come face to face in a life-and-death struggle only one of them can survive.

Having a profound experience on a hypnotist's stage in spite of not believing in magic, Arthur abruptly abandons his family in the middle of the night and becomes a famous author while his sons grow into men shaped by loss and doubt.

"Award-winning, New York Times Notable author of A Replacement Life-"a born storyteller with a tremendous gift for language" (San Francisco Chronicle)- delivers a fierce and staggering new page-turner full of cruelty, tenderness, and heroism, about a young girl and her parents fleeing civil war and the brutal dictatorship that has targeted their family"--

When their adopted eight-year-old son Max suddenly turns feral, Maya Shulman convinces her husband, Alex, to embark on a cross-country trip to Montana to track down Max's birth parents, which results in unexpected consequences and life-altering changes.

As she lay on her deathbed, Stella Folger had some things to say to her husband. Like "You should paint the living room. I noticed there were brown spots on the ceiling." And "Be sure to take the car in for a tune-up every three months." In life, Stella always took care of business. In death, she's doing the same. Because Stella is communicating with Roger from her hotel room in Heaven-and it seems that entering paradise hasn't made her any less bossy. The truth is, she still cares about Roger. She worries about him. She loves him-so much, in fact, that she's determined to find him a new wife, someone to take care of him like she did. But as the celestial matchmaking progresses, one thing becomes clear: according to his departed wife, no woman on earth could be good enough for Roger Folger...

Critically acclaimed for his international bestseller, A Case of Curiosities, Allen Kurzweil has been called one of today's most gifted new voices in fiction. Now he returns with The Grand Complication -- a modern-day tale of literary intrigue, deviant passions, and delicious secrets. Behind the majestic walls of a Manhattan town house, a stylish young reference librarian of arcane interests unravels an 18th-century mystery -- who stole Marie Antoinette's watch The book is a grand and complicated "timepiece," told with a devilish sense of fun.

1990

After being sidetracked by two affairs in the region, Haffner finally resolves to claim his widow's inheritance in the eastern Alps, a villa seized in darker times, but must first win a fight with a team of bureaucrats and their minions.