5744 results for "Literature"

Fierce: how competing for myself changed everything

Raisman, Aly
Aly Raisman first stepped onto a gymnastics mat as a toddler in a "mommy & me" gymnastics class. No one could have predicted then that sixteen years later, she'd be standing on an Olympic podium, having achieved her dreams. But it wasn't an easy road to success. Aly faced obstacle after obstacle, including naysayers who claimed that she didn't have the talent to compete at an elite level and classmates who shamed Aly for her athletic body. Through it all, Aly surrounded herself with supportive family, friends, and teammates and found the inner strength to believe in herself and prove her doubters wrong. In her own words, Aly shows what it takes to be a champion on and off the floor, and takes readers on a behind-the-scenes journey before, during, and after her remarkable achievements in two Olympic Games -- through her highest highs, lowest lows, and all the moments in between. Aly's story is enhanced with never-before-published photos, excerpts from the personal journals she's kept since childhood that chronicle memorable moments with her teammates, and hard-won advice for readers striving to rise above challenges, learn to love themselves, and make their own dreams come true.
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers 2018 358 pages

Skylight Confessions

Hoffman, Alice
Writing at the height of her powers, Alice Hoffman conjures three generations of a family haunted by love.Cool, practical, and deliberate, John is dreamy Arlyn's polar opposite. Yet the two are drawn powerfully together even when it is clear they are bound to bring each other grief. Their difficult marriage leads them and their children to a house made of glass in the Connecticut countryside, to the avenues of Manhattan, and to the blue waters of Long Island Sound. Glass breaks, love hurts, and families make their own rules. Ultimately, it falls to their grandson, Will, to solve the emotional puzzle of his family and of his own identity. This special Scholastic edition contains additional pages, including a Reading Group Guide & Discussion Questions.
Little Brown & Co. 2007 262 pages

The Pig Who Sang to the Moon

jeffrey-mousssaieff-masson
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s groundbreaking bestseller, When Elephants Weep, was the first book since Darwin’s time to explore emotions in the animal kingdom, particularly from animals in the wild. Now, he focuses exclusively on the contained world of the farm animal, revealing startling, irrefutable evidence that barnyard creatures have feelings too, even consciousness. Weaving history, literature, anecdotes, scientific studies, and Masson’s own vivid experiences observing pigs, cows, sheep, goats, and chickens over the course of five years, this important book at last gives voice, meaning, and dignity to these gentle beasts that are bred to be milked, shorn, butchered, and eaten. Can we ever know what makes an animal happy? Many animal behaviorists say no. But Jeffrey Masson has a different view: An animal is happy if it can live according to its own nature. Farm animals suffer greatly in this regard. Chickens, for instance, like to perch in trees at night, to avoid predators and to nestle with friends. The obvious conclusion: They cannot be happy when confined twenty to a cage. From field and barn, to pen and coop, Masson bears witness to the emotions and intelligence of these remarkable farm animals, each unique with distinct qualities. Curious, intelligent, self-reliant–many will find it hard to believe that these attributes describe a pig. In fact, there is much that humans share with pigs. They dream, know their names, and can see colors. Mother cows mourn the loss of their calves when their babies are taken away to slaughter. Given a choice between food that is nutritious or lacking in minerals, sheep will select the former, balancing their diet and correcting the deficiency. Goats display quite a sense of humor, dignity, and fearlessness (Indian goats have been known to kill leopards). Chickens are naturally sociable–they will gather around a human companion and stand there serenely preening themselves or sit quietly on the ground beside someone they trust. For far too long farm animals have been denigrated and treated merely as creatures of instinct rather than as sentient beings. Shattering the abhorrent myth of the “dumb animal without feelings,” Jeffrey Masson has written a revolutionary book that is sure to stir human emotions far and wide. From the Hardcover edition.
Ballantine Books 2003

Three Early Stories

Jerome David Salinger
A young and ambitious writer named Jerome David Salinger set his goals very high very early in his career. He almost desperately wished to publish his early stories in The New Yorker magazine, the pinnacle, he felt, of America's literary world. But such was not to be for several long years and the length of one long world war. The New Yorker, whose tastes in literary matters were and remain notoriously prim and fickle, was not quite ready for this brash and over-confident newcomer with the cynical worldview and his habit of slangy dialogue. But other magazines were quick to recognize a new talent, a fresh voice at a time when the world verged on madness. Story magazine, an esteemed and influential small circulation journal devoted exclusively to the art of the short story and still active and respected today, was the first publication to publish the name J.D. Salinger and the story "The Young Folks" in 1940, an impressive view of New York's cocktail society and two young people talking past one another, their conversation almost completely meaningless and empty. His next short story was published in a college journal, The University of Kansas City Review, "Go See Eddie," a tale of quiet menace as an unsavory male character gradually turns up the pressure on a young lady to see a man named Eddie. Also published in 1940, the story is notable for the backstory that is omitted - a technique that Hemingway used to great effect. Four years later toward the end of Salinger's war experience saw the publication of "Once A Week Won't Kill You," again in Story magazine. Ostensibly about a newly minted soldier trying to tell an aging aunt he is going off to war, some may see the story as a metaphor for preparing one's family for the possibility of wartime death. Three Early Stories (Illustrated) is the first legitimately published book by J.D. Salinger in more than 50 years. Devault-Graves Digital Editions, a publisher that specializes in reprinting the finest in American period literature, is proud to bring you this anthology by one of America's most innovative and inspiring authors.
Devault-Graves Digital Editions 2014 69 pages

84 Charing Cross Road

Hanff, Helene
It all began with a letter enquiring about second-hand books, written by Helene Hanff in New York, and posted to a bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road, London. As Helene's sarcastic and witty letters are responded to by the stodgy and proper Frank Doel of 84 Charing Cross Road, a relationship blossoms into a warm, charming, feisty love affair. We follow, in her subsequent letters and in the shop's responses, the trial of one woman;s idiosyncratic path through English literature. Along the way, as Anne Bancroft notes in her introduction, our enjoyment in sharing. Hanff's literary eduction is deepened by the human story her letters tell as she grows ever fonder of her bookselling friends across the ocean.
Moyer Bell 2015 97 pages

Jigsaw: An Alex Delaware Novel

Kellerman, Jonathan
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The iconic thriller series that inspired the upcoming streaming show on Prime Video, in development now! Psychologist Alex Delaware and Detective Milo Sturgis, the most beloved duo in American crime fiction, return in this electric novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling “master of suspense” (Los Angeles Times). This one looked like a slam dunk: a young woman found dead at her kitchen table, DNA on cigarette butts linking quickly to an ex-boyfriend with a criminal record. Or so homicide lieutenant Milo Sturgis thought. Then everything changed and a quick close turned into a mind-bending whodunit. That’s when Milo called in psychologist Alex Delaware, his best friend and a long-term consultant on “those cases.” The ones that are different. Then there’s another one: an old woman found brutally murdered, her body stashed in a deep freeze and mutilated. And when Milo learns who she is, he’s stunned. This victim is someone he once knew. Complicating matters further, her home is an extreme hoarder’s den, virtually impassable due to years of stored trash and apparently meaningless objects. Except for the envelopes of cash stashed among the garbage. As Alex and Milo dig deeper into the seemingly unrelated crimes, they discover shocking links between the victims and realize they have a labyrinthine—and deadly—puzzle to solve. Cast against the unforgettable L.A. ambience unique to the novels of Jonathan Kellerman, this is classic Delaware at its best.
Random House Large Print 2026-02-03 320 pages

Dogs Never Lie about Love Reflections on the Emotional World of Dogs

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
As he guides readers through the surprising depth of canine emotional complexity, Jeffrey Masson draws from myth and literature, from scientific studies, and from the stories and observations of dog trainers and dog lovers around the world. But the stars of the book are Masson's own three dogs - Sasha, Sima, and Rani - whose delightful and mysterious behavior provides the way to exploring a wide range of subjects - from emotions like gratitude, compassion, loneliness, and disappointment to speculating what dogs dream of, how they perceive of other species (including humans), and how their powerful sense of smell shapes their perception of reality. As he sweeps aside old prejudices on animal behavior, Masson navigates through the rich universe of dog feeling to its essential core, their master emotion: love.
Cengage Gale 1997-11

You know, sex: bodies, gender, puberty, and other things!

Silverberg, Cory
"In a bright graphic format featuring four dynamic middle schoolers, You Know, Sex grounds sex education in social justice, covering not only the big three of puberty-hormones, reproduction, and development-but also power, pleasure, and how to be a decent human being. Centering young people's experiences of pressures and joy, risk and reward, and confusion and discovery, there are chapters on body autonomy, disclosure, stigma, harassment, pornography, trauma, masturbation, consent, boundaries and safety in our media-saturated world, puberty and reproduction that includes trans, non-binary, and intersex bodies and experience, and more. Racially and ethnically diverse, inclusive of cross-disability experience, this is a book for every kind of young person and every kind of family. You Know, Sex is the first thoroughly modern sex ed book for every body navigating puberty and adolesence, essential for kids, everyone who knows a kid, and anyone who has ever been a kid"--
Seven Stories Press/Triangle Square Books for Young Readers 2022-04-12 432 pages

Motherhood A Novel

Sheila Heti
From the author of How Should a Person Be? (“one of the most talked-about books of the year”— Time Magazine ) and the New York Times Bestseller Women in Clothes comes a daring novel about whether to have children. In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother, treating the most consequential decision of early adulthood with the candor, originality, and humor that have won Heti international acclaim and made How Should A Person Be? required reading for a generation. In her late thirties, when her friends are asking when they will become mothers, the narrator of Heti’s intimate and urgent novel considers whether she will do so at all. In a narrative spanning several years, casting among the influence of her peers, partner, and her duties to her forbearers, she struggles to make a wise and moral choice. After seeking guidance from philosophy, her body, mysticism, and chance, she discovers her answer much closer to home. Motherhood is a courageous, keenly felt, and starkly original novel that will surely spark lively conversations about womanhood, parenthood, and about how—and for whom—to live.
Henry Holt and Company 2019-05-07 304 pages

The Human Stain: A Novel – The PEN/Faulkner Award Winner of Identity, Race, and Scandal in 1990s America

Roth, Philip
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’ 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY “A master novelist's haunting parable about our troubled modern moment." —The Wall Street Journal “By turns unnerving, hilarious, and sad. . . . It is a book that shows how the public zeitgeist can shape, even destroy, an individual's life." —The New York Times “The best novel he has written.” —The Times Literary Supplement It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk’s secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled.
Mariner Books Classics 2026-05-26 448 pages

The history of love

Krauss, Nicole
Leo Gursky is trying to survive a little bit longer, tapping his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he's still alive, drawing attention to himself at the milk counter of Starbucks. But life wasn't always like this: sixty years ago, in the Polish village where he was born, Leo fell in love and wrote a book. And although he doesn't know it, that book also survived: it crossed oceans and generations, and changed lives. Fourteen-year-old Alma was named after a character in that book. She has her hands full keeping track of her little brother Bird (who thinks he might be the Messiah) and taking copious notes in her book, How to Survive in the Wild Volume Three. But when a mysterious letter arrives in the mail she undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family. In her extraordinary new novel Nicole Krauss has created some of the most memorable and moving characters in recent fiction. A tale brimming with laughter, passion, and soaring imaginative power, The History of Love confirms Krauss as one of the most remarkable writers of her generation.
Norton 2005 252 pages

The Laramie Project

Moisés Kaufman
"On October 7, 1998, a young gay man was discovered bound to a fence in the hills outside Laramie, Wyoming, savagely beaten and left to die in an act of brutality and hate that shocked the nation. Matthew Shepard's death became a national symbol of intolerance, but for the people of Laramie the event was deeply personal, and it is their voices we hear in this stunningly effective theater piece. Moises Kaufman and fellow members of the Tectonic Theater Project made six trips to Laramie over the course of a year and a half in the aftermath of the beating and conducted more than 200 interviews with people of the town. From these interviews as well as their own experiences, Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater members have constructed a deeply moving theatrical experience. The Laramie Project chronicles the life of the town of Laramie in the year after the murder, using eight actors to embody more than sixty different people in their own words--from rural ranchers to university professors. The result is a complex portrayal that dispels the simplistic media stereotypes and explores the depths to which humanity can sink and the heights of compassion of which we are capable"--Jacket.
Vintage Books 2001 112 pages

Run Away

Coben, Harlan
A perfect family is shattered when their daughter goes missing in this nail-biting thriller from a New York Times bestselling author. The inspiration for the limited series on Netflix! "[A] greased-lightning domestic thriller." ―Kirkus Reviews You've lost your daughter. She's addicted to drugs and has an abusive boyfriend. And she's made it clear that she doesn't want to be found. Then, by chance, you see her playing guitar in Central Park. But she's not the girl you remember. This woman is living on the edge, frightened, and clearly in trouble. You don't stop to think. You approach her, beg her to come home. She runs. And you do the only thing a parent can do: you follow her into a dark and dangerous world you never knew existed. Before you know it, both your family and your life are on the line. And in order to protect your daughter from the evils of that world, you must face them head on. "The modern master of the hook and twist." ―Dan Brown, #1 bestselling author of The Da Vinci Code
Grand Central Publishing 2025-12-30 384 pages