American Literature

Essie Mae Richardson means the world to the residents of the Braxton Park subdivision. So when she dies, all the hard work she did to rebuild fraying relationships and bolster broken families begins coming undone. But there are some who won’t let her efforts go to waste, and they will fight to keep this angel’s legacy alive.

Kidnapped from the Earth People as a child, White Ash learns the way of the Sun People as she grows into a beautiful woman. But the disturbing dreams that made her an outcast in her old tribe are becoming stronger and they foretell a frightening future of bitter cold, war and famine. When a hostile tribe massacres her adopted family, White Ash is raped and left near death, but is miraculously saved by a brave shaman...and falls in love with him. Together they set out on a dangerous journey to steal a magical object - but they soon face a ruthless enemy who wants White Ash for his own.

On the surface, Alice is exactly where she should be. She's just given birth to a beautiful baby girl, Dawn; her charming husband, Steve, is nothing but supportive; and they've recently moved to a wealthy neighborhood in Toronto. And yet, Alice feels like an imposter. She isn't connecting with Dawn, a struggle made even more difficult by the recent loss of her mother, and every waking moment is spent hiding her despair from her watchful white neighbors.

Gabby and Mischelle are best friends. Mischelle is despondent, unable to get over the hurt and betrayal of finding out her husband cheated on her with a younger woman - and even worse, he walked out on her and their children. Meanwhile, Gabby's relationship has imploded, and her ex refuses to believe it's over and has started to stalk her. To get away from all the chaos, the women head to Tybee Island, Georgia, looking for a weekend of fun in the sun. Once they get there, they encounter two charismatic yet mysterious men who have the power to inexplicably change their lives forever.

The thrilling new novel from number-one New York Times best-selling author Lisa See explores the lives of a Chinese mother and her daughter who has been abandoned and adopted by an American couple.

One man finds himself torn between two cultures in this sweeping tale of frontier life in post–Civil War era Texas. In the years following the American War Between the States, the once vacated military presence in west Texas is on the rise to protect the waves of settlers moving into the region. Living peaceably with the Mescalero Apache, half-breed former military scout Holton Lang promotes the tentative harmony between the US cavalry and the Native American population.

La primera novela para adultos en casi 15 años de la autora internacionalmente superventas de "In the Time of the Butterflies" y "How the García Girls Lost Their Accents". Antonia Vega, la escritora inmigrante en el centro de "Afterlife", ha sacado la alfombra de debajo de ella. Acaba de retirarse de la universidad donde enseñó inglés cuando su amado esposo, Sam, muere repentinamente.

Stories of Your Life and Others presents characters who must confront sudden change-the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens-while striving to maintain some sense of normalcy. In the amazing and much-lauded title story (the basis for the 2016 movie Arrival), a grieving mother copes with divorce and the death of her daughter by drawing on her knowledge of alien languages and non-linear memory recollection.

Weaving a vibrant tapestry of fact and fiction, Into the Wilderness sweeps us into another time and place...and into the heart of a forbidden, incandescent affair between a spinster Englishwoman and an American frontiersman. Here is an epic of romance and history that will captivate readers from the start.

After taking us through the rugged, thug-filled lives of Jaz, Kyra, and Angel, Wahida now takes us into the drama-filled life of their best friend, Roz, aka Tasha. She is sexy, beautiful, and torn between her desires to distance herself from the streets and the magnetic attraction to the irresistible and thuggish Trae Macklin, who acknowledges that mature women are a turn-on. Women come and go for a thug who is more about his business over everything else, yet Trae surprisingly falls head over heels for his business partner's woman, Tasha.

In Cross of Snow, the result of more than 12 years of research, including access to never-before-examined letters, diaries, journals, and notes, Nicholas Basbanes reveals the life, the times, the work - the soul - of the man who shaped the literature of a new nation with his countless poems, sonnets, stories, essays, and translations, and whose renown was so wide-reaching that his deep friendships included Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, and Oscar Wilde.

In Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America's contemporary moment both to our nation's fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy. Smith's signature voice - inquisitive, lyrical, and wry - turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men, and violence.

At once fiercely immediate and complex in their implications, “The Shawl” and “Rosa” succeed in imagining the unimaginable: the horror of the Holocaust and the emptiness of its aftermath. They were written in 1977 but were first published in the early 1980s in The New Yorker. Both “The Shawl” and “Rosa” won first prize in the O. Henry Prize Stories and were chosen for Best American Short Stories.

Proverbs for the People is an astounding collection of contemporary African-American fiction, featuring stories by such well known authors as Pearl Cleage, Omar Tyree, Margaret Johnson-Hodge, Travis Hunter, Parry "Ebony Satin" Brown, Gwynne Forster, Edward Jackson and Vicki L. Andrews. These widely varied stories resonate with the power and wisdom of the ages, speaking of universal truths that will heal and guide the wayward spirit.

Widower Mukesh lives a quiet life in the London Borough of Ealing after losing his beloved wife. He shops every Wednesday, goes to Temple, and worries about his granddaughter, Priya, who hides in her room reading. Aleisha is a bright but anxious teenager working at the local library when she discovers a crumpled-up piece of paper. It's a list of novels that she's never heard of before. When Mukesh arrives at the library, desperate to forge a connection with his bookworm granddaughter, Aleisha passes along the reading list…hoping that it will be a lifeline for him too.

Janelle Marshall's life is finally going according to plan. Her perfect, upscale career - and her perfect, successful boyfriend - will make her future as secure and predictable as her childhood never was. And with luck, Little Bill, the grandfather who raised her, will someday understand why she'd rather play it safe than be impulsive. But just when she should be happiest, she gets a distressing call: Little Bill has gone missing. Now Janelle must go to the one place she's long avoided - the tiny mountain town of Mammoth Falls, South Dakota.

Martin Dressler, son of an immigrant cigar maker, believes he can achieve anything if he works hard enough. At the turn of the century, he rises from the shadows of his father’s shop in New York City to become a powerful entrepreneur and builder of hotels. But, as he contemplates this land of almost limitless opportunity, his plans grow impossibly grand. Through the curve of Martin’s spectacular rise and eventual downfall in the business world, his tale remains a uniquely American one. Martin may not always control an empire, but he will always be able to dream.

Evelyn is a Creole woman who comes of age in New Orleans at the height of World War II. Her family inhabits the upper echelon of black society, and when she falls for no-name Renard, she is forced to choose between her life of privilege and the man she loves. In 1982, Evelyn's daughter Jackie is a frazzled single mother grappling with her absent husband's drug addiction. Just as she comes to terms with his abandoning the family, he returns, ready to resume their old life.

There's a saying in Brooklyn that if you come from my part of town, you're from around the way. Well Lyric, Juicy, and Precious are all from around the way. They all live in Crown Heights, one of the most notorious sections of Brooklyn, but to them it's just a place they call home. Around the Way Girls 2 is a fast-paced look at the life of some street-smart women who think they know it all but are about to get the lessons of their lives.

Meet Ceazia, a very attractive, very good girl who has just left the safety of her parents' home and entered into the world of bad boys and fast money. Ceazia thinks the world belongs to her when she meets Vegas, one of the Tidewater, Virginia, area's most notorious drug dealers. Even though a relationship with Vegas goes against everything her parents taught her, she still can't resist his bad boy persona.