Letters Literature

The first volume in the best-selling Letters of Note series was a collection of hundreds of the world's most entertaining, inspiring, and unusual letters, based on the seismically popular website of the same name - an online museum of correspondence visited by more than 70 million people. In this volume, Shaun Usher turns to the subject of sex.

A powerful and resonant novel from Tom Franklin - critically acclaimed author of Smonk and Hell at the Breech - Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter tells the riveting story of two boyhood friends, torn apart by circumstance, who are brought together again by a terrible crime in a small Mississippi town. An extraordinary novel that seamlessly blends elements of crime and Southern literary fiction, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is a must for readers of Larry Brown, Pete Dexter, Ron Rash, and Dennis Lehane.

After surviving the accident that took her mother's life, Claire Broussard worked hard to escape her small Louisiana hometown. But these days, she feels something lacking. Abruptly leaving her lucrative job in Chicago, Claire returns home to care for her ailing grandmother. There, she unearths a beautiful sculpture that her great-grandfather sent home from Paris after World War II. At her grandmother's urging, Claire travels to Paris to track down the centuries old mask-making atelier where the sculpture was created.

Evoking the spirit and hardships of small-town America during World War II, Carolyn Hart's beautifully written story follows a young reporter, Gretchen Gilman, who investigates the puzzling murder of an acquaintance. Gretchen's assignments at the local newspaper weren't very exciting, but the job was a good opportunity for a young woman with talent and ambition. That summer, everyone was talking about Faye Tatum, who was found dead in her living room.

In the summer of 1905, Katherine Arthur's mother arrives on her doorstep, dying, forcing her to relive a past she wanted to forget. When Katherine was young, the Arthur family had been affluent city dwellers until shame sent them running for the prairie, into the unknown. Taking her family, including young Katherine, to live off the land was the last thing Jeanie Arthur had wanted, but she would do her best to make a go of it. For Jeanie's husband, Frank, it had been a world of opportunity. Dreaming, lazy Frank.

When shy and bookish Gavin Hartford is sent to London, he is prepared to be very bored and very lonely. But after he accidentally forms an acquaintance with dashing man-about-town Charles Kentworthy, his life is turned completely upside down. As Gavin opens up to Mr. Kentworthy - discussing poetry and magic, confessing his fears about marriage, and expanding his social circle to shocking proportions - he finds himself far outside his comfort zone. Will he have the courage to face his own growing feelings for his new friend?

Henry couldn't get over the fact that he had purchased Jenny's home! It was all there in her diary, which he had just discovered the day before. How they had met in 1956 and instantly fell in love and the wonderful summer that followed, only to end when Jenny's family moved away. Although separated for 32 years, their love was sustained by an angelic power that had never waned.

After decades apart, Henry and Jenny's lives are poised to intersect yet again, when Henry's oldest son brings his new girlfriend home to meet the family. Bearing an unusual resemblance to Henry's first love, her name, Camilla, is not just unusual; it's also the same name Jenny had vowed to name her own daughter one day. Did Jenny get pregnant that fateful night in the park? Everything about Camilla seemed to confirm Henry's belief that she is Jenny's daughter.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is a masterpiece of American literature. It is a fascinating moral and philosophical study of Puritan New England that details the life and trials of the long-suffering protagonist Hester Prynne who is forced to wear a scarlet A as a sign of her adultery as she navigates life with her impish daughter Pearl, her estranged husband Roger Chillingworth, and the "saintly" minister Arthur Dimmesdale.

World War I is in full swing, and Abigail Hudson is doing her best to keep the home fires burning while her husband, Jacob, fights for king and country. She tries to balance family life along with running The General Store in their village of Abbington Pickets. Abigail, expecting their first child, is adjusting well to her new role until something unforeseen happens. Writing to Jacob brings comfort to Abigail. His letters always lift her spirits. Then, his letters stop. What happened? Is he missing? Captured? Or worse?

In the public imagination, Ernest Hemingway looms larger than life. But the actual person behind the legend has long remained elusive. Now, his son Patrick shares the letters they exchanged over two decades, offering a glimpse into how one of America’s most iconic writers interacted with his children. These letters reveal a father who wished for his children to share his interests—hunting, fishing, travel—and a son who was receptive to the experiences his father offered.

Becky Nelson fled her childhood home and risked irreparable damage to her relationship with her only sister for an independent life in Kansas. The bookish bachelorette had no sooner settled in the Sunflower State when her path crossed with Henry, a ruggedly handsome farmer. The draft selects the seemingly untouchable Henry, and the couple rushes to make their union permanent before the war carries him to far-off lands. As the days turn to months, their letters give Becky and Henry the strength to go on as he serves his country, and she shares their home with an unlikely guest.

It's April of 1997 in Erie, Pennsylvania, and an unsolved crime has just shattered Rosalyn's life. To cope with her heartache, she begins writing a series of private letters to Nova in her journal, where she confides a shameful secret about the night before it happened. In her anguish, Rosalyn recounts the recent dreams that still haunt her, recording them as poems, just as her grandmother had taught her as a young girl. But after she moves to New York City and her letters progress, Rosalyn begins to realize that her dreams are delivering her a series of clues.

FEAT DESC

A meditative and inspiring diary of Derek Jarman's famous garden at Dungeness. In 1986 Derek Jarman discovered he was HIV positive and decided to make a garden at his cottage on the barren coast of Dungeness. Facing an uncertain future, he nevertheless found solace in nature, growing all manner of plants. While some perished beneath wind and sea-spray, others flourished, creating brilliant, unexpected beauty in the wilderness. Modern Nature is both a diary of the garden and a meditation by Jarman on his own life.

In a powerfully intimate and non-traditional (or "new-fashioned") memoir, Kwame Alexander shares snapshots of a man learning how to love. He takes us through stories of his parents: from being awkward newlyweds in the sticky Chicago summer of 1967, to the sometimes-confusing ways they showed their love to each other, and for him. He explores his own relationships—his difficulties as a newly wedded, 22-year-old father, and the precariousness of his early marriage working in a jazz club with his second wife.

Publicada en 1701, esta carta constituye un documento fundamental para entender la defensa del derecho de las mujeres a la educación y al conocimiento en un tiempo en que estas aspiraciones eran frecuentemente restringidas y desvalorizadas. La carta es un documento autobiográfico en el que Sor Juana narra su propio desarrollo intelectual y su pasión por el estudio durante la época colonial de México.

The death of one’s spirit should come with a great deal of noise: weeping and wailing, if not thunder or the roar of a fire. Elizabeth could not have imagined a spirit forced into darkness by something so mundane as the scratch of pen on paper. Elizabeth Bennet has been certain of many things in her life: her place in society, the love of her family, her ability to choose her own future, and her ability to accurately judge the character of those she meets. Three days after the Netherfield Ball, a near tragedy shakes that foundation.

Danielle Stuart is spending a year abroad studying in Venice, but while she loves the romance of the language and the beauty of country, she finds herself more and more confused by her growing feelings for a gondolier named Nico and her now ex-husband, Mason, who has shown up on her doorstep looking to reconcile. Desperate Dani writes to the Baumgartners in hopes her former lovers might help her clarify her muddled emotions. Finding herself torn between the two men, she reveals her dizzying dilemma, only to discover, thanks to the Baumgartner's insight, that she may not have to choose after all.

Blood Letters tells the astonishing tale of Lin Zhao, a poet and journalist arrested by the authorities in 1960 and executed eight years later, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. The only Chinese citizen known to have openly and steadfastly opposed communism under Mao, she rooted her dissent in her Christian faith—and expressed it in long, prophetic writings done in her own blood, and at times on her clothes and on cloth torn from her bedsheets.