Letters Literature

Kennedy steered the nation away from the brink of nuclear war, initiated the first nuclear test ban treaty, created the Peace Corps, and launched American on its mission to the moon and beyond. JFK inspired a nation, particularly the massive generation of baby boomers, injecting hope and revitalizing faith in the American project. 2013 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy's untimely death, a milestone to be marked by an avalanche of new books on his life and importance.

Senator Thomas Dodd began his career in public service as a prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials. His son, Senator Christopher Dodd, recently discovered his mother's collection of letters his father wrote during that time. Through his father, Chris Dodd learned not only the scope of the Holocaust but also the importance of the rule of law.

Celebrate Christmas on Blossom Street with a brand-new romantic comedy from New York Times best-selling author Debbie Macomber. Katherine O'Connor often spends her days at a cozy cafe on Blossom Street in Seattle where she writes Christmas letters for other people. She's good at making their everyday lives sound more interesting. More humorous. More dramatic. But for Dr. Wynn Jeffries, who also frequents the cafe, Christmas means lies and deception

The war was ending for Captain Eugene Stewart. He and the rest of the 85th Illinois would soon be mustered out and he’d return home to Peoria. After he entered his tent, he found a thick envelope from his mother sitting on his cot. When he unfolded the pages, another envelope fell to the ground. He picked it up and noticed the heavy hand that had written the address. It hadn’t been sent to him with the army but was forwarded by his mother. After reading his mother’s letter, he stared at the sealed envelope and thought about tossing it into the fire rather than reading it.

To eager students of human sexuality in all its wild and amazing forms: Welcome to Penthouse University, the premier center of higher learning in carnal knowledge. It's a place to explore - from making love in the library to steamy oral exams behind closed classroom doors. A place to experiment - with bi-curious coeds in the dorm and nubile sorority sisters at sex toy parties. A place to graduate - to shower room liaisons with the curvy phys ed teacher and thrilling threesomes with the seductive housesitter.

A collection of Jackson's letters from prison, Soledad Brother is an outspoken condemnation of the racism of white America and a powerful appraisal of the prison system that failed to break his spirit but eventually took his life. Jackson's letters make palpable the intense feelings of anger and rebellion that filled Black men in America's prisons in the 1960s. But even removed from the social and political firestorms of the 1960s, Jackson's story still resonates for its portrait of a man taking a stand even while locked down.

Barbara Taylor Bradford delivers an evocative new novel of family secrets and betrayals that stretch from the streets of World War II Berlin to the winding alleys of Istanbul to the present day. Justine Nolan is a documentary film maker who lost her beloved grandmother a decade ago. Her own mother, Deborah, had always been distant and uninvolved. But when Justine inadvertently opens a letter addressed to her mother, she discovers that not only is her grandmother alive, but that Deborah has deliberately estranged the family from her for all these years.

The New York Times best-selling true story of an all-American girl and a boy from Zimbabwe and the letter that changed both of their lives forever. It started as an assignment. Everyone in Caitlin's class wrote to an unknown student somewhere in a distant place. Martin was lucky to even receive a pen-pal letter. There were only 10 letters, and 50 kids in his class. But he was the top student, so he got the first one. That letter was the beginning of a correspondence that spanned six years and changed two lives.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in the history of American thought, religion, and literature. The vitality of his writings and the unsettling power of his example continue to influence us more than a hundred years after his death. Now Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord.

Née le 1er septembre 1940 à Lillebonne, en Seine-Maritime, Annie Ernaux a grandi à Yvetot, en Normandie, où ses parents tenaient un café-épicerie. Issue d'un milieu modeste, elle poursuit cependant des études supérieures et devient agrégée de lettres. Elle enseignera à Annecy, puis au Centre National d'Enseignement à Distance. Son premier roman, Les armoires vides (1974), met en scène Denise Lesur, sorte de double de l'auteur, héroïne confrontée à un avortement.

Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American authors of the last hundred years and among our greatest chroniclers of the female experience. This extraordinary compilation of personal correspondence has all the hallmarks of Jackson’s beloved fiction: flashes of the uncanny in the domestic, sparks of horror in the quotidian, and the veins of humor that run through good times and bad.

If you like to use your drive time for education by audiobook, consider this book for widening and deepening your view of an event you studied briefly in school - the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Conquistador Voices, which relies more heavily than most works of this kind on first-person accounts, neither glamorizes nor condemns the conquistadors. Somewhat in the manner of a modern film documentary, it treats the so-called conquest as an historical event that’s worth learning about for its own sake, with most of the moralizing left to the listener.

From the creator of The New York Times best seller Boing! comes the riotous story of a cat gone berserk -- four times over an in alphabetical order each time. Kitty is not happy hen she's told that her favorite foods are all gone and all that's left are Asparagus, Beets, Cauliflower, Dill...and 22 other equally unappealing vegetables. So she: Ate my homework, Bit grandma, Clawed the curtains, Damaged the dishes, and so on, through Z.

The summer of 1956 starts out like any other summer for 15-year-old Henry Pederson: hot, long, and boring. That all changes when Jenny Sarsky, along with her guardian angel and her family, moves into the house three doors down.

With its winding high street lined with a greengrocer, post office, pub and church, Melstead St Mary is the perfect English village. Neighbours look out for neighbours, and few things trouble the serene surface of the community. But when residents start to receive anonymous letters containing secret information about their pasts - secrets that no one else is meant to know - life in Melstead St Mary is about to change, possibly forever....

In the bitter winds of autumn 1963, Tove Jansson, helped by Brunström, a maverick fisherman, raced to build a cabin on a treeless island in the Gulf of Finland. The island was Klovharun, where for thirty summers Tove and her beloved partner, the visual artist, Tuulikki “Tooti” Pietilä, lived, painted, and wrote, energized by the solitude and shifting seascapes. The island's flora, fauna, and weather patterns provided deep inspiration which can be seen reflected in all of Jansson's work, most famously in her novel The Summer Book and her longstanding comic strip and novels for children, Moomin.

The deepest currents of passion seldom break the surface of literature. Romantic classics abound; but however skilled a writer may be in verbalising an emotional experience, he cannot publicly evoke the heat of blood, the yearning of soul, bared in perfect intimacy between two beings. But letters can do this, and songs never meant to be sung by any but the lover, or the beloved.

With Christmas around the corner, it’s time for Amish families to include holiday greetings in their circle letters, each writer adding to a growing collection as it travels on to the next. In this delightful trio of stories, three cousins scattered across the country share their blessings - and reveal news of romantic surprises.

Every evening for eight years, at his request, President Obama was given 10 handpicked letters written by ordinary American citizens - the unfiltered voice of a nation - from his Office of Presidential Correspondence. He was the first president to interact daily with constituent mail and to archive it in its entirety. In To Obama, Jeanne Marie Laskas interviews President Obama, the letter writers themselves, and the White House staff who sifted through the powerful, moving, and incredibly intimate narrative of America during the Obama years:

Abounding with good-natured fun, A Case of Crooked Letters celebrates the pure, Christian values of small-town America. Trouble is brewing in the sleepy hamlet of Morning Shade. Multiple chain letters are circulating throughout town, and a local resident is to blame. Little old ladies are being victimized by empty promises of vast riches and rejuvenated health. Fortunately, the plucky Stella Diamond is on the case.