Reading House

In Girls That Never Die, award-winning poet Safia Elhillo reinvents the epic to explore Muslim girlhood and shame, the dangers of being a woman, and the myriad violences enacted and imagined against women’s bodies. Drawing from her own life and family histories, as well as cultural myths and news stories about honor killings and genital mutilation, she interlaces the everyday traumas of growing up a girl under patriarchy with magical realist imaginings of rebellion, autonomy, and power.

Why is it that we read? Is it to pass time? To learn something new? To escape from reality? For Will Schwalbe, reading is a way to entertain himself but also to make sense of the world, to become a better person, and to find the answers to the big (and small) questions about how to live his life. In this delightful celebration of reading, Schwalbe invites us along on his quest for books that speak to the specific challenges of living in our modern world, with all its noise and distractions.

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.

More than three decades have passed since the events described in John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick. The three divorcées - Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie - have left town, remarried, and become widows. They cope with their grief and solitude as widows do: they travel the world, to such foreign lands as Canada, Egypt, and China, and renew old acquaintance. Why not, Sukie and Jane ask Alexandra, go back to Eastwick for the summer?

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis never wrote a memoir, but she told her life story and revealed herself in intimate ways through the nearly 100 books she brought into print during the last two decades of her life as an editor at Viking and Doubleday. Based on archives and interviews with Jackie's authors, colleagues, and friends, Reading Jackie mines this significant period of her life to reveal both the serious and the mischievous woman underneath the glamorous public image.

Recently graduated from Harvard University, Michelle Kuo arrived in the rural town of Helena, Arkansas, as a Teach for America volunteer, bursting with optimism and drive. But she soon encountered the jarring realities of life in one of the poorest counties in America, still disabled by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. In this stirring memoir, Kuo, the child of Taiwanese immigrants, shares the story of her complicated but rewarding mentorship of one student, Patrick Browning.

In this explosive expose of the drug companies and how they are ripping us off, Marcia Angell, M.D., a doctor, medical journalist, and a former editor of the respected New England Journal of Medicine, reveals the many ways in which the pharmaceutical industry has moved away from its original purpose of finding and producing useful new drugs.

Paris, France: 1860’s. Hundreds of houses are being razed, whole neighborhoods reduced to ashes. By order of Emperor Napoleon III, Baron Haussman has set into motion a series of large-scale renovations that will permanently alter the face of old Paris, moulding it into a “modern city.” The reforms will erase generations of history - but in the midst of the tumult, one woman will take a stand. Rose Bazelet is determined to fight against the destruction of her family home until the very end; as others flee, she stakes her claim in the basement of the old house on rue Childebert, ignoring the sounds of change....

Mystery bookstore owner Annie Laurance, and detective Max Darling are finally tying the knot, but a bizarre sequence of events threatens to unravel this blissful marriage before it begins. The ceremony is barely over when the phone rings and a woman on the other end of the line screams bloody murder! The newlyweds rush to the scene of the crime only to discover that Ingrid Jones, Annie's bookstore assistant, has vanished, leaving the body of a neighborhood Peeping Tom on her living room rug.

An adventure to blow you away! That's what Jack and Annie get when the Magic Tree House whisks them back to the 1870s. They land on the prairie near a one-room schoolhouse, where they meet a teenaged schoolteacher, some cool kids, and one big, scary bully. But the biggest and scariest thing is yet to come.

Once, Special Agent Smoky Barrett hunted serial killers for the FBI. She was one of the best, until a madman terrorized her family, killed her husband and daughter, and left her face scarred and her soul brutalized. Turning the tables on the killer, Smoky shot him dead, but her life was shattered forever.

Best-selling author Pat Conroy acknowledges the books that have shaped him and celebrates the profound effect reading has had on his life. Pat Conroy, the beloved American storyteller, is a voracious reader. Starting as a childhood passion that bloomed into a life-long companion, reading has been Conroy’s portal to the world, both to the farthest corners of the globe and to the deepest chambers of the human soul. His interests range widely, from Milton to Tolkien, Philip Roth to Thucydides, encompassing poetry, history, philosophy, and any mesmerizing tale of his native South.

Dorothy Martin's husband, a local police inspector, is out of town. On a trip to London for a doctor's appointment, Dorothy talks to a young man who, by the time the train reaches Victoria Station, is very dead. No one seems to think anything is amiss and the man who told her he was a doctor and would take care of everything seems to have done just that. The body has disappeared. Dorothy has a mystery on her hands and, with her husband in Zimbabwe, there's nothing to do but begin an investigation.

Raised in a remote village on the edge of a sugarcane plantation, 14-year-old Isabel was born with the gift and curse of "seeing farther". When drought and war grip the backlands, her brother Isaias joins a great exodus to a teeming city in the south. Soon Isabel must follow, forsaking the only home she's ever known, her sole consolation the thought of being with her brother again. But when she arrives, she discovers that Isaias has disappeared.

In her latest spellbinding escapade, Jane Austen arrives in London to watch over the printing of her first novel, and finds herself embroiled in a crime that could end more than her career. For it is up to Jane to tease a murderer out of the ton, lest she—and her country—suffer a dastardly demise....

From the widely acclaimed poet, novelist, critic, and scholar, a lucid and edifying exploration of the building blocks of poetry and how they've been used over the centuries to assemble the most imperishable poems.

Jane Austen is enjoying August, 1806, among Derbyshire's craggy peaks, sparkling streams, and cavernous gorges. That is, until she discovers the corpse of a young gentleman whose blond curls and delicate features suggest the face of an angel.

Chase Prescott, media magnate, is nearly killed by a box of cyanide candy. Fearing for his life, he calls his former lover, retired reporter Henrietta O'Dwyer Collins. His request is simple: He'll assemble all the suspects if she will kindly point out the would-be murderer. On Chase's private island off the South Carolina coast, Henrie O meets the players in this deadly drama: Prescott's unstable young wife, his sullen stepson, and his toady of a secretary.

Normally, Annie Laurence Darling would be eagerly awaiting her trip to this year's Dixie Book Festival. But this year Annie has agreed to be the author liaison to five authors honored with the Dixie Book Festival Medallions, and she fears she is going to have her hands full. What Annie doesn't count on is the untimely death of ambitious Mint Julep Press publisher Kenneth Hazlitt.

Invited to stage a Mystery Night for the annual antebellum house tour of the Historical Preservation Society of Chastain, South Carolina, Annie Laurance instead finds herself the leading lady in a flesh-and blood drama. The play's the thing when the curtain falls on grande dame Corinne Webster. While jeweled fingers point, accusing Annie of murder, the perpetrator lurks among the cast and the murder weapon is one of the props. Now it will take all of her sleuthing skills to discover the real killer.