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Reading recommendations for fiction, nonfiction, and audiobooks across all reading levels.
Author
Formats
Description
A novel about a man who finds himself transformed into a huge insect, and the effects of this change upon his life. This is a fantastic horror story about a hapless man who is turned into an insect. When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story...
Author
Series
New Crobuzon series volume 1
Description
WINNER OF THE AUGUST DERLETH AND ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARDS • A masterpiece brimming with scientific splendor, magical intrigue, and fierce characters, from the author who “has reshaped modern fantasy” (The Washington Post)
“[China Miéville’s] fantasy novels, including a trilogy set in and around the magical city-state of New Crobuzon, have the refreshing effect of making Middle-earth seem plodding...
“[China Miéville’s] fantasy novels, including a trilogy set in and around the magical city-state of New Crobuzon, have the refreshing effect of making Middle-earth seem plodding...
Author
Formats
Description
"A novel about an interactive game designer with no face by the singer-songwriter behind the Mountain Goats and the author of Black Sabbath's Master of Reality (33-1/3)"-- Provided by publisher.
Isolated by a disfiguring injury, Sean Phillips crafts imaginary worlds for strangers to play in. From his small apartment in southern California, he orchestrates fantastic adventures where possibilities, both dark and bright, open in the boundaries between...
6) Ulysses
Author
Appears on list
Description
A day in the life of Leopold Bloom, whose odyssey through the streets of turn-of-the-century Dublin leads him through trials that parallel those of Ulysses on his epic journey home.
Author
Formats
Description
Find Boundaries and Peace from Codependent Behaviors
Free yourself from codependency and reclaim your sanity, peace, and inner strength with this codependency book by Karen Casey, the bestselling author of Each Day a New Beginning.
Learn how to value your own opinion over those of others. Codependency books are perfect for those of us who live as if what other people think matters more than what we think. This thinking leads to constantly trying to...
8) Alienation
Author
Description
The Hegelian-Marxist idea of alienation fell out of favor during the post-metaphysical rejection of humanism and essentialist views of human nature. In this book Jaeggi draws on phenomenological analyses grounded in modern conceptions of agency, along with recent work in the analytical tradition, to reconceive of alienation as the absence of a meaningful relationship to oneself and others, which manifests itself in feelings of helplessness and the...
Author
Formats
Description
"Humanity is at an inflection point. Stress, disconnection, and increasing environmental degradation have people yearning for more than just material progress, personal freedom, or political stability. We are searching for deeper connection. We are longing to belong. On Belonging is an exploration of the crisis of social isolation and of the fundamental human need to belong. It considers belonging across four core dimensions: in our relationships...
Author
Description
"Which should prevail: loyalty to family or loyalty to the truth? Is telling the truth ever a mistake and is lying for one’s family ever justified? Can one do the right thing, but bitterly regret it? My Life as a Rat follows Violet Rue Kerrigan, a young woman who looks back upon her life in exile from her family following her testimony, at age twelve, concerning what she knew to be the racist murder of an African-American boy by her older brothers....
11) The outsider
Author
Formats
Description
[The author] presents a compelling story of a black man's attempt to escape his past and start anew in Harlem. Cross Damon is a man at odds with society and with himself, a man who hungers for peace but who brings terror and destruction wherever he goes.
Author
Description
The stories in Better Than War encompass narratives from a diverse set of Iranian immigrants, many searching for a balance between memories of their homeland and their new American culture. The everyday life of each character subtly reflects viewpoints that are simultaneously Iranian and American, of all ages and circumstances. These stories deal with family, friends, relationships, urban life, prison, school, and adolescence. They also contain powerful...
13) After nightfall
Author
Publisher
Lake Union Publishing
Pub. Date
[2018]
Description
Imagine your closest friend utterly betraying you. Years later, when she seeks forgiveness, you invite her to your engagement party as a gesture of reconcilliation. But seething hostilities rise to the surface, ruining everyone's evening. After an awful night, your friend's battered, lifeless body is found at the bottom of a rocky cliff.
14) The stranger
Author
Series
Everyman's library volume 139
Description
The Stranger by Albert Camus is a short novel about an ordinary little man living quietly in Algiers. Life begins to stalk him quietly and slowly, but inexorably. The pace quickens until the little man commits a pointless murder - and reaches its climax after his trial. The Stranger presents an indelible picture of a human being helpless in life's grip.
Author
Formats
Description
With Music Through the Floor, Pushcart Prize winner and former Wallace Stegner Fellow Eric Puchner makes an extraordinary debut: a collection of nine unforgettable stories -- strikingly original, fiercely funny, and quietly heartbreaking -- portraying a group of cultural misfits attempting to navigate mainstream America.
Lost, teetering on the edge of normalcy, Puchner's characters seek to define themselves in a frequently absurd and hostile world...
16) Between sisters
Author
Description
Meghann Dontess is a woman haunted by heartbreak. Twenty-seven years ago she was forced to make a terrible choice, one that cost her everything, including the love of her sister, Claire. Now, Meghann is a hotshot divorce attorney who doesn't believe in intimacy, until she meets the one man who can change her mind. Claire Cavenaugh has fallen in love for the first time in her life. As her wedding day approaches, she prepares to face her harsh, judgmental...
Author
Appears on these lists
ATL: Top 10 Most Checked Out Fiction & Nonfiction Titles of 2023
Bedford Library Staff's Favorite Reads of 2024
HPL: Cozy Reads for Every Mood
HPL: Staff Picks for Adults & Teens 2023-2024
Bedford Library Staff's Favorite Reads of 2024
HPL: Cozy Reads for Every Mood
HPL: Staff Picks for Adults & Teens 2023-2024
Description
"Maya Andersson and Benji Ovich, two young people who left in search of a life far from the forest town, come home and joyfully reunite with their closest childhood friends. There is a new sense of optimism and purpose in the town, embodied in the impressive new ice rink that has been built down by the lake. Two years have passed since the events that no one wants to think about. Everyone has tried to move on, but there's something about this place...
Author
Formats
Description
"Alma and her family live close to the land: they raise chickens and sheep, they make maple syrup. Every day Alma's husband leaves for his job at a nearby college while she stays home with their young children, cleans, searches for secondhand goods online, and reads books by the women writers she adores. Then, one night, she abruptly leaves it all behind - speeding through the darkness, away from their Vermont homestead, bound for New York. In a series...
Author
Formats
Description
A fascinating study of Edward Hopper's iconic Nighthawks painting and its deep significance for understanding American culture.
Staying up Much Too Late discusses the painting Nighthawks and the painter Edward Hopper and their central importance to twentieth-century American culture. Topics include individualism, New York City, Arthur "Weegee" Fellig, diners, pornography, capitalism, advertising, cigarettes, American philosophy, World War II, Gravity's...
20) All our names
Author
Description
An unforgettable love story about a searing affair between an American woman and an African man in 1970s America and an unflinching novel about the fragmentation of lives that straddle countries and histories. All Our Names is the story of two young men who come of age during an African revolution, drawn from the safe confines of the university campus into the intensifying clamor of the streets outside. But as the line between idealism and violence...