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Reading recommendations for fiction, nonfiction, and audiobooks across all reading levels.
1) Ulysses
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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.
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Experience one fraught, momentous day in the life of Baruch Kotler, a Soviet Jewish dissident who now finds himself a disgraced Israeli politician. When he refuses to back down from a contrary but principled stand regarding the settlements in the West Bank, his political opponents expose his affair with a mistress decades his junior, and the besieged couple escapes to Yalta, the faded Crimean resort of Kotler's youth. There, shockingly, Kotler comes...
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When a witness's son is kidnapped, Chicago's gangland erupts into chaos Once a college football star, Bill Hanrahan has had a hard time of it ever since his bad knees kept him out of the pros. He became a homicide detective with the unfortunate reputation of losing witnesses and loving the bottle. Now Hanrahan is off the sauce, and working a job that should be straightforward: He's guarding a mob informant's ex-wife and teenage son while they tour...
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"Avital Cohen isn't wearing underpants--woefully, for unsexy reasons. Chronic pelvic pain has forced her to sideline her photography dreams and her love life. It's all she can do to manage her family's kosher bakery, Best Babka in Brooklyn, without collapsing. She needs hired help. And distractingly handsome Ethan Lippmann seems the perfect fit. Except Ethan isn't there to work--he's undercover, at the behest of his ironfisted grandfather. Though...
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Carl Zwick is an aging Chicago Cubs baseball player. Sometimes he feels like he's spent his life hitting into double plays, but he's finally gotten onto the right track. Then tragedy strikes him out.
Anita Mills is a pretty single black mother just trying to get by. A random act of brutality in one of Chicago's rougher neighborhoods permanently ends her struggle.
Richard Allen Smith walks the streets of ChiTown saying God has sent him. He has an...
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Through the eyes of an elderly Polish Jew, a comment on 20-century existence. A former journalist and survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, he lives in New York's upper west side, musing on the loss of tradition, roots, and ideals, and eyeing various family crises with curious but objective eyes.
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Buck Schatz mysteries volume 2
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"Twenty something Daniel Friedman's debut hit novel, Don't Ever Get Old, was a huge critical and word-of-mouth success. Friedman's unforgettable protagonist Buck Schatz is back, and, once again, this 88-year-old retired Memphis cop refuses to go gently into that good night. Having sustained injuries in Don't Ever Get Old, Buck is living at a retirement home with his wife, and he's downright miserable being treated like the elderly person he is. But...
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A literary love story.
In this literary love story, Marcus Weiss, a loyal denizen of New York City, retires at age fifty to work on a dictionary he has grandly titled "The Human Gesture in Western Literature." Comparing himself to Flaubert, who read fifteen hundred books in order to compose his Bouvard and Pécuchet-Marcus immerses himself in literature, culling quotations and passages for his dictionary and treating his friends to impromptu readings...
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Handcuffed to a dead man, Lieberman vows to take on the Chicago mob Thirty-three years ago, Connie Gower decided to raise hell in a synagogue. Drunk, armed, and out for revenge, he came to hunt down Abe Lieberman, a young cop he believed had killed his brother in a shoot-out. Lieberman takes him down, unafraid to return fire. Since then, Gower has had few run-ins with the law, even as he made a name for himself as one of the Chicago mob's most feared...
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"Benjamin Gold is damaged goods. After he cracked up in the war and was discharged into a psych ward, his rich wife dumped him. Right after that, the white-shoe law firm that never hired Jews dumped him too; without powerful in-laws, it didn't matter how many cases he won or how much he shortened his name. Unemployable as a lawyer, he wound up working as a private eye - and not exactly at the top of the profession. Drunk and anorectic, his only remaining...
13) The human stain
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It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret. But it's not the secret of his affair, at seventy-one, with Faunia Farley,...
14) Herzog
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Is Moses Herzog losing his mind? His formidable wife Madeleine has left him for his best friend, and Herzog is left alone with his whirling thoughts - yet he still sees himself as a survivor, raging against private disasters and the myriad catastrophes of the modern age.
15) The winter guest
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"Life is a constant struggle for the eighteen-year-old Nowak twins as they raise their three younger siblings in rural Poland under the shadow of the Nazi occupation ... Helena discovers an American paratrooper stranded outside their small mountain village ... Risking the safety of herself and her family, she hides Sam--a Jew--but Helena's concern for the American grows into something much deeper ... [as] Helena is forced to contend with the jealousy...
17) My fine fellow
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It's 1830s England, and Culinarians--doyens who consult with society's elite to create gorgeous food and confections--are the creme de la creme of high society. Helena Higgins, top of her class at the Royal Academy, has a sharp demeanor and an even sharper palate--and knows stardom awaits her if she can produce greatness in her final year. Penelope Pickering is going to prove the value of non-European cuisine to all of England. Her contemporaries...
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Zuckerman novels volume 3
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Farrar, Straus, Giroux
Pub. Date
c1983
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The finale to Roth's Zuckerman trilogy. Nathan Zuckerman comes down with a mysterious physical affliction - pure pain, beginning in his neck and shoulders, invading his torso, and taking possession of his life. His work was his life, but now his work is trekking from one doctor to the next.
19) The ghost writer
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Zuckerman novels volume 1
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At 23, ambitious Nathan Zukerman has had four stories published, received a complimentary profile in Saturday Review, and has alienated his family with his unflattering biographical bent. When well-known author E.I. Lonoff invites Nathan to his secluded New England home, the budding young writer hopes to learn from a master. Instead of inspiration, however, Nathan encounters a man whose self-absorption borders on egomania and a hauntingly mysterious...