Enjoying the Classics (01/18/2023): The Razor’s Edge
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Enjoying the Classics (01/18/2023): The Razor’s Edge

Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute. The progress of this spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham’s most brillant characters – his fiancee Isabel, whose choice between love and wealth have lifelong repercussions, and Elliot Templeton, her uncle, a classic expatriate American snob. The most ambitious of Maugham’s novels, this is also one in which Maugham himself plays a considerable part as he wanders in and out of the story, to observe his characters struggling with their fates. […]

Enjoying the Classics (11/16/2022): McTeague
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Enjoying the Classics (11/16/2022): McTeague

A couple’s life and love are destroyed when they win the lottery in this tragic tale of turn-of-the-century San Francisco.

McTeague and Trina are in love, and with the modest income from McTeague’s dentistry office, their needs are few. But when Trina wins a small fortune from a lottery ticket, jealousy and distrust begin to unravel their happy home. As tension erupts between McTeague and Trina’s cousin Marcus, Trina’s impulse to save her winnings slowly gives way to a pathological obsession with hoarding money. Betrayed and destitute, the couple embarks on a journey down a path of violence, theft, and murder.

Considered transgressive for its brutality and sordid subject matter upon first publication in 1899, McTeague has since served as the basis for the films Greed (1924) by Erich von Stroheim and Slow Burn (2000), starring Minnie Driver and James Spader. Widely acclaimed as Frank Norris’s masterpiece, the novel was hailed as “a literary masterpiece” by the New York Times. […]

Enjoying the Classics (10/19/2022): Passing
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Enjoying the Classics (10/19/2022): Passing

Irene Redfield is living an affluent, enviable life with her husband and children in the thriving African American enclave of Harlem in the 1920s. That is, until she runs into her childhood friend, Clare Kendry. Since they last saw each other, Clare, who is similarly light-skinned, has been “passing” for a white woman, married to a racist man who does not know about his wife’s real identity, which she has chosen to hide from the rest of the world. Irene is both fascinated and repulsed by Clare’s dangerous secret, and in turn, Clare yearns for Irene’s sense of ease and security with her Black identity and community, which Clare gave up in pursuit of a more advantageous life, and which she can never embrace again. As the two women grow close, Clare begins to insert herself and her deception into every part of Irene’s stable existence, and their complex reunion sets off a chain of events that dynamically alters both women forever.

In this psychologically gripping and chilling novel, Nella Larsen explores the blurriness of race, sacrifice, alienation, and desire that defined her own experience as a woman of mixed race, issues that still powerfully resonate today. Ultimately, Larsen forces us to consider whether we can ever truly choose who we are. […]

Enjoying the Classics (09/21/2022): Nostromo
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Enjoying the Classics (09/21/2022): Nostromo

Joseph Conrad’s multilayered masterpiece tells of one nation’s violent revolution and one hero’s moral degeneration. Conrad convincingly invents an entire country, Costaguana, and sets it afire as warlords compete for power and a fortune in silver.

Señor Gould, adamant that his silver should not become spoil for his enemies, entrusts it to his faithful longshoreman, Nostromo, a local hero of sorts whom Señor Gould believes to be incorruptible. Nostromo accepts the mission as an opportunity to increase his own fame. But when his exploit fails to win him the rewards he had hoped for, he is consumed by a corrupting resentment.

Nostromo, relevant both as literature and as a brilliant social study, ambitiously brings to life Latin American history and the politics of an underdeveloped country. […]

Enjoying the Classics (08/17/2022): The Virginian
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Enjoying the Classics (08/17/2022): The Virginian

The novel that introduced the first great American hero: the cowboy

The Virginian cuts an impressive figure when the unnamed narrator of Owen Wister’s groundbreaking novel first encounters him in Medicine Bow, Wyoming. Dark-haired and physically imposing, the charismatic Virginian quickly befriends the narrator, whom he nicknames “the tenderfoot,” and the two embark on a three-hundred-mile journey to the ranch where the Virginian works. Life on the frontier is unforgiving—filled with hardship and violence—and as they travel together, the tenderfoot recognizes all the ways in which the stoic and principled Virginian exemplifies the heroism and romance of life in the Wild West.

Published in 1902 and considered to be the first true Western, The Virginian broke the trail for every great poet of the frontier, from Zane Grey to Louis L’Amour to John Ford. […]

Enjoying the Classics (07/20/2022): The Black Tulip
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Enjoying the Classics (07/20/2022): The Black Tulip

The tulip craze of 17th century Holland has a dark side! Cornelius van Baerle, a wealthy but naïve tulip grower, finds himself entangled in the deadly politics of his time. Cornelius’ one desire is to grow the perfect black tulip. But, after his godfather is murdered, he finds himself in prison, facing a death sentence. His jailer’s lovely daughter holds the key to his survival, and his chance to produce the precious black blossom. Yet he has one more enemy to contend with! […]

The Case of the Missing Mysteries and Other Library Adventures
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The Case of the Traveling Mysteries and Other Library Adventures

The next time you visit the Adult Services Department at the Main Library on Harnish Drive, you might notice that things look a little bit different. Our librarians and materials staff have been busy rearranging our fiction collections to make browsing easier, and to create room for some exciting new items we can’t wait to share! Here’s where you’ll find…

Enjoying the Classics (06/15/2022): Angle of Repose
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Enjoying the Classics (06/15/2022): Angle of Repose

Wallace Stegner’s uniquely American classic centers on Lyman Ward, a noted historian who relates a fictionalized biography of his pioneer grandparents at a time when he has become estranged from his own family. Through a combination of research, memory, and exaggeration, Ward voices ideas concerning the relationship between history and the present, art and life, parents and children, husbands and wives. Like other great quests in literature, Lyman Ward’s investigation leads him deep into the dark shadows of his own life. The result is a deeply moving novel that, through the prism of one family, illuminates the American present against the fascinating background of its past.

Set in many parts of the West, Angle of Repose is a story of discovery—personal, historical, and geographical—that endures as Wallace Stegner’s masterwork: an illumination of yesterday’s reality that speaks to today’s. […]

Enjoying the Classics (05/18/2022): A Good Man Is Hard to Find
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Enjoying the Classics (05/18/2022): A Good Man Is Hard to Find

In 1955, with the title story and others in this critical edition, Flannery O’Connor firmly laid claim to her place as one of the most original and provocative writers of her generation. Steeped in a Southern Gothic tradition that would become synonymous with her name, these stories show O’Connor’s unique view of life—infused with religious symbolism, haunted by apocalyptic possibility, sustained by the tragic comedy of human behavior, confronted by the necessity of salvation. These classic stories—including “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Good Country People,” and “The Displaced Person,” among others, are sure to inspire future generations of fans and remind existing readers why she remains a master of the short story. […]

Enjoying the Classics (04/20/2022): Life of Pi
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Enjoying the Classics (04/20/2022): Life of Pi

Pi Patel is an unusual boy. The son of a zookeeper, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior, a fervent love of stories, and practices not only his native Hinduism, but also Christianity and Islam. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes. The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with Richard Parker for 227 days lost at sea.

When they finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees to the jungle, never to be seen again. The Japanese authorities who interrogate Pi refuse to believe his story and press him to tell them “the truth.” After hours of coercion, Pi tells a second story, a story much less fantastical, much more conventional-but is it more true?

Life of Pi is at once a realistic, rousing adventure and a meta-tale of survival that explores the redemptive power of storytelling and the transformative nature of fiction. It’s a story, as one character puts it, to make you believe in God. […]