Jane Smiley
2) Some luck
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Overview: 1920, Denby, Iowa: Rosanna and Walter Langdon have just welcomed their firstborn son, Frank, into their family farm. He will be the oldest of five. Each chapter in this extraordinary novel covers a single year, encompassing the sweep of history as the Langdons abide by time-honored values and pass them on to their children. With the country on the cusp of enormous social and economic change through the early 1950s, we watch as the personal...
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"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres and the New York Times best-selling Last Hundred Years Trilogy, a captivating, brilliantly imaginative story of three extraordinary animals--and a young boy--whose lives intersect in Paris. Paras is a spirited racehorse at a racetrack west of Paris. At dusk, one afternoon she pushes open the door of her stall--she's a curious filly--and, after traveling through the night, arrives by chance...
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"From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling author: a rollicking murder mystery set in Gold Rush California, as two young prostitutes follow a trail of missing girls. Monterey, 1851. Ever since her husband was killed in a bar fight, Eliza Ripple has been working in a brothel. It seems like a better life, at least at first. The madam, Mrs. Parks, is kind, the men are (relatively) well behaved, and Eliza has attained what few women have:...
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Everyman's library volume 382
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"The only hardcover edition of Jane Smiley's most famous novel--King Lear on an Iowa farm--which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. With a new introduction. This powerful twentieth-century reimagining of Shakespeare's King Lear centers on a wealthy Iowa farmer who decides to divide his farm among his three daughters. When the youngest objects, she is cut out of his will, which sets in motion a chain of events that brings dark truths to light. Ambitiously...
6) Golden age
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"From the Pulitzer Prize-winner: the much-anticipated final volume of her magnificent, best-selling American trilogy, which brings the beloved Langdon family into our present times and beyond. A lot can happen in 100 years, as Jane Smiley has shown to dazzling effect in her astonishing, critically acclaimed Last Hundred Years Trilogy. When Golden Age, its last installment, opens in 1987, the next generation of the Langdon family is facing economic,...
7) Private life
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English
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As her husband's obsessions with science take a darker turn on the eve of World War II, Margaret Mayfield is forced to consider the life she has so carefully constructed.
8) Moo
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A satire on university life, describing the rackets and the intellectual dishonesty that goes on. The setting is the U of Moo where research into the destruction of rain forests is tailored to suit the corporation funding the project. By the author of A Thousand Acres.
9) GOOD FAITH
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English
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New Jersey realtor Joe Stratford is 40 years old, divorced, and ready for a fresh start. Enter Marcus Burns, a former IRS agent who believes the old rules are meant to be broken. Marcus is enthusiastic about his get-rich-quick plans, but are they the right plans for Joe? And why is the local savings and loan so eager to lend Joe and Marcus the money they need to complete a huge real estate transaction?
10) Horse heaven
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A novel set in the world of thoroughbred racing follows a group of trainers, jockeys, and "track brats" on a two-year journey through the racing cycle.
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English
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It is the morning after the 2003 Academy Awards. Max-an Oscar-winning writer/director whose fame has waned-and his lover, Elena, luxuriate in bed, still groggy from last night's red-carpet festivities. They are talking about movies, talking about love, and talking about the war in Iraq, recently begun. But soon their house will be full of guests, and guests like these demand attention. There is Max's ex-wife, "the legendary Zoe Cunningham," a dazzling...
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"Essays that show how Smiley draws inspiration from across literary history to invigorate her own writing. Among the authors she examines are Marguerite de Navarre, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Franz Kafka, Halldor Laxness, and Jessica Mitford"--
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Plain, independent Lidie Harkness, impatient with the restrictions placed on women in mid-nineteenth century Illinois, jumps at the chance to marry New England abolitionist Thomas Newton and travel with him to the Kansas Territory where they embark on a dangerous quest to stop the spread of slavery.
14) Lucky
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"Before Jodie Rattler became a star, she was a girl growing up in St. Louis. One day in 1955, when she was just six years old, her Uncle Drew took her to the racetrack, where she got lucky - and that roll of two-dollar bills she won has never since left her side. Jodie thrived in the warmth of her extended family, and then - through a combination of hard work and serendipity - started a singing career, which catapulted her from St. Louis to New York...
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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres—and "a diverse and masterly writer” (The New York Times Book Review)—comes an enthralling epic tale, written in the tradition of the old Norse sagas, that takes us to fourteenth-century Greenland and tells the story of a proud landowner and his unforgettable family.
Jane Smiley brings us to a farflung place of glittering fjords, blasting...
Jane Smiley brings us to a farflung place of glittering fjords, blasting...
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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres—and “one of her generation’s most eloquent chroniclers of ordinary familial love” (The New York Times)—comes two exquisite twin novellas that chronicle the difficult choices that reshape the lives of two very different families.
In Ordinary Love, Smiley focuses on a woman’s infidelity and the lasting, indelible...
In Ordinary Love, Smiley focuses on a woman’s infidelity and the lasting, indelible...
18) Duplicate keys
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English
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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres comes a brilliant literary thriller set in Manhattan that’s “as taut and chilling as anything Hitchcock put on film" (San Francisco Chronicle). “A first-rate cliffhanger.” —The New York Times Book Review
Alice Ellis is a Midwestern refugee living in Manhattan. Still recovering from a painful divorce, she depends on...
Alice Ellis is a Midwestern refugee living in Manhattan. Still recovering from a painful divorce, she depends on...
20) Barn blind
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Best-selling author and Pulitzer-Prize winner Jane Smiley crafts compelling novels filled with quiet strength and emotion. In Barn Blind she portrays a middle-aged woman so galvanized with success that she drives a wedge between herself and those who love her most. Kate Karlson's only focus in life is her Midwestern horse farm. Ignoring her husband, she spends long days giving riding lessons and training horses. To showcase her teaching ability, she...