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Willa Cather’s story of the missionary priest Father Jean Marie Latour and his work of faith in the wilderness of the Southwest is told with a spare but sensuous directness and profound artistry—with an Introduction by A. S. Byatt. When Latour arrives in 1851 in the territory of New Mexico, newly acquired by the United States, what he finds is a vast desert region of red hills and tortured arroyos that is American by law but Mexican and Indian...
2) The pearl
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"For the diver Kino, finding a magnificent pearl means the promise of better life for his impoverished family. His dream blinds him to the greed and suspicions the pearl arouses in him and his neighbors, and even his loving wife cannot temper his obsession or stem the events leading to tragedy. Kino and his wife illustrate the fall from innocence of people who believe that wealth erases all problems"--P. [4] of cover.
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In a future totalitarian state where books are banned and destroyed by the government, Guy Montag, a fireman in charge of burning books, meets a revolutionary schoolteacher who dares to read and a girl who tells him of a past when people did not live in fear ... This sixtieth-anniversary edition commemorates Ray Bradbury's masterpiece with a new introduction by Neil Gaiman ; personal essays on the genesis of the novel by the author; a wealth of critical...
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"First published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads-- driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human...
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One of the greatest epic novels in history, Les Misérables is the moving story of Jean Valjean's struggle for redemption and his lifelong pursuit by Javert, a police detective determined to return Valjean to chains. Always one step ahead of Javert, Valjean encounters the tragic Fantine, and ultimately rescues Fantine's daughter, Cosette, from her wretched life with the Thénadiers, treating the child as his own as she comes of age in pre-revolutionary...
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"A Victorian scientist and inventor creates a machine for propelling himself through time, and voyages to the year AD 802701, where he discovers a race of humanoids called the Eloi. Their gently indolent way of life, set in a decaying cityscape, leads the scientist to believe that they are the remnants of a once great civilization. He is forced to revise this assessment when he comes across the cave dwellings of threatening ape-like creatures known...
8) Kim
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Classics - St. Charles Public Library
Historical Fiction Set in India
If you Like The Covenant of Water, try...
Historical Fiction Set in India
If you Like The Covenant of Water, try...
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Rudyard Kipling's epic rendition of the imperial experience in India is also his greatest long work. Born in India and growing into early manhood, Kim is the son of an Irish soldier born under British Imperial rule in 19th century India. Left in the care of a half-caste woman, Kim is free to explore the back allies and bazaars of Lahore. But when he meets with his father's old regiment he trades his native clothes for European suits and abandons his...
9) Lord Jim
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The eponymous Jim is a young, good-looking, genial, and naive water-clerk on the Patna, a cargo ship plying Asian waters. He is, we are told, "the kind of fellow you would, on the strength of his looks, leave in charge of the deck." He also harbors romantic fantasies of adventure and heroism--which are promptly scuttled one night when the ship collides with an obstacle and begins to sink. Acting on impulse, Jim jumps overboard and lands in a lifeboat,...
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Bunyan wrote the first part of "The pilgrim's progress" when he was in prison as a Baptist preacher. In his hands a pious tract is transformed into a work of imaginative literature which has been more widely read than any book in English except the Bible. Its influence, both indirectly on the English consciousness and directly on the literature that followed, has been immeasurable. The rich countryman's phrases that Bunyan borrowed or invented have...
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Bing! Bang! Chugga! Beep! is the latest charming tale from rhyming pair Bill Martin Jr and Michael Sampson. This old car has been everywhere from the backyard to the sky, from the hills to the water. Bouncing between the mud in the ground and the clouds up high, the old car is loved by a clever young boy ... --
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"Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a seminal novel of the 1960s. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants--a counterculture classic that inspired the 1975 film adaptation, widely considered one of the greatest movies ever made"--
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This updated authoritative edition of the classic Hardy novel, which was published anonymously and first attributed to George Eliot, is set from Hardy's revised, unedited final draft of 1912 and features a new Introduction and Afterword. There is in England no more real or typical district than Thomas Hardy's imaginary Wessex, the scattered fields and farms of which were first discovered in Far from the Madding Crowd. It is here that Gabriel Oak observes...
15) The witches
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This Roald Dahl classic tells the scary, funny and imaginative tale of a seven-year-old boy who has a run-in with some real-life witches! In fairy tales witches always wear silly black hats and black cloaks and they ride on broomsticks. But this is not a fairy tale. This is about REAL WITCHES. REAL WITCHES dress in ordinary clothes and look very much like ordinary women. They live in ordinary houses and they work in ordinary jobs. That is why...
16) My Ántonia
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"Widely recognized as Willa Cather's finest book and one of the outstanding novels of American literature, My Antonia details of the life of early American pioneers in Nebraska. Through Jim Burden's endearing, smitten voice, we revisit the remarkable vicissitudes of immigrant life in the Nebraska heartland, with all its insistent bonds. Guiding the way are some of literature's most beguiling characters: the Russian brothers plagued by memories of...
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From the Publisher: Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes 'unstuck in time' after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden. Slaughterhouse-Five...
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AAPI Heritage Month
Aliens
May Books on Tap: Sci-fi
Thomas Ford Library's Science Fiction Book Club Selections
Aliens
May Books on Tap: Sci-fi
Thomas Ford Library's Science Fiction Book Club Selections
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"When massive, intelligent aliens from Mars touch down in Victorian England and threaten to destroy the civilized world, humanity's vaunted knowledge proves to be of little use. First published in 1898, H.G. Wells's masterpiece of speculative fiction has thrilled and delighted generations of readers, spawned countless imitations, and inspired dramatizations by such masters as Orson Welles and Steven Spielberg. The War of the Worlds is a fantasy that...
19) Kidnapped
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After the death of his father, the seventeen-year-old orphan David Balfour discovers the existence of an uncle, and sets off in search of him. His uncle Ebenezer is far from welcoming, however, and David, after barely escaping with his life, finds himself kidnapped and bound for America, where he is to be sold into slavery. Yet when the hot-headed Jacobite rebel Alan Breck Stewart comes on board, David soon finds himself thrust into a perilous adventure,...
20) Wild ride
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Seventh-grader Charley Decker's mother is on vacation with her boyfriend, and Charley plans to spend the weekend watching movies with her best friends Wade and Oona and her older brother, Greg; but Greg has a date and takes their mother's boyfriend's expensive, rare automobile, than manages to get it towed; Charley and her friends hatch a plan to get the car back--but things go seriously wrong when they discover somebody called Mitch hiding from a...