American Literature Collection

Poppy Turner has spent more than a decade teaching children grammar and arithmetic. Suddenly her days are steeped in fears that reach well beyond a classroom filled with air-raid drills and anxious young faces. As a mother-to-be, she worries about bringing a child into a time of such turmoil. To find stability, she will have to decide if she’s willing to look more closely at her own past.

Beginning with several dozen new poems that have appeared in The New Yorker, among other publications, this volume is a tour through Cynthia Zarin’s five exquisitely made collections, beginning with The Swordfish Tooth, published in 1989. Zarin, a poet in the line of Elizabeth Bishop, allows the listener to experience human truths through a poem's shape and music, bodied forth through intimate images—the turn in the stair, a snow globe, naked birch branches, a vase of flowers—and a propulsive syntax.

Black Girl Magic continues and deepens the work of the first BreakBeat Poets anthology by focusing on some of the most exciting Black women writing today. This anthology breaks up the myth of hip-hop as a boys’ club and asserts the truth that the cypher is a feminine form.

Examining the borders between one nation and another, between one person and another, Urrea reveals his mastery of the short form. This collection includes the Edgar-award winning "Amapola" and his now-classic "Bid Farewell to Her Many Horses," which had the honor of being chosen for NPR's "Selected Shorts" not once but twice.

In Kenan's fictional territory of Tims Creek, North Carolina, an old man rages in his nursing home, a parson beats up an adulterer, a rich man is haunted by a hog, and an elderly woman turns unwitting miracle worker. A retired plumber travels to Manhattan, where Billy Idol sweeps him into his entourage. An architect who lost his famous lover to AIDS reconnects with a high school fling. Howard Hughes seeks out the woman who once cooked him butter beans.

How does a Mexican American, the son of poor immigrants, leave his border home and move to the heart of gringo America? How does he adapt to the worlds of wealth, elite universities, the rush and power of New York City? How does he make peace with a stern, old-fashioned father who has only known hard field labor his whole life? Troncoso tells his luminous stories through the lens of an exile adrift in the 21st century, his characters suffering from the loss of culture and language, the loss of roots and home as they adapt to the glittering promises of new worlds that seem so empty.

The National Book Award finalist for Refund returns with a new collection of stories that boldly examines the changes in American culture over the last two years through the increasing presence of violence, bigotry, sexual harassment, and the emotional costs of living under constant threat. In the title story, the competition between two middle school cellists is affected by a shooting at their school, and it is only years later that they realize how the intrusion of violence affected the course of their lives.

A FINALIST FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD Horace Hopper is a half-Paiute, half-Irish ranch hand who wants to be somebody. He's spent most of his life on the ranch of his kindly guardians, Mr. and Mrs. Reese, herding sheep alone in the mountains. But while the Reeses treat him like a son, Horace...

Following in the steps of Beatriz Williams and Amor Towles, this richly atmospheric, spellbinding novel transports readers to the dazzling, glamorous world of Newport during the Roaring Twenties and to a mansion filled with secrets as a debonair lawyer must separate truth from deception. Spring...

The ""wonderfully talented"" (Dwight Garner, New York Times) author of Mislaid returns with a fierce and audaciously funny novel of families—both the ones we’re born into and the ones we create—a story of obsession, idealism, and ownership, centered around a young woman who inherits her...

From the author of the highly acclaimed The Story of Land and Sea comes a captivating novel, set in the late eighteenth-century American South, that follows a singular group of companions—an escaped slave, a white orphan, and a Creek Indian—who are being tracked down for murder. In 1788...

In this short story collection, New York Times bestselling author Brenda Jackson takes us on five steamy, sexy adventures. From a freelance writer whose interview with a ruthless, ambitious, and very handsome millionaire turns into something so much more to an attorney’s explosive encounter...

Six Gaelic tales of wonder and adventure, read in an authentic brogue by actor Des Keogh, transport wee listeners to a magic world of leprechauns and giants.

Headstrong Coraline Baxter has worked all her life to be more than the spoiled socialite others expect. When her beloved stepfather's bank is threatened by the Panic of 1893, she makes a deal with arrogant entrepreneur Cash Kincaid, who has been pressuring her to marry him. If she can climb Mount Rainier, he will bail out the bank. All Cora needs is a guide to get her to the top.

This program is read by the author. A selection of poems from the celebrated poet and lawyer Beginning with his first book, Shouting at No One, from 1983, and continuing through to So Where Are We?, from 2017, A Certain Clarity provides a generous selection of Lawrence Joseph’s poetry “of...

A Children's Book About Beer? Yes, believe it or not—but B Is for Beer is also a book for adults, and bear in mind that it's the work of maverick bestselling novelist Tom Robbins, inter-nationally known for his ability to both seriously illuminate and comically entertain. nce upon a time...

A hypnotic collection of speculative fiction about compassion, love, and human resilience in the technological hyper-age, from Alexander Weinstein, author of Children of the New World. Universal Love welcomes listeners to a near-future world where our everyday technologies have fundamentally...

A powerful and moving new novel from an award-winning, acclaimed author: in the wake of a devastating revelation, a father and son journey north across a tapestry of towns. When a widower receives notice from a doctor that he doesn’t have long left to live, he is struck by the question of who...

“[Twain] was, in the phrase of his friend William Dean Howells, ‘the Lincoln of our literature’... At the heart of his work lies that greatest of all American qualities: irreverence.” — Washington Post “More than 100 years after [Twain] wrote these stories, they remain not only...

Kia Carson, a Los Angeles district attorney with beauty, brains, taste, and style, is about to turn thirty-five. There's just one problem with her picture-perfect life—she's not got one eligible man in sight. Well, thank God she has her career . . . at least until she gets suspended from her...