Showing results by narrator "Lorna Raver" in All Categories

An eccentric boarding house denizen winds up dead; his presumed killer, a fellow boarder, has vanished. The baffling case unfolds through the testimony of witnesses, who are themselves suspect.

Three generations of Roths live together in a crowded tenement flat. Long-widowed Manya is the family's head and its heart. But Manya is no soft touch, except, perhaps, where her granddaughter Elka is concerned. Precocious Elka is her closest companion and confidante. Through Elka's eyes we come to know the fascinating characters who move in and out of the Roths' lives.

Even before John Singer Sargent painted her portrait, Virginie Gautreau's reputation for promiscuity and showy self-display made her the subject of vicious Paris gossip. In this remarkable novel, the author tells Virginie's story, drawing on the sketchy facts of the notorious beauty's life to recreate her tempestuous personality, the captivating milieu of Belle Epoch Paris, and the struggle between artist and model to control the painting that would change their lives and affect the course of art history.

Most people think of the morgue as that cold and sterile facility where medical examiners do their necessary, albeit dreadful, work. Less familiar is the other type of morgue, the dry and dusty version, the newspaper morgue, usually housed in the basements and backrooms of newspaper buildings, where old news clippings are filed away. Dolly Madison Sprowls has been in charge of the Hannawa Herald-Union’s morgue for more than forty years. She is gruff and salty, well past the age of retirement, and the unchallenged queen of her ink-stained domain.

In 1975, a People's Militia homicide investigator is on a plane for Istanbul when it is hijacked by Armenian terrorists. Before the Turkish authorities can fulfill the hijackers' demands, the plane explodes in midair. Two investigators, a secret policeman and a homicide detective, are assigned to the case.

This is an exuberant group portrait of four extraordinary writers, Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Edna Ferber, whose loves, lives, and literary endeavors captured the spirit of the 1920s.

Thirty years after she first heard his voice singing on the jukebox at her local drive-in, Barbara Ann Blakely heard Frank Sinatra take the wedding vows that began his fourth, final, and most enduring marriage. In Lady Blue Eyes, Barbara Sinatra's first public love letter to the husband she adored, she celebrates the sensational singer, possessive mate, sexy heartthrob, and devoted friend that she found in Frank.

Following a string of three New York Times best sellers comes the most powerful work of Mother Angelica, who shares publicly for the first time her most private thoughts and prayers. More powerful and intimate than any of her previous books, this is the book that her millions of admirers have been waiting for. In this special work, listeners are brought inside her spiritual life through her private prayers and reflections.

A starlet's plot to blackmail a film-studio executive results in her murder. Only the "trouble chaser" can clear her volatile lover and solve the crime.

Maddy Sprowls, newspaper librarian for the Hannawa Herald-Union, prefers to stay in the newspaper morgue and do her job. But one Saturday, she sees four elderly women get out of a taxicab at a garage sale. She figures that those women must hire that cabby every week to drive them from garage sale to garage sale, and wouldn't that make a great feature story for the paper? Shortly after the story runs, one of the four women, retired antiques dealer Violeta Bell, is murdered.

Ned is not just any troll. Even though Ned is nearly seven feet tall, with a nose the size of a pickle, Ned has a heart full of love! A heart that swoons over poetry and craves true friendship! And when it comes to humans...it's complicated. So complicated that, long ago, Ned fled the Enchanted Realm for the one place no one would notice a troll hiding in plain sight: New York City. But one human boy - Cody - has noticed.

In These Schools Belong to You and Me, MacArthur Award-winning educator, reformer, and author Deborah Meier draws on her 50-plus years of experience to argue that the purpose of universal education is to provide young people with an "apprenticeship for citizenship in a democracy". Through an intergenerational exchange with her former colleague and fellow educator Emily Gasoi, the coauthors analyze the last several decades of education reform, challenging narrow profit-driven conceptions of school success.

Weaving between heartbreaking memories of her marriage and the pressing needs of her new day-to-day routine, Roiphe constructs an elegant literary pastiche, not of grief but of renewal. She begins her memoir just as the shock of her husband's death has begun to wear off and writes her way into the then unknown world of life after love. In beautifully wrought vignettes, Roiphe captures the infinite number of "firsts" that lie ahead.

The year is 2050 and contrary to popular belief, Judy Garland did not die in 1969, but rather, after several liver transplants, she has lived to the grand old age of 138. Re-embracing her real name, Frances Gumm, she becomes a feminist scholar working on her PhD and writing her thesis on a little-known gay Canadian playwright Dash King, whose career ended in drugs and promiscuous sex. Frances is obsessed with King’s antiquated notion of gay politics.

Growing up in Queens in the 1960s, Alyse Myers always yearned for more in life as she watched her mother settle for an unhappy marriage, an unsatisfying job, and a joyless existence. Alyse rejected everything about her mother's life, but after her death, she inherited a small wooden box whose contents revealed a deeply moving truth.

Written by his wife of twenty years, The Magnificent Elmer is the first book about Elmer Bernstein, a seminal figure of movie music. In this book, Elmer's former wife Pearl tells in vivid anecdotes of their move from a fifth-floor Manhattan walk-up to the red carpets of Hollywood. Pearl participated in the ups and downs of McCarthy, Will Hays, and Otto Preminger. She presents an array of Hollywood's leading men, warts and all, from Sinatra to Odets, from DeMille to Elmer's eponymous rival, Leonard Bernstein.

The mundane and the miraculous stand side by side in these sketches and stories of Southern small-time life by the author of Quite a Year for Plums.

When Susan Richards adopted an abused horse rescued by the local SPCA, she didn't know that the memoir she would write about the experience would become a best seller - or that she would fall in love.

Ellie Jerome is a young-at-heart seventy-five-year-old who feels she has more in common with her twenty-nine-year-old granddaughter, Lucy, than her fifty-five-year-old daughter, Barbara. Ellie's done everything she can to stay young, and the last thing she wants is to celebrate another birthday. So when she finds herself confronted with a cake full of candles, Ellie wishes more than anything that she could be twenty-nine again, just for one day. But who expects a wish like that to come true?

From Coney Island sideshows to the brand-new Yankee Stadium, Diamond Ruby chronicles the extraordinary life and times of a girl who rises from utter poverty to the kind of renown only the Roaring Twenties can bestow. But her fame comes with a price, and Ruby must escape a deadly web of conspiracy and threats from Prohibition rumrunners, the Ku Klux Klan, and the gangster underworld.