Charming Billy

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Alice McDermott / Hardcover / Published 1998

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The prestigious National Book Award for fiction honors Alice McDermott's Charming Billy , a haunting narrative of the lies that hold one Irish family together. Charming Billy is a devastating account of the power of longing and lies, love's tenacity, and resignation's hold. Even at his funeral party, Billy Lynch's life remains up for debate. This soft-spoken, poetry lover's drinking was as legendary among his Queens, New York, family and friends as was his disappointment in love. But the latter, as his cousin Dennis knows, "was, after all, yet another sweet romance to preserve."

Other winners: Edward Ball for Slaves in the Family, poet Gerald Stern for This Time, and Louis Sachar for his young adult novel Holes.

Amsterdam: A Novel

Ian McEwan; Hardcover

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Happy 30th birthday to the Booker Prize. The Booker celebrated by bestowing top honors to Ian McEwan's Amsterdam, a darkly funny tale of love, death, scandal, and euthanasia.

Birthday Letters

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Ted Hughes / Hardcover / Published 1998

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The prestigious literary award--given to writers who have resided in the U.K. or Ireland for at least three years--has announced its 1998 winner. For the second year in a row, Ted Hughes has won, this time for Birthday Letters.

Black Zodiac

by Charles Wright
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Noonday Pr
Paperback - 85 pages
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Charles Wright's Black Zodiac received the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award amid stiff competition and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. When Wright is on, his work is gratifying in many ways. He is, first of all, a consummate musician, and his fine ear enables him to take liberties with what is being said, to test aphorisms against atmospheric pressure.

American Pastoral

by Phillip Roth
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Vintage Books
Paperback - 432 pages , Reprint edition
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Readers who have followed Philip Roth's hero and alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman through five previous novels will be happy to see him again in American Pastoral, a novel that finds Nathan attending a high school reunion in Newark, New Jersey. But enjoy him while you can. Nathan disappears on page 89 and the story turns toward the particulars of Seymour Levov--the Swede, to his friends--a classmate of Zuckerman's whose life, it turns out, is nothing like what Nathan had imagined for him.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

by Jared Diamond
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W.W. Norton & Company
Hardcover - 480 pages
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Life isn't fair--here's why: Since 1500, Europeans have, for better and worse, called the tune that the World has danced to. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond explains the reasons why things worked out that way. It is an elemental question, and Diamond is not nearly the first to ask it. However, he performs a singular service by relying on scientific fact rather than specious theories of European genetic superiority. Diamond, a professor of physiology at UCLA, suggests that the geography.

The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor
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W.W. Norton & Company
Hardcover - 480 pages
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As Rafi Zabor's PEN-Faulkner Award-winning novel opens, the Bear shuffles and jigs with a chain through his nose, rolling in the gutter, letting his partner wrestle him to the ground for the crowd's enjoyment. But as soon becomes clear, this is no ordinary dancing bear. "I mean, dance is all right, even street dance. It's the poetry of the body, flesh aspiring to grace or inviting the spirit in to visit," he muses, but before all else, the Bear's heart belongs to jazz.

Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball
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Farrar Straus & Giroux
Hardcover - 272 pages , 1 Ed edition
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Writer Edward Ball opens Slaves in the Family with an anecdote: "My father had a little joke that made light of our legacy as a family that had once owned slaves. 'There are five things we don't talk about in the Ball family,' he would say. 'Religion, sex, death, money and the Negroes.'" Ball himself seemed happy enough to avoid these touchy issues until an invitation to a family reunion in South Carolina piqued his interest in his family's extensive plantation and slave-holding past.

This Time: New and Selected Poems

by Gerald Stern
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W.W. Norton & Company
Hardcover - 288 pages , 1 Ed edition
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Gerald Stern is often compared to Walt Whitman, and his verse does possess a similar oracular urgency. Yet his lines are shorter and more digestible to the modern ear, and his emotional sensibility is more likely to search for analogies in wildlife--maple trees and blue jays in Iowa backyards, spiders on New Jersey bridges--than in Whitman's worlds of labor and war.

Rapunzel (Caldecott Medal Book)

by Paul O. Zelinsky, et al
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Dutton Books
Hardcover - 48 pages , 1 Ed edition
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In older versions of the classic tale Rapunzel, it always seemed improbable that a grown man could scale a tower using only his beloved's hair. Not so in Paul O. Zelinsky's Caldecott Medal-winning version of Rapunzel. Here, Rapunzel's reddish-blonde mane is thick with waves and braids, and cascades like a waterfall down the walls of her isolation tower. In Zelinsky's able hands it's easy to believe that a prince would harbor no hesitations about scrambling up our fair heroine's hair.

Out of the Dust (Newbery Medal Book)

by Karen Hesse
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Scholastic Trade
Hardcover - 160 pages , 1 Ed edition
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Like the Oklahoma dust bowl from which she came, 14-year-old narrator Billie Jo writes in sparse, free-floating verse. In this compelling, immediate journal, Billie Jo reveals the grim domestic realities of living during the years of constant dust storms - that hopes, like the crops, blow away in the night like skittering tumbleweeds.

Forever Peace

by Joe Haldeman
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Ace Books
Hardcover - 368 pages
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Julian Class is a full-time professor and part-time combat veteran who spends a third of each month virtually wired to a robotic "soldierboy." The soldierboys, along with flyboys and other advanced constructs, allow the U.S. to wage a remotely controlled war against constant uprisings in the Third World.

Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke
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Hyperion
Hardcover - 352 pages
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Billy Bob Holland, the protagonist of Cimarron Rose, is an attorney in the dusty Texas town of Deaf Smith. An ex-Texas Ranger (cop, not ball-player) who mistakenly killed his partner during a drug bust, Holland is jolted from his brooding when his estranged illegitimate son is accused of the rape and murder of a party girl. He takes the case, of course, and things quickly get complicated.

Lewis & Clark : The Journey of the Corps of Discovery

by Dayton Duncan, et al
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Random House (Audio)
Audio Cassette , Cassette edition
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In the spring of 1804, a party of explorers set out from St. Louis in search of the Northwest Passage, a possible water route across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. Under the leadership of two starkly different commanders, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, this diverse group calling itself the Corps of Discovery was comprised of soldiers, French Canadian boatmen, a slave named York, and, eventually, an Indian woman named Sacagawea and her infant son.