Alamosa Public Library

"What are you reading?" That's the quest Will Schwalbe asks his mother, Mary Anne, as they sit in the waiting room of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. In 2007, Mary Anne returned from a humanitarian trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan suffering from what her doctors believed was a rare type of hepatitis. Months later she was diagnosed with a form of advanced pancreatic cancer. This is the inspiring story of a son and his mother, who start a "book club"...

A nostalgic and unflinchingly funny celebration of the horror fiction boom of the 1970's and 1980's, complete with story summaries and artist and author profiles.

What is the role of literature in an era when one political party wages continual war on writers and the press? What is the connection between political strife in our daily lives, and the way we meet our enemies on the page in fiction? How can literature, through its free exchange, affect politics? In this galvanizing guide to literature as resistance, Nafisi seeks to answer these questions. Drawing on her experiences as a woman and voracious reader...

"Not all the water in the rough rude sea/Can wash the balm off from an anointed king," declares the soon-to-be deposed ruler of this historical drama. Confident in his divine right, Richard II is an ineffective and unpopular king who abuses his power and sows the seeds of his own downfall. Toppled from the throne by Henry, his ambitious cousin, Richard only learns to value kingship after he loses it, achieving a tragic dignity only with his downfall....

"Needed now more than ever: a guide that includes 500 diverse contemporary fiction and memoir recommendations for preteens and teens with the goal of inspiring greater empathy for themselves, their peers, and the world around them. As young people are diagnosed with anxiety and depression in increasing numbers, or dealing with other issues that can isolate them from family and friends-such as bullying, learning disabilities, racism, or homophobia-characters...

A true 20th-century classic from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Sound and the Fury: the famed harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother.
As I Lay Dying is one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama. Narrated in turn by each of the family members, including Addie herself as well as others,...

Love's Labours Lost - William Shakespeare - Love's Labour's Lost is one of William Shakespeare's early comedies, believed to have been written in the mid-1590s for a performance at the Inns of Court before Queen Elizabeth I. It follows the King of Navarre and his three companions as they attempt to forswear the company of women for three years of study and fasting, and their subsequent infatuation with the Princess of Aquitaine and her ladies. In...

Although one of his lesser known plays, Shakespeare's considerable abilities as a playwright are readily apparent in "Troilus and Cressida." This historical and tragic 'problem play', thought to be inspired by Chaucer, Homer, and some of Shakespeare's history-recording contemporaries, is initially a tale of a man and woman in love during the Trojan War. When Cressida is given to the Greeks in exchange for a prisoner of war, Troilus is determined to...

A fascinating exploration of the contents of Agatha Christie's seventy-three private notebooks, including illustrations and two unpublished Poirot stories

When Agatha Christie died in 1976, at age eighty-five, she had become the world's most popular author. With sales of more than two billion copies worldwide, in more than one hundred countries, she had achieved the impossible—more than one book every year since the 1920s, every one

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What do the great books of your youth have to say about your life now? Smokler's essays on the classics are divided into ten sections, each covering an archetypical stage of life from youth and first love to family, loss, and the future. The author not only reminds you about the essential features of each great book but gives you a practical, real-world reason why revisiting it in adulthood is not only enjoyable but useful.