NCW Libraries

Available for the first time in a single volume are the three holiday stories that Truman Capote regarded as among his greatest works of short fiction. Two of these childhood memoirs - "A Christmas Memory" and "The Thanksgiving Visitor"--Center on the author's early years with a family of distant relatives in rural Alabama. Both pay loving tribute to an eccentric old-maid cousin, Miss Sook Faulk, who became his best friend. In "A Christmas Memory,"...

After a scandal breaks out involving a famous Irish Nationalist politician, Stephen Dedalus finds his family being torn apart over their differing opinions of the matter. Shaken by all the fighting and animosity, Stephen begins to wonder where he can place his faith. Questioning the Irish and Catholic ideology that he was raised on, Stephen begins to rebel against expectations as he departs for college. While he excels in his studies, Stephen struggles...

"In the wake of Hilary Mantel's brilliant conclusion to her award-winning Wolf Hall trilogy, this collection of loosely autobiographical stories locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood. Sharp and funny, these drawn-from-life stories begin in the 1950s in an insular northern village "scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues." For the child narrator, the only way to survive is to get up, get on, get out. In "King Billy Is a Gentleman,"...

The classic novel that epitomizes the "Beat Generation." Portrays a spontaneous and wandering way of life founded on jazz and drugs.

Villette, by Charlotte Bronte, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies of contemporary...

"Willie Nelson, country music's quintessential musician, displays all the wit and warmth of his homespun style of storytelling in an inspiring holiday novel based on his classic Christmas song, "Pretty Paper." More than fifty years ago, Willie Nelson's beloved Christmas song "Pretty Paper" first hit the airwaves. And for all these years, Willie has wondered about the real-life Texas street vendor, selling wrappings and ribbons, who inspired his song....

A classic tale of an orphan growing up in the 1800's of England. Intimately rooted in the author's own biography and written as a first-person narrative, "David Copperfield" charts a young man's progress through a difficult childhood in Victorian England to ultimate success as a novelist, finding true love along the way. Jeremy Tambling's provocative Introduction reveals subtle themes relevant today in Dickens' favorite work.

"An award-winning Peruvian journalist and writer delivers her stunning English breakthrough in an autobiographical novel that explores colonialism through one woman's family ties to both the colonized and colonizer. Alone in a museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener confronts her complicated family heritage. She is visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artifacts, spoils of European colonialism, many stolen from her homeland of Peru. As she peers at countless...

"When Tom's heavily pregnant girlfriend Karin is rushed to the hospital, doctors are able to save the baby. But they are helpless to save Karin from what turns out to be acute leukemia. And in a cruel, fleeting moment Tom gains a daughter but loses his soul-mate. In Every Moment We Are Alive is the story of the year that changes everything, as Tom must reconcile the fury and pain of loss with the overwhelming responsibility of raising his daughter,...

"From one of the most highly acclaimed writers at work today: his most intimate and epic work yet--an autobiographical novel of sex and love, family and friendship. Inside Story had its birth in the death of Martin Amis's closest friend, the incomparable Christopher Hitchens, and it is within that profound and sprawling friendship that the novel unfurls. From their early days as young magazine staffers in London, reviewing romantic entanglements and...