NCW Libraries

In 1979, seemingly overnight-- moving at a clip some thirty years faster than the rest of the world-- Iran became the first revolutionary theocracy in modern times. Since then, the country has been largely a black box to the West, a sinister presence looming over the horizon. But inside Iran, a breathtaking drama has unfolded since then, as religious thinkers, political operatives, poets, journalists, and activists have imagined and reimagined what...

An insider's perspective on Appalachia, and a frank, ferocious assessment of America's recent fascination with the people and the problems of the region.

"A literary history of the Federal Writers Project"-- "The plan was as idealistic as it was audacious—and utterly unprecedented. Take thousands of hard-up writers and put them to work charting a country on the brink of social and economic collapse, with the aim of producing a series of guidebooks to the then forty-eight states—along with hundreds of other publications dedicated to cities, regions, and towns—while also gathering...

Mark Twain's semi-autobiographical travel memoir, "Roughing It" was written between 1870-1871 and subsequently published in 1872. Billed as a prequel to "Innocents Abroad", in which Twain details his travels aboard a pleasure cruise through Europe and the Holy Land in 1867, "Roughing It" conversely documents Twain's early days in the old wild west between the years 1861-1867. Employing his characteristically humoristic wit and flare for regional dialect,...

Father Paul Mankowski, S.J. (1953-2020), was one of the most brilliant and scintillating Catholic writers of our time. His essays and reviews, collected here for the first time, display a unique wit, a singular breadth of learning snd a penetrating insight into the challenges of Catholic life in the postmodern world. Whether explicating Catholic doctrine such as the Immaculate Conception, dissecting contemporary academic life, deploring clerical malfeasance,...

"December 1926: England unleashes the largest manhunt in its history. The object of the search is not an escaped convict or a war criminal, but the missing wife of a WWI hero, up-and-coming mystery author Agatha Christie. When her car is found wrecked, empty, and abandoned near a natural spring, the country is in a frenzy. Eleven days later, Agatha reappears, claiming amnesia. She provides no answers for her disappearance. That is...until she writes...

A black woman recalls the anguish of her childhood in Arkansas and her adolescence in northern slums.

"This book provides an in-depth sampling of the best satirical writings by Fr. Paul Mankowski, S.J., a brilliant, perceptive, and knowledgeable analyst of Church affairs during the early twenty-first century. Writing under the pseudonym Diogenes, Fr. Mankowski delighted his many readers with his keen observations and biting wit"--

La mítica última novela del Premio Nobel de Literatura Ernest Hemingway. Publicada póstumamente en 1964, París era una fiesta es la obra más personal y reveladora de Hemingway, quien, ya en el crepúsculo de su vida, narra aquí los dorados, salvajes y fructíferos años de su juventud en el París de los años veinte, en compañía de escritores como Scott Fitzgerald o Ezra Pound, la llamada «generación perdida», según la popular denominación...