NCW Libraries

"How did Kafka become Kafka? This eagerly anticipated third and final volume of Reiner Stach's definitive biography answers that question with more facts, detail, and insight than ever before, describing the complex personal, political, and cultural circumstances that shaped the young Franz Kafka (1883-1924). It tells the story of the years from his birth in Prague to the beginning of his professional and literary career in 1910, taking the reader...

"On All Souls Day, the late Marcus Conway returns home. Solar Bones captures in a single relentless sentence the life and death of this rural Irish engineer, and his place in the globally interconnected 21st century. The book takes in local municipal failures and global financial collapse, the quotidian pleasures of family, ancient history and the latest headlines, the living and the dead. A vital, tender, acerbic, warm, and death-haunted work one...

When Queen Kelsea is forced to surrender herself and her magic sapphires to the enemy to protect the Tearling, her regent and most trusted guard, the Mace, rallies his forces to rescue their imprisoned sovereign. --Publisher.

""So delicately calibrated and precisely beautiful that one might not immediately sense the sledgehammer of pain building inside this book. And I mean that in the best way. What powerful tension and depth this provides!"-Aimee Bender. Fourteen-year-old Linda lives with her parents in the beautiful, austere woods of northern Minnesota, where their nearly abandoned commune stands as a last vestige of a lost counter-culture world. Isolated at home and...

An intimate exploration of the life, craft, and legacy of one of the most revered and influential writers, an artist who continues to inspire fans and creatives to cultivate practices of deep attention, rigorous interrogation and beautiful style. Joan Didion was a writer's writer; not only a groundbreaking journalist, essayist, novelist and screenwriter, but a keen observer who honed her sights on life's telling details. Her insights continue to influence...

Longlisted for the 2020 Grand Prix de littérature américaine
Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2017 (Top 10)
Chicago Public Library Best of the Best Books 2017
Indie Next Summer 2018 Pick For Reading Groups

The haunting tale of a desolate cottage, and the hair-thin junction between this life and the next, from bestselling National Book Award finalist Gail Godwin.
After...

"[E]xplores the various ways that rival states used cultural diplomacy and the political police to influence writers. In response, many writers from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean--such as Chinua Achebe, Mulk Raj Anand, Eileen Chang, C.L.R. James, Alex La Guma, Doris Lessing, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and Wole Soyinka-carved out a vibrant conceptual space of aesthetic nonalignment, imagining a different and freer future for their work. Kalliney looks...

At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. Cyril's son Danny and his older sister Maeve are exiled from...

The third and final volume of the Eisner Award-nominated adventure from critically acclaimed illustrator and animator Arthur De Pins. When three crabs fight back against evolution and learn to walk forward, not just side-to-side, it's all-out crab war! Those who can change direction face-off against those who cannot, but it may be meaningless against the ultimate enemy: humans.

Not so long ago, humankind did not move as widely as it does today. Few left their native village, and people were left to wonder what lay beyond the next hill or valley. But life was full of storytellers, folklore, performers, nature. These days anyone can buy a ticket to the other side of the world, but what is the purpose? What are we seeking? This poetic work seeks evasive answers to the questions we have all asked ourselves about the mysteries...