Author | Title | Synopsis |
---|---|---|
Blundell, Judy | What I Saw and How I Lied | In 1947, with her jovial stepfather Joe back from the war and family life returning to normal, teenage Evie, smitten by the handsome young ex-GI who seems to have a secret hold on Joe, finds herself caught in a complicated web of lies whose devastating outcome change her life and that of her family forever. |
Burroughs, Augusten | Dry | You may not know it, but you’ve met Augusten Burroughs. You’ve seen him on the street, in bars, on the subway, at restaurants: a twentysomething guy, nice suit, works in advertising. Ordinary. But when the ordinary person had two drinks, Augusten was circling the drain by having twelve. He soon lands in rehab. Dry is the story of love, loss, and Starbucks as a Higher Power. A memoir. |
Cheever, John | Bullet Park | Welcome to Bullet Park, a township in which even the most buttoned-down gentry sometimes manage to terrify themselves simply by looking in the mirror. Cheever traces the intersection of two men: Eliot Nailles, a nice fellow who loves his wife and son to blissful distraction, and Paul Hammer who after half a lifetime of drifting, settles down in Bullet Park with one objective – to murder Nailles' son. |
Colby, Tanner | Some of My Best Friends are Black: the strange story of integration in America | Tanner Colby chronicles America’s troubling relationship with race through four interrelated stories: the transformation of a once-racist Birmingham school system; a Kansas City neighborhood’s fight against housing discrimination; the racial divide of the Madison Avenue ad world; and a Louisiana Catholic parish’s forty-year effort to build an integrated church. |
Cunningham, Michael | The Hours | The spirit of Virginia Woolf permeates the lives of several American readers as evidenced in this trio of tales about the author Woolf, a New Yorker planning a party to honor a writer, and a young mother reading Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. |
Ferris, Joshua | Then We Came to the End | The remaining employees at an office affected by a business downturn spend their time enjoying secret romances, elaborate pranks, and frequent coffee breaks, while trying to make sense of their only remaining "work," a mysterious pro-bono ad campaign. |
Friedan, Betty | The Feminine Mystique | First published in 1963, Betty Friedan’s work ignited a revolution that profoundly changed our culture, our consciousness, and our lives. Today it penetrates to the heart of issues determining our lives - and sounds a call to arms against the dangers of a new feminine mystique in the economic and political turbulence of the current day. |
Groth, Janet | The Receptionist: an education at the New Yorker | In 1957, when a young Midwestern woman landed a job at The New Yorker, she didn’t expect to stay long at the reception desk. But stay she did, and for twenty years she had the best seat in the house. In addition to taking messages, she ran interference for jealous wives, drank with famous writers, and was seduced and proposed to by a few of the magazine’s eccentric luminaries. A memoir. |
Levin, Ira | Stepford Wives | For Joanna, her husband Walter, and their children, the move to beautiful Stepford seems almost too good to be true. It is. For behind the town's idyllic facade lies a terrible secret - a secret so shattering that no one who encounters it will ever be the same. |
Lindstrom, Martin | Buy Ology: truth and lies about why we buy | Martin Lindstrom presents the astonishing findings from his three-year study – an experiment that looked at the brains of 2,000 volunteers throughout the world as they encountered various ads, logos, commercials, and products. His startling results shatter much of what we have long believed about what seduces our interest and drives us to buy. |
Martin, Steve | Object of Beauty | Lacey Yeager takes New York City's art world by storm, charming men and women, old and young, rich and even richer with her magnetic charisma and liveliness and experiencing the highs and lows of the art world from the late 1990s into the present day. |
McCarthy, Mary | The Group | The Group follow the lives of eight Vassar graduates, an eclectic mix of personalities and upbringings, known simply to their classmates as “the group.” The women begin their post-school lives traveling to Europe, tackling the worlds of nursing and publishing, and finding love and heartbreak in the streets of New York City. |
Plath, Sylvia | The Bell Jar | Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but is also slowly going under - maybe for the last time. In her acclaimed work, Plath draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes palpably real, even rational - as accessible an experience as going to the movies. |
Stegner, Wallace | Angle of Repose | Retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family. |
Towles, Amor | Rules of Civility | A chance encounter with a handsome banker in a jazz bar on New Year's Eve 1938 catapults Wall Street secretary Katey Kontent into the upper echelons of New York society, where she befriends a shy multi-millionaire, an Upper East Side ne'er-do-well, and a single-minded widow. |
Updike, John | Rabbit Run | Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star, on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty. |
Vincenzi, Penny | More Than You Know | A tale set against a backdrop of the glossy magazine and advertising worlds of 1960s London which follows a harrowing courtroom custody battle between Eliza, who gave up her writing job to marry, and her ex-husband, Matt, an edgy working-class man. |
Walker, Rob | Buying In: the secret dialogue between what we buy and who we are | Brands are dead. Advertising no longer works. Consumers are in control. Or so we're told. Rob Walker argues that this accepted wisdom misses an important cultural shift, including a practice he calls murketing, in which people create brands of their own and participate, in marketing campaigns for their favorites. |
Yates, Richard | Revolutionary Road | April and Frank Wheeler are a young, ostensibly thriving couple living with their two children in a prosperous Connecticut suburb in the mid-1950s. However, the self-assured exterior masks a deep frustration at their lack of fulfillment in their relationships or careers. |