Bent Northrop Memorial Library

Depicts the journey of Christian and his companions through mortal life to their entrance into the Celestial City.

In the summer of 1968, after travelling from Brooklyn to Oakland, California, to spend a month with the mother they barely know, eleven-year-old Delphine and her two younger sisters arrive to a cold welcome as they discover that their mother, a dedicated poet and printer, is resentful of the intrusion of their visit and wants them to attend a nearby Black Panther summer camp.

Poet and student Adam Walker meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born and his silent, seductive girlfriend, Margot, sending Adam into a perverse triangle that leads to a shocking act of violence that will alter his life.

In the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Nan Wu, who had studied in the U.S. in the mid-1980s, leaves China with his wife and son to seek the freedom of the West, embarking on a migration that takes them through the heart of contemporary America.

This collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national crises. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people's wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art collapse under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in "Bronze," a sexually confused college freshman whose encounter with a stranger on a train leads to a revelation about his past and his future.

A woman returns home—and rediscovers her past

Charleen is a divorcee in her mid-thirties, eking out a living as a poet and part-time assistant for an obscure scientific journal. Although she is quick to count her blessings—a son whom she loves, a blossoming relationship with a man, and friends who care about her—Charleen wonders how her life turned out the way it did. Is she a failure? Or is she still struggling to escape

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It's two days before Christmas and Helsinki is battling a ruthless climate catastrophe: subway tunnels are flooded; abandoned vehicles are left burning in the streets; the authorities have issued warnings for malaria, tuberculosis, Ebola , and the plague. People are fleeing to the far north of Finland and Norway, where conditions are still tolerable. Social order is crumbling and private secruity firms have undermined the police force. Tapani Lehtinen,...

Ashamed of his ugliness, long-nosed Cyrano de Bergerac, a brilliant seventeenth-century poet and expert swordsman in the French army, helps a rival woo and win Roxane, the beautiful cousin Cyrano loves in silence.