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One of the Best Books of the Year: San Francisco ChronicleIt's 1953, and the Langdons are at a crossroads. Walter, their stalwart patriarch, has died unexpectedly, and his wife must try to keep their farm going. But of their five children, only one will remain to work the land. The others scatter to Washington, DC, California, and everywhere in between. As the country moves into the Cold War, through the social revolutions of the '60s and '70s, and into the unprecedented wealth-for some-of the early '80s, the Langdon children have children of their own: twin boys who are best friends and vicious rivals; a girl whose rebellious spirit takes her to the notorious Peoples Temple in San Francisco; and a golden boy who drops out of college to fight in Vietnam-leaving behind a secret legacy. Capturing a transformative period through characters we come to know and love, this second volume in Jane Smiley's epic trilogy brings to life the challenges-and rewards-of family and home, even in the most turbulent of times.

A delightful collection of stories and photographs from the best-selling author of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, imagining the lives and loves of everyday people in the twentieth century Pictures capture moments in time, presenting the viewer with a window into another life. But a picture can go only so far. Who are the people in the image? What are their fears? What are their dreams? The fourteen captivating tales in this collection are all inspired by photos from the Times of London archive. A young woman finds unexpected love while perusing Egyptian antiquities. A family is forever fractured when war comes to Penang, in colonial Malaysia. Iron Jelloid tablets help to reveal a young man's inner strength. And twin sisters discover that it's never too late to forge a new path--even when standing at the altar. There are big stories behind these simple images. Though at first glance they may appear to represent small moments, these photographs in fact speak volumes, uncovering possibilities of love, friendship, and happiness. With his indomitable charm, Alexander McCall Smith takes us behind the lens to explore the hidden lives of those photographed; in so doing, he reveals the humanity in us all.

A Chicago Tribune, Electric Literature, and BookRiot Best Book of the Year A National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" AuthorMarie is a waitress at an upscale Dallas steakhouse, attuned to the appetites of her patrons and gifted at hiding her private struggle as a young single mother behind an easy smile and a crisp white apron. It's a world of long hours and late nights, and Marie often gives in to self-destructive impulses, losing herself in a tangle of bodies and urgent highs as her desire for obliteration competes with a stubborn will to survive. Pulsing with a fierce and feral energy, Love Me Back is an unapologetic portrait of a woman cutting a precarious path through early adulthood and the herald of a powerful new voice in American fiction.

Emily Wu's account of her childhood under Mao opens on her third birthday, as she meets her father for the first time in a concentration camp. A well-known academic, her father had been designated an "ultra-rightist” and class enemy. As a result, Wu's family would be torn apart and subjected to unending humiliation and abuse. Wu recounts this hidden holocaust in which millions of children and their families died. Feather in the Storm is an unforgettable story of the courage of one child in a quicksand world of endless terror.

When Sadie looks out her window and sees her bother standing on the front lawn she knows he can't bring good news. Fidgeting over coffee with sugar and cream he explains: Their sister is gone. Three days earlier Goldie left to go shopping and she has not returned. With Goldie's disappearance as the catalyst, The First Desire takes us deep into the life of the Cohen family and Buffalo, New York, from the Great Depression to the years immediately following World War II. Shifting perspectives from siblings Sadie, Jo, Goldie, and Irving we learn of the secrets they have managed to keep hidden--and of Lillian, the beautiful woman their father took as a lover while his wife was dying. In this astonishing novel Reisman brings to life the love, grief, and desires that ultimately bind one family together.

LaVerne Madigan led an extraordinary life. In an era when few women even worked outside the home, La Verne was the executive director of the only major national rights advocacy group for American Indians at the time. Brilliant, beautiful, stylish, and independent, she worked tirelessly for what she believed in and inspired those who knew her. Perhaps no one as much as her young son, Fergus Bordewich.One morning when Fergus was fourteen, he and his mother went riding, which they did often. It was the last time he saw her alive. Attempting to jump from her runaway horse, LaVerne fell under the hooves of her son's mount and was killed. Fergus was left with the belief that he was responsible. More than thirty years later and after a lifetime of guilt and self-punishment, the son returned to his mother's life. My Mother's Ghost is the story of a brilliant woman cut down in her prime and of a haunted man who confronted the source of his pain, uncovered startling truths, and reclaimed his own life along with that of his mother.

In his most enthralling novel since the acclaimed Tupelo Nights, John Ed Bradley tells a scorching story of sex and death in sultry New Orleans.After years as an "actress” in California, Juliet Beauvais is drawn back to town with the promise of a big inheritance. But she finds her "dying” mother all too healthy and making other plans. Fortunately for Juliet, Sonny LaMott has been carrying a torch for her all these years, and he's easily lured into a scheme that's sure to get Juliet what she deserves. Twisted, gothically atmospheric, and replete with surprise, My Juliet is a deliciously dark and mordantly funny tale.

A thought-prooking thriller and a literate page-turner, Stephen Amidon's The New City takes aim at the suburban American dream and captures the real nightmare behind it.It is 1973, the Vietnam War is winding down and the Senate Watergate hearings are heating up. But Newton, Maryland, is a model community, an enclave of harmony and prosperity. Through years of cunning legal maneuvering and smooth real-estate deals, the white lawyer Austin Swope has made the dream of this new city a reality. His best friend is Earl Wooten, the black master builder who raised Newton from its foundations. Their teenaged sons, Teddy and Joel, each the repository of his father's deepest hopes for the future, are inseparable buddies. But cracks begin to appear in this pristiine and meticulously planned community, and an innocent misunderstanding is about to set the two men who control its quiet streets on a fateful collision course.

The curved lines of a sailing ship resemble the inverted dome of a great cathedral, surrounded not by soot-covered buildings and crowded streets but by a vast liquid wilderness. This physical and symbolic connection is at the thematic heart of Cathedral of the World, a collection of essays in which writer and professional small-boat sailor Myron Arms sets out on a journey both physical and spiritual, seeking to explore what he calls "the primal spaces" and to articulate the sailor's age-old quest to understand his world and himself. Arms, author of the Boston Globe bestseller Riddle of the Ice, weaves the experiences of four decades at sea into a series of reflections that range across half a lifetime and thousands of ocean miles. During these journeys, he takes readers to some of the last wild places on Earth, climbing the hills of the North Atlantic in a full gale, watching the flight of seabirds, listening to the night-breath of whales, and pondering the questions that all such encounters inspire. What John Muir did for western forests, what Edward Abbey did for the desert, Arms now does for the ocean. In a voice that is reverent, impassioned, and clear-sighted, he celebrates the wilderness he has come to love, mourns its wounds, and demonstrates for all of us its power to heal.

Follow the rebirth of Scottish literature from one of the finest current English writers. The Good Times is a humorous and dazzling collection of short stories that continues a tradition of portraying ordinary people dealing with their everyday lives. These twenty first-person narratives introduce an assortment of men encountering life and love in their immediate surroundings and in the world at large.

A gripping historical novel in the bestselling tradition of The Alienist and Time and Again, Booth brings vividly to life a figure who continues to haunt the American imagination--John Wilkes Booth. The story begins as an elderly John Surratt, the only conspirator to escape a hanging sentence for the murder of Abraham Lincoln, is asked by film director D.W. Griffith to recount the harrowing events of his youth during the screenings of Griffith's film Birth of a Nation. The request prompts Surratt to reread his detailed diaries, begun in 1864 when he was first befriended by John Wilkes Booth and was unwittingly enmeshed in Booth's plot to assassinate the President.Told through a series of flashbacks, the novel both chronicles the young, naive Surratt's tragic coming of age as he belatedly realizes the nature of the plot Booth has sucked him into, and illuminates the motivations, larger-than-life appetites, and appeal of the charismatic and world-famous stage actor. As Surratt delves further into the diaries and transcripts, it is clear the young Surratt has become trapped in Booth's web of seduction and betrayal. Further insight into the assassination plot is revealed in a surprising twist when the genuine diary that Booth left behind, explaining his actions and implicating others around him, falls into Surratt's hands (a Booth diary, with several missing pages, does exist and is on public display at the Ford Theater in Washington).Compulsively readable, and filled with brilliant period detail--as well as a dozen reproductions of actual photographs of the conspirators and their execution, Booth is a powerful evocation of a dangerous, chaotic, and tragic time in our history, a story that continues to resonate to this day.

There are countless works of interest to gay men in print right now--anthologies, novels, memoirs, and more. It is a reflection of progress that there is such an openly recognizable culture. Yet how to make sense of the choices offered? What do gay men need to read? What books have shaped the gay heart, mind, and soul?The Gay Canon gives its readers answers to these questions. Not only does it list the one hundred great gay books that have influenced writers and continue to shape the gay imagination, it also provides a deeper, more comprehensive look at the twenty-six most seminal works, each of which is followed by a series of useful group discussion questions. Reaching all the way back to Gilgamesh and continuing through classics like Leaves of Grass, Confessions of a Mask, and The Wild Boys, as well as more recent books like Borrowed Time, The Gay Canon consistently avoids impenetrable academic literary criticism in favor of a more popular introduction for general readers and book groups.The Gay Canon is a book to give to any young man just coming out, a book every gay reading group will want to rely on, and--most important--a book that will enrich and improve the gay story that continues to be written.

Susan Straight's most powerful novel yet is framed by two race riots: the little known Tulsa riots of the 1920s, in which white Tulsa burned down the town's black enclave; and the notorious L. A. riots of the 1990s.Straight's brilliant story of the effects of violence in America on three generations of a family is told through the lives of the Thompsons, a large clan who live in Treetown, above downtown Rio Seco, California, and operate a car towing and repair business. Patriarch Hosea is a proud man, and a hardened one, whose father was killed in the violence that erupted in Tulsa many years earlier. All Hosea's memories come flooding black with ferocious force when the bodies of two white women are found engulfed in flames in an abandoned car on his property. These are the first signs that someone wants Hosea off his land; it is up to his son Marcus, the only one of the six children of Hosea and his half-Mexican wife who can negotiate with the white world, to help the family hold on to their home and their livelihood.But it is only when Marcus' nephew Motrice-a young man infatuated with guns and the power that they bring- comes back to Rio Seco from gang-ridden Los Angeles that the real secrets of the bodies found on Thompson land are revealed, as Rio Seco erupts in the same wave of trashing and looting that has engulfed the nearby metropolis.The Gettin Place is a powerful portrait of a family struggling to defend its turf in a changing world, to hold on to the gettin place, the source from which they derive the tools for survival.

Since the decade to lift the ban on gays in the military, the emergence of gay conservatives, and the onslaught of antigay initiatives across America, the gay and lesbian community has been asking itself tough questions: Where should the movement go? What do we want? In Virtual Equality, veteran activist Urvashi Vaid tackles these questions with a unique combination of visionary politics and hard-earned pragmatism.

A mulitcultural anthology of fiction and non-fiction literary narratives which addresses the psychological and political aspects of a woman's body in today's culture. An important and much-needed book for women who seek to understand their bodies and find independent, imaginative ways to cope with aging, beauty expectations beauty expectations, and ethnic comparisons.

An extraordinary selection of the finest and best-known art from the American war in Vietnam, from Tim O'Brien to Marvin Gaye, from mainstream bestsellers to radical poetry.This authoritative and accessible volume includes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, film, photography, and popular song lyrics from the Vietnam War era, covering a breadth of experiences and perspectives. Also included are incisive reader's questions--useful for educators and book clubs--in a volume that makes an essential contribution to a wider understanding of the Vietnam War.An indispensable and provocative read for anyone who wants to know more about the war that changed the face of late-twentieth-century America.