Central Kansas Library System

Mr. and Mrs. Mallard proudly return to their home in the Boston Public Garden with their eight offspring.

In a series of poems, fifteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family's wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression. in a series of poems, fifteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family's wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression. Dust piles up like snow across the prairie. A terrible accident has transformed Billie Jo's life, scarring her inside and...

She tipped her head sideways, her lips offering themselves to his. He remembered the fire those lips contained, the promise her kiss held. . . . In 1962 David Carkeet's drowsy hometown of Sonora, California, snapped awake at the news that it had inspired a smutty potboiler titled Campus Sexpot. Before leaving town on short notice, the novel's author had been an English teacher at the local high school, where Carkeet was a hormone-saturated sophomore....

Mort Zachter's childhood revolved around a small shop on Manhattan's Lower East Side known in the neighborhood as "the day-old bread store." It was a bakery where nothing was baked, owned by his two eccentric uncles who referred to their goods as "the merchandise." Zachter grew up sleeping in the dinette of a leaking Brooklyn tenement. He lived a classic immigrant story-one of a close-knit, working-class family struggling to make it in America. Only...

In Amina Gautier's Brooklyn, some kids make it and some kids don't, but not in simple ways or for stereotypical reasons. Gautier's stories explore the lives of young African Americans who might all be classified as "at-risk," yet who encounter different opportunities and dangers in their particular neighborhoods and schools and who see life through the lens of different family experiences. Gautier's focus is on quiet daily moments, even in extraordinary...

Constantly surprising, these personal essays explore the attractions and dangers of intimacy and the violence that often arises in close relationships. Deulen's artful storytelling and dialogue also draw the reader into complicated questions about class, race, and gender. In "Aperture," she considers how she has contributed to her autistic brother's isolation from family and from the world. "Theft" investigates her mother's romantic stories about...

New to living and gardening in Philadelphia, Sharon White begins a journey through the landscape of the city, past and present, in Vanished Gardens. In prose now as precise and considered as the paths in a parterre, now as flowing and lyrical as an Olmsted vista, White explores Philadelphia's gardens as a part of the city's ecosystem and animates the lives of individual gardeners and naturalists working in the area around her home. In one section...

Food can bring together families, communities, and cultures. It is the essence of life and yet our relationships with one another can be most fraught at the dinner table. This perpetually fascinating subject has inspired a unique collection of fiction-including flash fiction, essay, short stories, and even a "stoku" (amalgam of short story and haiku)-from a wonderfully diverse and international group of authors. The authors in the anthology include...

In The Small Heart of Things, Julian Hoffman intimately examines the myriad ways in which connections to the natural world can be deepened through an equality of perception, whether it's a caterpillar carrying its house of leaves, transhumant shepherds ranging high mountain pastures, a quail taking cover on an empty steppe, or a Turkmen family emigrating from Afghanistan to Istanbul. The narrative spans the common-and often contested-ground that supports...

This is a book about the world's greatest actresses who are no longer with us. Each actress profiled received the Academy Award for Best Actress (an Oscar) at least once. I wrote this book so that anyone who reads it will understand what it takes to be the best. Many people have wishes and desires but only a few do what it takes to fulfill their wishes and desires. This book describes the cost of greatness to each of the actresses profiled as well...