Gerald Peary Collection (College of Staten Island Library)
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English
Description
This is the tale of family, memory, love, and living told by 14-year-old Susie Salmon, who is already in heaven. Through the voice of a precocious teenage girl, Susie relates the awful events of her death and builds out of her family's grief a hopeful and joyful story.
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English
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Coleman Silk is a respected professor at a New England college who suddenly finds his life unraveling after a comment he makes about some African-American students is misinterpreted as a racial slur. As the scandal heats up, Nathan Zuckerman, a writer researching a biography of Silk, begins to dig deeply into Silk's life. Eventually, matters are made worse when Coleman's affair with a young married janitor named Faunia Farley is exposed. But amid...
3) Still Alice
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Language
English
Description
Alice Howland -- Harvard professor, gifted researcher, and lecturer, wife, and mother of three grown children -- sets out for a run and soon realizes she has no idea how to find her way home. She has taken the route for years, but nothing looks familiar. She is utterly lost. Medical consults reveal early-onset Alzheimer's. Alice slowly but inevitably loses memory and connection with reality, as told from her perspective. She gradually loses the ability...
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English
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Richard Russo's novel follows the unexpected operation of grace in a deadbeat town in upstate New York -- and in the life of one of its unluckiest citizens, Sully, who has been doing the wrong thing triumphantly for fifty years. Divorced from his own wife and carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, saddled with a bum knee and friends who make enemies redundant, Sully now has one new problem to cope with: a long-estranged son who is in imminent...
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English
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From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human. Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants...
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English
Description
This novel follows Seymour "Swede" Levov, a successful Jewish American businessman and former high school star athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov's happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, which in the novel is described as a manifestation of the "indigenous American berserk"; the author investigates the century's most divisive...
Author
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English
Description
Eliza Naumann, a seemingly unremarkable nine-year-old, expects never to fit into her gifted family: her autodidact father, Saul, absorbed in his study of Jewish mysticism; her brother, Aaron, the vessel of his father's spiritual ambitions; and her brilliant but distant lawyer-mom, Miriam. But when Eliza sweeps her school and district spelling bees in quick succession, Saul takes it as a sign that she is destined for greatness. In this altered reality,...
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English
Description
"J.R. Moehringer grew up captivated by a voice. It was the voice of his father, a New York City disc jockey who vanished before J.R. spoke his first word. Sitting on the stoop, pressing an ear to the radio, J.R. would strain to hear in that plummy baritone the secrets of masculinity and identity. Though J.R.'s mother was his world, his rock, he craved something more, something faintly and hauntingly audible only in The Voice. At eight years old,...
Author
Series
Persepolis volume 1
Publisher
Pantheon Books
Pub. Date
[2003]
Language
English
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Description
"Originally published to wide critical acclaim in France, where it elicited comparisons to Art Spiegelman's Maus, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi's wise, funny, and heartbreaking memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah's regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and...
10) The book thief
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English
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Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel--a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.
It's just a small story really, about among other things: a girl, some words, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist-fighter, and quite a lot of thievery. Set during World War II in Germany, Markus...
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English
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Jonathan is a Jewish college student searching Europe for the one person he believes can explain his roots. Alex, a lover of all things American and unsurpassed butcher of the English language, is his lovable Ukrainian guide. On their quixotic quest, the two young men look for Augustine, a woman who might have saved Jonathan's grandfather from the Nazis. As past and present merge, hysterically funny moments collide with episodes of great tragedy --...
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English
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Description
As a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets uncover their letters, journals, & poems, & trace their movements from London to Yorkshire-and from spiritualist seances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany-an extraordinary counterpoint of passions & ideas emerges. An exhilarating novel of wit and romance, an intellectual mystery, and a triumphant love story. This tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives...
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English
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Otto and Sophie Bentwood live in a changing neighborhood in Brooklyn. Their stainless steel sink is new, their Mercedes is parked at the curb. But when Sophie is bitten by a possibly rabies-infected stray cat, a series of disasters begin to plague the Brentwoods' lives, revealing the fault lines in a marriage--and a society--wrenching itself apart.--From publisher description.
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English
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"April Epner teaches high school Latin, wears flannel jumpers, and is used to having her evenings free. Bernice Graverman brandishes designer labels, favors toad-sized earrings, and hosts her own tacky TV talk show: Bernice G! For thirty-six years Bernice has followed the life of the daughter she gave up for adoption. Now she's ready to be a mom. And she's hurtling straight for April's quiet little life..." -- Page 4 of cover.
15) Choke: a novel
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English
Description
Medical school dropout Victor Mancini comes up with a complicated but ingenious scam to pay for his mother's elder care, cruises sex addiction groups for action, and visits his zany mother, whose Alzheimer's disease hides the bizarre truth about his parentage.
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English
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Description
Struggling to graduate from NYU and afford her microscopic studio apartment, Nanny takes a position caring for the only son of the wealthy X family. She rapidly learns the insane amount of juggling involved to ensure that a Park Avenue wife, who doesn't work, cook, clean, or raise her own child, has a smooth day. When the Xs' marriage begins to disintegrate, Nanny ends up involved way beyond the bounds of human decency or good taste. Her tenure with...
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English
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Description
"Set in the wide-open spaces of the American West, The power of the dog is a stunning story of domestic tyranny, brutal masculinity, and thrilling defiance from one of the most powerful and distinctive voices in American literature. The novel tells the story of two brothers--one magnetic but cruel, the other gentle and quiet--and of the woman and boy, a mother and son, whose arrival on the brothers' ranch shatters an already tenuous peace. From the...
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Bridget Jones volume 2
Language
English
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Description
"Lurching from the cappuccino bars of Notting Hill to the blissed-out shores of Thailand, Bridget Jones searches for The Truth in spite of pathetically unevolved men, insane dating theories, and Smug Married advice ..." From the bookjacket.
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"For thirty years, since the publication of his first novel Americana, Don DeLillo has lived in the skin of our times. He has found a voice for the forgotten souls who haunt the fringes of our culture and for its larger-than-life, real-life. figures. His language is defiantly, radiantly American." "Now, to a new century, he has brought The Body Artist. In this novel, he inhabits the muted world of Lauren Hartke, an artist whose work defies the limits...