"A sweeping and enchanting new novel from the widely beloved, award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken about three generations of an unconventional New England family who own and operate a candlepin bowling alley"-- Provided by publisher.

"Nevin Montgomery, a young lawyer with a prestigious Boston law firm, is dispatched to the Cape Cod compound of Andrew Windsor, the most acclaimed artist in America, to update Windsor's will. Nevin arrives to the news that a woman, who had secretly modeled for Windsor for decades, has been found dead. Nevin, who is battling a hidden drug addiction, is asked to remain at the Windsor compound to complete his assignment because the health of his law firm's most famous client is deteriorating rapidly. Nevin is introduced to the secretive art world, and he becomes smitten along the way with Catina Cruz, a beautiful young Portuguese-American woman he meets at the compound. Nevin eventually learns that Catina models for James Windsor, Andrew Windsor's son. James is a painter in his own right, albeit not nearly of the stature of his father. When Andrew Windsor finally dies, a will contest ensues. At Andrew's request, Nevin had cut Andrew's wife and son out of the will and they challenge the will in court. Nevin is instructed by his law firm to defend the will, but he has some further investigating to do before he can: investigating that reveals more than he ever wanted to know about the woman he has come to love...and about himself."-- Back cover.

Boston, 1992. David Greenfeld is one of the few white kids at the Martin Luther King, Jr., Middle School. Everybody clowns him, girls ignore him, and his hippie parents won't even buy him a pair of Nikes, let alone transfer him to a private school. Unless he tests into the city's best public high school--which, if practice tests are any indication, isn't likely--he'll be friendless for the foreseeable future. Nobody's more surprised than Dave when Marlon Wellings sticks up for him in the school cafeteria. Mar's a loner from the public housing project on the corner of Dave's own gentrifying block, and he confounds Dave's assumptions about black culture: He's nerdy and neurotic, a Celtics obsessive whose favorite player is the gawky, white Larry Bird. Before long, Mar's coming over to Dave's house every afternoon to watch vintage basketball tapes and plot their hustle to Harvard. But as Dave welcomes his new best friend into his world, he realizes how little he knows about Mar's. Cracks gradually form in their relationship, and Dave starts to become aware of the breaks he's been given--and that Mar has not.--Provided by Publisher.

The home of a family of five is now a crime scene: four of them savagely murdered, one--a sixteen-year-old girl--missing. Was she lucky to have escaped the carnage? Or does her absence speak of something more sinister? Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren is on the case--but so is survivor-turned-avenger Flora Dane. Seeking different types of justice, they must make sense of the clues left behind by a young woman who, whether as victim or suspect, is silently pleading: Look for me-- From dust jacket.

"Boston, 1976. Daniel Fitzsimmons is just sixteen years old and totally on his own--his parents are long dead, and his beloved brother, Harry, is off at Harvard, the star of the football team. When Harry is murdered, Daniel wrestles not only with inconsolable grief but with strange new powers he never knew he possessed. Powers he's not sure he can control. Detectives William Barkley 'Bark' Jones and Tommy Dillon are assigned to Harry's case. The veteran partners thought they'd seen it all, but they are stunned when Daniel wanders into the crime scene. Even stranger, Daniel claims to have known the details of his brother's murder before it ever happened. The investigation leads the detectives deep into the Fitzsimmons brothers' past. They find heartbreaking loss, sordid characters, and metaphysical conspiracies. Even on the rough streets of 1970s Boston, Jones and Dillon have never had a case like this"--Dust jacket.

• Acknowledgments ix Introduction
• 1
• 1. Factory Fictions: Lowell Mill Women and the Romance of Labor
• 33
• 2. Factory Labor and Literary Aesthetics: The Lowell Mill Girl, Popular Fiction, and the Proletarian Grotesque
• 73
• 3. Narrating Female Dependency: The Sentimental Seamstress and the Erotics of Labor Reform
• 113
• 4. Harriet Wilson's Our Nig and the Labor of Race
• 153
• 5. Hidden Hands: E.D.E.N. Southworth and Working-Class Performance
• 180
• 6. Writing Mexicana Workers: Race, Labor, and the Western Front
• 219 Postscript. Looking for Antebellum Workingwomen
• 247 Notes
• 251 Works Cited
• 285 Index 303.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

In Archives of Labor Lori Merish establishes working-class women as significant actors within literary culture, dramatically redrawing the map of nineteenth-century US literary and cultural history. Delving into previously unexplored archives of working-class women's literature-from autobiographies, pamphlet novels, and theatrical melodrama to seduction tales and labor periodicals-Merish recovers working-class women's vital presence as writers and readers in the antebellum era. Her reading of texts by a diverse collection of factory workers, seamstresses, domestic workers, and prostitutes boldly challenges the purportedly masculine character of class dissent during this era. Whether addressing portrayals of white New England "factory girls, " fictional accounts of African American domestic workers, or the first-person narratives of Mexican women working in the missions of Mexican California, Merish unsettles the traditional association of whiteness with the working class to document forms of cross-racial class identification and solidarity. In so doing, she restores the tradition of working women's class protest and dissent, shows how race and gender are central to class identity, and traces the ways working women understood themselves and were understood as workers and class subjects.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

'Harper Lee has a worthy successor. Wolk is a big new talent' - The Times Crow has lived her whole life on a tiny, starkly beautiful island. Her only companions are Osh, the man who rescued her from a washed-up skiff as a baby and raised her, and Miss Maggie, their neighbour across the sandbar. But it is only when a mysterious fire appears across the water that an unspoken question of her own history forms in Crow's heart, and an unstoppable chain of events is triggered. Crow sets out to find her lost identity - and, ultimately, to learn what it means to be a family. Vivid and heartfelt, Beyond the Bright Sea is a gorgeously crafted, gripping tale of buried treasure and belonging.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Moccasin print
• Colonial village
• American canal
• Transition
• Port Concord
• Wild waters
• River sojourns
• Consultant
• Mapmaker
• Genius
• Saving the meadows
• Reversal of fortune.

The Boatman gives readers a Thoreau for the Anthropocene epoch. As a backyard naturalist and river enthusiast, Thoreau was keenly aware of the way humans had altered the waterways and meadows of his beloved Concord River Valley. And he recognized that he himself--a land surveyor by trade--was as complicit in these transformations as the bankers, lawyers, builders, landowners, and elected officials who were his clients. Robert Thorson tells a compelling story of intellectual growth, as Thoreau moved from anger, to lament, to acceptance of the way humans had changed the river he cherished more than Walden Pond.In his twenties, Thoreau had contemplated industrial sabotage against a downstream factory dam. By the mid-1850s he realized that humans and an "imperfect" nature were inseparable. His beliefs and scientific understanding of the river would be challenged again when he was hired in 1859 as a technical consultant for the River Meadow Association, in America's first statewide case for dam removal--a veritable class-action suit of more than five hundred petitioners that pitted local farmers against industrialists. Thorson offers the most complete account to date of this "flowage controversy, " including Thoreau's behind-the-scenes investigations and the political corruption that eventually carried the day.In the years after the publication of Walden (1854), the river boatman's joy in the natural world was undiminished by the prospect of environmental change. Increasingly, he sought out for solace and pleasure those river sites most dramatically altered by human invention and intervention--for better and worse.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Julia and Cassie have been friends since nursery school. They have shared everything, including their desire to escape the stifling limitations of their birthplace, the quiet town of Royston, Massachusetts. But as the two girls enter adolescence, their paths diverge and Cassie sets out on a journey that will put her life in danger and shatter her oldest friendship. The Burning Girl is a complex examination of the stories we tell ourselves about youth and friendship, and straddles, expertly, childhood's imaginary worlds and painful adult reality-crafting a true, immediate portrait of female adolescence. Claire Messud, one of our finest novelists, is as accomplished at weaving a compelling fictional world as she is at asking the big questions: To what extent can we know ourselves and others? What are the stories we create to comprehend our lives and relationships? Brilliantly mixing fable and coming-of-age tale, The Burning Girl gets to the heart of these matters in an absolutely irresistible way.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Ben Carver returns for the spring semester at the exclusive Natick School in Massachusetts determined to put his relationship with Rafe Goldberg behind him and concentrate on his grades and the award that will mean a full scholarship--but Rafe is still there, there is a girl named Hannah whom he meets in the library, and behind it all is his relationship with his distant, but demanding father.

"Mark Firth is a home builder in Howland, Massachusetts in the early 2000s who, after being swindled by a finanical advisor, feels opportunity passing him by. In the paranoid days after 9/11, a New York money manager, Philip Hadi, moves his family to Howland and hires Mark to turn his his house into a "secure location." When Howland's first selectman passes away suddenly, Hadi runs for office, and begins subtly transforming the town in his image. The collision of these two men and their very different worlds -- rural vs urban, middle class vs wealthy -- propels Jonathan Dee's new novel to a haunting conclusion. This is a novel that captures our fraught moment, but is timeless in its depiction of the American family"-- Provided by publisher.

"Centered around a family's weekend in their summer cottage on the Northeast cape that explores four lives in crisis and reflects back at us what the American family is becoming"-- Provided by publisher.

Settright Road is a collection of 20 short stories and one longer piece of fiction, all set in and around a string of busted Massachusetts mill towns during the cocaine-fueled 1980s. Its pages are colored by unforgettable characters: a teenage lothario whose plans to escape his one-horse town by hopping a train to California are monkey-wrenched when he impregnates a local girl from a prominent family; fresh-out-of-prison Sean Folan, who nearly kills a man in a bar fight just so he'll get locked up again; underage Bill Buick, who sells dope to hard-up townies and seduces high school girls, when he's not driving a wedge between his aunt and her new boyfriend; and Eskimo -- trouble in a too-tight dress -- a dancer and a poet whose unsavory relationship with a strip club owner comes to a tragic end when she falls in love with a notorious backwoods brawler. Jon Boilard lets loose these conflicted characters against a backdrop of the abject poverty that sits in stark contrast to the lush New England scenery; then he challenges us to root for these desperados despite the weight of their human errors.

From Thoreau's renowned Journal, a treasury of memorable, funny, and sharply observed accounts of his encounters with the wild and domestic animals of Concord Many of the most vivid writings in the renowned Journal of Henry David Thoreau concern creatures he came upon when rambling the fields, forests, and wetlands of Concord and nearby communities. A keen and thoughtful observer, he wrote frequently about these animals, always sensitive to their mysteries and deeply appreciative of their beauty and individuality. Whether serenading the perch of Walden Pond with his flute, chasing a loon across the water's surface, observing a battle between black and red ants, or engaging in a battle of wits with his family's runaway pig, Thoreau penned his journal entries with the accuracy of a scientist and the deep spirituality of a transcendentalist and mystic. This volume, like its companion Thoreau's Wildflowers, is arranged by the days of the year, following the progress of the turning seasons. A selection of his original sketchbook drawings is included, along with thirty-five exquisite illustrations by naturalist and artist Debby Cotter Kaspari.
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Welcome to Boston in the early years of the republic. Prepare to journey by stagecoach with a young man moving to the "bustling city"; stop by a tavern for food, drink, and conversation; eavesdrop on clerks and customers in a dry-goods shop; get stuck in what might have been Boston's first traffic jam; and enjoy arch comments about spouses, doctors, lawyers, politicians, and poets. As Paul Lewis and his students at Boston College reveal, regional vernacular poetry-largely overlooked or deemed of little or no artistic value-provides access to the culture and daily life of the city. Selected from over 4,500 poems published during the early national period, the works presented here, mostly anonymous, will carry you back to Old Boston to hear the voices of its long-forgotten citizen poets. A rich collection of lost poetry that will beguile locals and visitors alike.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

"Welcome to Appleseed, Massachusetts, where stories grow in soil, sentences are kept as pets, and pianos change your point of view. Golden Delicious chronicles the narrator's rich, vivid childhood - driving to the local flea market with his father, causing trouble at school, pedaling through the neighborhood on his Bicycle Built for Two. But as the local economy sours, the narrator's family is torn apart. His mother joins a flying militia known as The Mothers; his father takes an all-consuming job; his sister runs away for a better life elsewhere. Who will save Appleseed? Will it be the Memory of Johnny Appleseed? The Mothers? The narrator himself?"-- Provided by publisher.

We re living in a sensitive age, Cuke, and I m not altogether sure you re fully attuned to it. So says Irish-American politician Frank Skeffington a cynical, corrupt 1950s mayor, and also an old-school gentleman who looks after the constituents of his New England city and enjoys their unwavering loyalty in return. But in our age of dynasties, mercurial social sensitivities, and politicians making love to the camera, Skeffington might as well be talking to us. Not quite a roman a clef of notorious Boston mayor James Michael Curley, " The Last Hurrah" tells the story of Skeffington s final campaign as witnessed through the eyes of his nephew, who learns a great deal about politics as he follows his uncle to fundraisers, wakes, and into smoke-filled rooms, ultimately coming almost against his will to admire the man. Adapted into a 1958 film starring Spencer Tracy and directed by John Ford (and which Curley tried to keep from being made), Edwin O Connor s opus reveals politics as it really is, and big cities as they really were. An expansive, humorous novel offering deep insight into the Irish-American experience and the ever-changing nature of the political machine, "The Last Hurrah "reveals political truths still true today: what the cameras capture is just the smiling face of the sometimes sordid business of giving the people what they want.".
(source: Nielsen Book Data)