Inyo County Free Library - New Acquisitions

These are books and media new to the library and cataloged by the Inyo County Free Library.

Additional information about each title can be found in the catalog (click on the title). For older acquisition lists choose from Select another list. To request any of these titles please contact your local library branch.

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1 to 20 of 35

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Several short sentences about writing

By Klinkenborg, Verlyn

Publishing Date: 2013

Classification: 800

Call Number: 808.02 KLI

"A widely admired writer and teacher of writing for more than 25 years, Klinkenborg gives a distillation of that experience in an indispensable and distinctive book that will help anyone who wants to write, write better, or have a clearer understanding of what it means to be writing. Klinkenborg believes that most of our received wisdom about how writing works is not only wrong but an obstacle to our ability to write. Here he sets out to help us unlearn that "wisdom"--About genius, about creativity, about writer's block, topic sentences, and outline--and understand that writing is just as much about thinking, noticing, and learning what it means to be involved in the act of writing. There is no gospel, no orthodoxy, no dogma in this book. Instead, it is a gathering of starting points in a journey toward lively, lucid, satisfying self-expression."--Publisher description.

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Rediscoveries II: important writers select their favorite works of neglected fiction

Publishing Date: 1988

Classification: 800

Call Number: 809.3

Forty authors recommend books that have not necessarily received wide critical acclaim or notice but that they feel will have a lasting influence and enduring value - (Baker & Taylor)

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Wild things: the joy of reading children's literature as an adult

By Handy, Bruce

Publishing Date: 2017

Classification: 800

Call Number: 809.8928 HAN

"An irresistible, nostalgic, and insightful--and totally original--ramble through classic children's literature from Vanity Fair contributing editor (and father) Bruce Handy. In 1690, the dour New England Primer, thought to be the first American children's book, was published in Boston. Offering children gems of advice such as "Strive to learn" and "Be not a dunce," it was no fun at all. So how did we get from there to "Let the wild rumpus start"? And now that we're living in a golden age of children's literature, what can adults get out of reading Where the Wild Things Are and Goodnight Moon, or Charlotte's Web and Little House on the Prairie? In Wild Things, Vanity Fair contributing editor Bruce Handy revisits the classics of every American childhood, from fairy tales to The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and explores the back stories of their creators, using context and biography to understand how some of the most insightful, creative, and witty authors and illustrators of their times created their often deeply personal masterpieces. Along the way, Handy learns what The Cat in the Hat says about anarchy and absentee parenting, which themes are shared by The Runaway Bunny and Portnoy's Complaint, and why Ramona Quimby is as true an American icon as Tom Sawyer or Jay Gatsby. It's a profound, eye-opening experience to reencounter books that you once treasured after decades apart. A clear-eyed love letter to the greatest children's books and authors from Louisa May Alcott and L. Frank Baum to Eric Carle, Dr. Seuss, Mildred D. Taylor, and E.B. White, Wild Things will bring back fond memories for readers of all ages, along with a few surprises"--

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Daemon voices: on stories and storytelling

By Pullman, Philip

Publishing Date: 2018

Classification: 800

Call Number: 809.9335 PUL

The author of the "His Dark Materials" trilogy shares insights into the art of writing while exploring how education, religion, and science, as well as his favorite classics, helped shaped his literary life.

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The weary blues

By Hughes, Langston

Publishing Date: 2015

Classification: 800

Call Number: 811.52 HUG

"Nearly ninety years after its first publication, this celebratory edition of The Weary Blues reminds us of the stunning achievement of Langston Hughes, who was just twenty-four at its first appearance. Beginning with the opening "Proem" (prologue poem)--"I am a Negro: / Black as the night is black, / Black like the depths of my Africa"--Hughes spoke directly, intimately, and powerfully of the experiences of African Americans at a time when their voices were newly being heard in our literature. As the legendary Carl Van Vechten wrote in a brief introduction to the original 1926 edition, "His cabaret songs throb with the true jazz rhythm; his sea-pieces ache with a calm, melancholy lyricism; he cries bitterly from the heart of his race. Always, however, his stanzas are subjective, personal," and, he concludes, they are the expression of "an essentially sensitive and subtly illusive nature." That illusive nature darts among these early lines and begins to reveal itself, with precocious confidence and clarity. In a new introduction to the work, the poet and editor Kevin Young suggests that Hughes from this very first moment is "celebrating, critiquing, and completing the American dream," and that he manages to take Walt Whitman's American "I" and write himself into it. We find here not only such classics as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and the great twentieth-century anthem that begins "I, too, sing America," but also the poet's shorter lyrics and fancies, which dream just as deeply. "Bring me all of your / Heart melodies," the young Hughes offers, "That I may wrap them / In a blue cloud-cloth / Away from the too-rough fingers / Of the world.""--

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A village life

By Glück, Louise

Publishing Date: 2009

Classification: 800

Call Number: 811.54 GLU

Around the fountain are concentric circles of figures, organized by age and in degrees of distance: fields, a river, and, like the fountain's opposite, a mountain. Human time superimposed on geologic time, all taken in at a glance, without any undue sensation of speed. Glück has been known as a lyrical and dramatic poet; since Ararat, she has shaped her austere intensities into book-length sequences. Here, for the first time, she speaks as "the type of describing, supervising intelligence found in novels rather than poetry," as Langdon Hammer has written of her long lines—expansive, fluent, and full—manifesting a calm omniscience. While Glück's manner is novelistic, she focuses not on action but on pauses and intervals, moments of suspension (rather than suspense), in a dreamlike present tense in which poetic speculation and reflection are possible.- (McMillan Palgrave)

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Devotions: the selected poems of Mary Oliver

By Oliver, Mary

Publishing Date: 2017

Classification: 800

Call Number: 811.54 OLI

"Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver presents a personal selection of her best work in this definitive collection spanning more than five decades of her esteemed literary career. Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Identified as "far and away, this country's best selling poet" by Dwight Garner, she now returns with a stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years. Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver's work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015. This timeless volume, arranged by Oliver herself, showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world"--

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Face

By Alexie, Sherman

Publishing Date: c2009

Classification: 800

Call Number: 811.6 ALE

From the Publisher: In this first full collection in nine years, Alexie's poems and prose show his celebrated passion and wit while also exploring new directions. Novelist, storyteller and performer, he won the National Book Award for his YA novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. His work has been praised throughout the world, but the bedrock remains what The New York Times Book Review said of his very first book: "Mr. Alexie's is one of the major lyric voices of our time."

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The triumph of the thriller: how cops, crooks, and cannibals captured popular fiction

By Anderson, Patrick

Publishing Date: c2007

Classification: 800

Call Number: 813.0872 AND

In a thoughtful look at the popularity of the suspense genre, a novelist and critic for The Washington Post examines how and why the thriller came to dominate the world's best-seller lists, tracing the history of the thriller from Edgar Allan Poe to Ed McBain and Patricia Cornwell and profiling the genre's major authors, in a volume that includes the author's picks for the top thriller novels of all time. - (Baker & Taylor)

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The Linwoods, or, "Sixty years since" in America

By Sedgwick, Catharine Maria

Publishing Date: [2014]

Classification: 800

Call Number: 813.2 SED

A novel of two families wrestling with questions of honor, class, loyalty, democracy, and independence during the American Revolution. In The Linwoods, Catharine Maria Sedgwick illuminates the American character and explores issues of civic virtue and national identity in the early republic, through the lives of two families: the Linwoods, dutiful loyalists, and the Lees, passionate revolutionaries. At the novel's heart is Isabella Linwood, a bright and independent young woman who will transform from a proud Tory to ardent Rebel, challenging not only British rule but its accepted social, economic, and political institutions, including the aristocracy, slavery, and patriarchal authority.

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Daughter of earth

By Smedley, Agnes

Publishing Date: 2011

Classification: 800

Call Number: 813.52 SME

"A tale of American disinheritance told from the inside out," declared the Village Voice of this autobiographical novel. Written in 1929 by a dedicated social activist, it chronicles a woman's escape from grinding rural poverty into a predominantly male world of politics and revolution. "My aim in life was to study, not to follow a man around," asserts Marie Rogers, who struggles to establish her identity as an individual and as "a daughter of the earth," in restless pursuit of equality and justice. Marie's hardscrabble childhood and her involvement with freedom fighters of India and China reflect the author's own experiences. Agnes Smedley (1892&;1950) drew upon her own search for spiritual consciousness in this powerful exploration of race, class, and sex in early twentieth-century America. Smedley's novel fell into obscurity after her death, only to reemerge decades later as a remarkable tale of a working-class woman's heroic transformation into an agent for social change. - (Dover Pubns)

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Ride, cowboy, ride: 8 seconds ain't that long : a rodeo novel

By Black, Baxter

Publishing Date: 2012

Classification: 800

Call Number: 813.54 BLA

"This hilarious new novel by America's best-selling cowboy poet, Baxter Black, offers a funny, fast-paced inside look at the lives of rodeo cowboys and the women they love--or that they want to love"--

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A childhood, the biography of a place

By Crews, Harry

Publishing Date: 1995

Classification: 800

Call Number: 813.54 CRE

Harry Crew recounts his childhood, focusing on the people, places, and circumstances that shaped him into the author he is today.

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The best American essays 2001

Publishing Date: 2001

Classification: 800

Call Number: 814.008 2001

A collection of twenty-six essays by American authors, chosen by guest editor Kathleen Norris as the best to be published in 2000, including selections by Stephen King, Diane Ackerman, and Reynolds Price.

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The best American essays 2010

Publishing Date: 2010

Classification: 800

Call Number: 814.008 2010

Compiles the best literary essays of the year 2009 which were originally published in American periodicals.

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The best American essays 2013

Publishing Date: 2013

Classification: 800

Call Number: 814.008 2013

Compiles the best literary essays of the year 2012 which were originally published in American periodicals.

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It all turns on affection: the Jefferson lecture & other essays

By Berry, Wendell

Publishing Date: c2012

Classification: 800

Call Number: 814.54 BER

In 2012 Wendell Berry delivered the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, perhaps the most honorary award that can be granted by the National Endowment for the Humanities. In it he combines his unique combination of literary talent, farming experience, and environmental concern to advocate healing of the earth and a movement toward sustainability. Ultimately he settles upon affection, not morality as the key to making this happen. This is followed by an interview with him and his wife Tanya that drifts from personal experiences to Henry David Thoreau and finally settles upon his advocacy of government arising from the needs of people and the land. Part two includes five essays, two of which initially appeared in The Progressive and one that was a memorial for his friend Maury Telleen, who established the Draft Horse Journal in 1964. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) - (Book News)

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The end of the end of the earth: essays

By Franzen, Jonathan

Publishing Date: 2018

Classification: 800

Call Number: 814.54 FRA

In The End of the End of the Earth, which gathers essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes - both human and literary - that have long preoccupied him. Whether exploring his complex relationship with his uncle, recounting his young adulthood in New York, or offering an illuminating look at the global seabird crisis, these pieces contain all the wit and disabused realism that we've come to expect from Franzen.00Taken together, these essays trace the progress of a unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature, and with some of the most important issues of our day, made more pressing by the current political milieu. The End of the End of the Earth is remarkable, provocative and necessary.

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What are we doing here: essays

By Robinson, Marilynne

Publishing Date: 2018

Classification: 800

Call Number: 814.54 ROB

A new essay collection assesses today's political climate and the mysteries of faith, from the influence of intellectual minds on society's political consciousness to the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life.

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Representative American speeches, 2018-2019

Publishing Date: 2019

Classification: 800

Call Number: 815

The reference shelf ; volume 91, number 6 Reference shelf ; v. 91, no. 6.

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