Washoe County Library System

In 1915 Vera Brittain abandoned her studies at Oxford to enlist as a nurse in the armed services. Before the war was over she had served in London, Malta, and close to the Western Front in France--and she had lost all the men she loved. Out of that experience came this cauterizing book, at once a memoir and an elegy for the bright, passionate generation who came of age on the eve of the war and vanished in its trenches. -- Provided by publisher.

This story, set on an Indian reservation just after World War II, concerns the return home of a war-weary Laguna Pueblo young man. Tayo, a young Native American, has been a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, and the horrors of captivity have almost eroded his will to survive. His return to the Laguna Pueblo reservation only increases his feeling of estrangement and alienation. While other returning soldiers find easy refuge in alcohol and...

During the 1950s the search for Buddhist truths takes two young Bohemians through a series of bizarre experiences in California. "A deluxe edition of Kerouac's 1958 classic Published just one year after On The Road, this is the story of two men enganged in a passionate search for Dharma or truth. Their major adventure is the pursuit of the Zen Way, which takes them climbing into the High Sierras to seek the lesson of solitude. For more than seventy...

In the late 1930s, Graham Greene was commissioned to visit Mexico to report on how the inhabitants had reacted to the brutal anticlerical purges of President Calles. The Lawless Roads is his spellbinding record of that journey. Taking him through the tropical states of Chiapas and Tabasco, where all the churches had been destroyed or closed and the priests driven out or shot, that provided him with the setting and theme for one of his greatest novels,...

"A blistering character study and an examination of the American melting pot and the judicial system that keeps it in check, Twelve Angry Men holds at its core a deeply patriotic belief in the U.S. legal system. The story's focal point, known only as Juror Eight, is at first the sole holdout in an 11-1 guilty vote. Eight sets his sights not on proving the other jurors wrong but rather on getting them to look at the situation in a clear-eyed way not...

Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate. This edition features a new introduction by Jonathan Lethem.

A Penguin Classic “Age can never dull this kind of writing,” writes the Chicago Tribune of John Steinbeck’s dispatches from World War II, filed for the New York Herald Tribune in 1943, which vividly captured the human side of war. Writing from England in the midst of the London blitz, North Africa, and Italy, Steinbeck focuses on the people as opposed to the battles, portraying everyone from the guys in the bomber crew to Bob Hope on his USO...

Tired of the glitter and glamour of St Petersberg society, aristocratic dandy Eugene Onegin retreats to the country estate he has recently inherited. An English translation of the early nineteenth-century Russian novel in verse, following the emotions and destiny of three men, as well as the fates and affections of three women, in Imperial Russia during the 1820s. Eugene Onegin is the master work of the poet whom Russians regard as the fountainhead...