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New from Tatiana de Rosnay, author of 'Sarah's Key'
A haunting journey through the past to a truth they may not want to know…
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New Author
Interviews |
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Anne Fortier
Join Anne Fortier as she discusses her first novel, Juliet, how she came to write it in English even though she's Danish, why she set her version of Romeo and Juliet in Siena when Shakespeare set his in Verona, and why her mother was exploring how to rob a bank in Siena to help with her writing.
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Michael J. Sandel
Michael J. Sandel’s "Justice" course is one of the most popular and influential at Harvard. Interested readers can take a seat in the lecture hall alongside Harvard College students, thanks to a 2009 PBS lecture series....
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Carol Lynch Williams
Carol Lynch Williams discussed The Chosen One, and what inspired her to write a book about polygamy.
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C. W. Gortner
A video interview with C.W. Gortner in which he talks about his 2010 historical novel, The Confessions of Catherine de Medici.
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Summary and Book Reviews |
Plainsong: Summary and book reviews of Plainsong by Kent Haruf, plus links to an excerpt from Plainsong and a biography of Kent Haruf. |
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Book Summary
A heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver.
In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl -- her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house -- is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known.
From these unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together -- their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant. As the milieu widens to embrace fully four generations, Kent Haruf displays an emotional and aesthetic authority to rival the past masters of a classic American tradition.
Utterly true to the rhythms and patterns of life, Plainsong is a novel to care about, believe in, and learn from.
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| BOOK REVIEWS |
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Media Reviews
Richard Russo
Kent Haruf's new novel Plainsong is nothing short of a revelation. I don't expect to read a better novel this year. Or next, for that matter.
Beverly Lowry
I read Plainsong in one sitting, unwilling--unable--to look up until I'd finished. Kent Haruf has given us a pure blessing of a book a novel of such sheer sweet amplitude, grace and humanity.
Howard Frank Mosher
Plainsong is the marvelous story of how seven extraordinary members of a tiny prairie community--two dedicated teachers, two young boys wise beyond their years, a pair of wonderfully idiosyncratic rancher brothers and a pregnant high school girl--come together, in the face of great difficulties, to form the most appealing extended family in contemporary fiction. With Plainsong, Kent Haruf has written an American masterwork a profound, witty, warmhearted and tough-minded account of a place where family and community still come first. Plainsong is the best new novel I've read since Cold Mountain.
James Crumley
Plainsong is a beauty, as spare and heartbreaking as an abandoned homestead cabin, always tough but humane, never sentimental. I loved the prose, as bright and hard as the winter sun sparkling off a sandy snowbank, and the characters, scrubbed to their essentials by the extremes of the Great Plains weather. It's a story that draws the reader like a heat mirage.
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Recent Reader Reviews
Rated  of 5
by DJ
Good book
Okay, here's the thing. This book is called Plainsong. I think that there is a point to the whole thing with no quotations and minimal punctuation. This book was real, and it takes maturity to read it, which is why I'm glad it was an option for my ... Read More
Rated  of 5
by Rachel
How in the World Did This Trash Get Published
My younger sister had to read this book for a school assignment, so I decided to take a look at it. What a mistake, this book is a nightmare to read. Mr. Haruf does not seem to like quotations, or any form of punctuation for that matter. This book ... Read More
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| Editor's Choice |
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Mockingjay
Suzanne Collins |
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Powerful and haunting, this thrilling final installment of Suzanne Collins’s groundbreaking The Hunger Games trilogy promises to be one of the most talked about books of the year. |
Wife of the Gods
Kwei Quartey |
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Lyrical and captivating, Kwei Quartey’s debut novel brings to life the majesty and charm of Ghana–from the capital city of Accra to a small community where long-buried secrets are about to rise to the surface. |
Brodeck
Phillipe Claudel |
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Set in an unnamed time and place, Brodeck blends the familiar and unfamiliar, myth and history into a work of extraordinary power and resonance. Readers of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Bernhard Schlink's The Reader and Kafka will be captivated by Brodeck. |
The Confessions of Catherine de Medici
C. W. Gortner |
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From the fairy-tale châteaux of the Loire Valley to the battlefields of the wars of religion to the mob-filled streets of Paris, The Confessions of Catherine de Medici is the extraordinary untold journey of one of the most maligned and misunderstood women ever to be queen. |
Bonobo Handshake
Vanessa Woods |
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A young woman follows her fiancé to war-torn Congo to study extremely endangered bonobo apes - who teach her a new truth about love and belonging. |
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The Book Thief by Markus Zusak |
| The Book Thief was an astounding book! I am 13 and have read this book twice. The first was assigned, but I loved it so much I had to read it again ...
read more |
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Brooklyn Bridge by Karen Hesse |
| I'm a ten year old girl who recently read this book. It was a deep, yet fun confection about growing up in the early 1900's, the time where New York ...
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Zeitoun by Dave Eggers |
| This book is important, yet has been largely overlooked by reviewers and book clubs. It's not just a history of Hurricane Katrina, but a personal ...
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Book Club Recommendations
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| Latest BookBrowse News |
Booker shortlist announced (Sep 07 2010)
The shortlist for the Man Booker Prize has been announced:
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Possibility of combined ALA and BEA book shows from 2012 (Sep 07 2010)
Reed Exhibitions, parent company of BookExpo America, is in discussion with the American Library Association (ALA) about taking over the organization's two...
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