The Virgin Cure

The Virgin Cure

Ami McKay

Literature & Fiction / Historical Fiction / Memoir

Following in the footsteps of The Birth House, her powerful debut novel, The Virgin Cure secures Ami McKay's place as one of our most beguiling storytellers. (Not that it has to . . . that is pretty much taken care of!)"I am Moth, a girl from the lowest part of Chrystie Street, born to a slum-house mystic and the man who broke her heart." So begins The Virgin Cure, a novel set in the tenements of lower Manhattan in the year 1871. As a young child, Moth's father smiled, tipped his hat and walked away from his wife and daughter forever, and Moth has never stopped imagining that one day they may be reunited -- despite knowing in her heart what he chose over them. Her hard mother is barely making a living with her fortune-telling, sometimes for well-heeled clients, yet Moth is all too aware of how she really pays the rent.Life would be so much better, Moth knows, if fortune had gone the other way -- if only she'd had the luxury of a good family...
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Claimed

Claimed

Sydney Lea

Poetry / Nonfiction / Memoir

For more than seven years, Summer Ashcroft has had to watch the man she knows is her mate, go about his life, ambivalent and distant toward her. Evan MacKenzie has known Summer all of his life, and has forcefully maintained his distance from the gorgeous woman. Mistakes are made by both, but when the truth is discovered, the pair is thrust together in unimaginable circumstances.
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Tragedy Plus Time

Tragedy Plus Time

Adam Cayton-Holland

Autobiography / Memoir / Nonfiction

In the tradition of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Truth & Beauty—from one of Variety's "10 Comics to Watch," a poignant tragicomic memoir about the author's beautiful, funny, and heartbreaking relationship with his younger sister and the depression that took her life.Adam Cayton-Holland went from a painfully sensitive kid growing up in Denver, Colorado, to a writer and performer with a burgeoning career in comedy. His father, a civil rights lawyer, and his mother, an investigative journalist, taught Adam and his two sisters to feel the pain of the world deeply and to combat it through any means necessary. Adam chose to meet life's tough breaks and cruel realities with stand-up comedy; his older sister chose law; their youngest sister, Lydia, struggled with mental illness and ultimately took her own life. This devastating tragedy strikes the Cayton-Holland household at the same moment Adam's career is finally getting off the ground....
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Across the River

Across the River

Alice Taylor

Cultural / Ireland / Autobiography / Memoir

Alice Taylor's gripping sequel to The Woman of the House.At Mossgrove, the Phelan family farm, long-time hired hand Jack plays peacemaker as widow Martha Phelan battles her young son, Peter, who wants to modernize the farm. Tensions on the home front are bitter enough, but at the Conway farm across the river, more trouble is brewing. Slovenly Matt Conway feels trapped and abuses his wife, Biddy. Spurred on by a misguided belief that the Phelans got the best of him in a loan to buy land, he keeps vigil at a fence post plotting revenge ...
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Give a Girl a Knife

Give a Girl a Knife

Amy Thielen

Nonfiction / Cookbooks / Memoir

A beautifully written food memoir chronicling one cook's journey from her rural Midwestern hometown to the intoxicating world of New York City fine dining—and back again—in search of her culinary roots. Before Amy Thielen frantically assembled rings of truffled potatoes in some of New York City's finest kitchens—for chefs David Bouley, Daniel Boulud, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten—she grew up in a northern Minnesota town next to the nation's largest French fry factory, the headwaters of the fast food nation, with a mother whose generous cooking pulsed with joy, sorrow, family drama, and an abundance of butter. Inspired by her grandmother's tales of making sausage and jam at the family farm, Thielen moves with her artist husband to the rustic, off-the-grid cabin he built in the woods. There, growing vegetables and standing at the stove three times a day, she develops a food obsession that leads her to the sensory madhouse of New York's...
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A Short Guide to a Happy Life

A Short Guide to a Happy Life

Anna Quindlen

Literature & Fiction / Memoir

From the author of Blessings and Still Life with Bread Crumbs, Anna Quindlen’s classic reflection on a meaningful life is the perfect gift for graduation, or any occasion. “Life is made of moments, small pieces of silver amidst long stretches of tedium. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won’t happen. We have to teach ourselves now to live, really live . . . to love the journey, not the destination.” In this treasure of a book, Anna Quindlen, the bestselling novelist and columnist, reflects on what it takes to “get a life”—to live deeply every day and from your own unique self, rather than merely to exist through your days. “Knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us,” Quindlen writes, “because unless you know the clock is ticking, it is so easy to waste our days, our lives.” Her mother died when Quindlen was nineteen: “It was the dividing line between seeing the world in black and white, and in Technicolor. The lights came on for the darkest possible reason. . . . I learned something enduring, in a very short period of time, about life. And that was that it was glorious, and that you had no business taking it for granted.” But how to live from that perspective, to fully engage in our days? In A Short Guide to a Happy Life, Quindlen guides us with an understanding that comes from knowing how to see the view, the richness in living. From the Hardcover edition.
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Go Ask Ali

Go Ask Ali

Ali Wentworth

Autobiography / Memoir / Nonfiction

New York Times bestselling author Ali Wentworth offers her hilarious and unique advice on surviving the absurdity of modern life in her third collection of laugh-out-loud comic vignettes.Ali Wentworth's first two books, Ali in Wonderland and Happily Ali After, were lauded by readers, critics, and fellow comedians alike. Entertainment Weekly included Happily Ali After on its "Must List" and hailed it as "hilarious. . . . Her glass isn't half full—it's "empty and cracked," while Cosmopolitan praised it as "razor-sharp." Chelsea Handler called Ali in Wonderland "truly hilarious," and Kathy Griffin christened it, "Chicken Soup for the Vagina." Alec Baldwin has described Ali as "funny and warm and crazy all at once. Like Barbara Eden. But on something. Like crystal meth," and Jerry Seinfeld has raved, "Everything that comes out of Ali Wentworth's mouth is funny!"At once endearing and hilarious, thoughtful and far-fetched, this third collection offers Ali at her...
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The Witches of New York

The Witches of New York

Ami McKay

Literature & Fiction / Historical Fiction / Memoir

The beloved, bestselling author of The Birth House and The Virgin Cure is back with her most beguiling novel yet, luring us deep inside the lives of a trio of remarkable young women navigating the glitz and grotesqueries of Gilded-Age New York by any means possible, including witchcraft...The year is 1880. Two hundred years after the trials in Salem, Adelaide Thom (Moth from The Virgin Cure) has left her life in the sideshow to open a tea shop with another young woman who feels it's finally safe enough to describe herself as a witch: a former medical student and gardien de sorts (keeper of spells), Eleanor St. Clair. Together they cater to Manhattan's high society ladies, specializing in cures, palmistry and potions—and in guarding the secrets of their clients. All is well until one bright September afternoon, when an enchanting young woman named Beatrice Dunn arrives at their door seeking employment. Beatrice soon becomes...
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