Showing results by narrator "Cassandra Campbell" in All Categories

In this powerful and wide-ranging collection of essays, Rebecca Solnit turns her attention to the war at home. This is a war, she says, "[W]ith so many casualties that we should call it by its true name, this war with so many dead by police, by violent ex-husbands and partners and lovers, by people pursuing power and profit at the point of a gun or just shooting first and figuring out who they hit later."

When Jess and Clare Martin move from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to their former college town in the Hudson River valley, they are hoping for rejuvenation - of their marriage, their savings, and Jess's writing career. They take a caretaker's job at Riven House, a crumbling estate and the home of their old college writing professor. While Clare once had dreams of being a writer, those plans fell by the wayside when Jess made a big, splashy literary debut in their 20s. It's been years, now, since his first novel.

Tricia Miles, owner of the Haven’t Got a Clue bookstore, must solve her own mystery when a bestselling author is found dead in the washroom.

Stingray’s memoir vividly shows how the energy of youth culture and an international love affair with rock ‘n’ roll forged alliances among a new generation who brought an end to the U.S.S.R.

Adulthood comes all too quickly when the baker’s son sets his sights on her. Offered a blood orange, Oliva—haunted by her mother’s warning, “a girl who smiles has already said yes”—spurns the fruit. Yet, this act sets into motion an unwanted courtship that will force Oliva to fight for the right to choose her own path, even though the odds of winning are steep. While America and Europe are in the throes of social change, Sicily fiercely clings to its rigid traditions, including the custom of fuitina–by which kidnappings could be disguised as elopements–which is accepted and enshrined in law.

Few of us can claim to be the authors of our fate. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy knows no other choice. With the eyes of the world watching, Jackie uses her effortless charm and keen intelligence to carve a place for herself among the men of history and weave a fairy tale for the American people, embodying a senator’s wife, a devoted mother, a First Lady - a queen in her own right. But all reigns must come to an end.

Two months to live. That's what the doctor says. Sally responds with grace and optimism. Marisa responds by closing herself off. If her mother is going to die before she graduates from high school, why even try. Cancer has already ruined everything. Honest and heartfelt, The Goodbye Diaries offers a touching glimpse into both sides of a terminal diagnosis - the one who will leave and the one who will be left behind.

On February 5, 1908, Kate Skinner, a 21-year-old unmarried barmaid in Brighton, England, gave birth to twin girls. Mary Hilton, Kate's employer and midwife, adopted Violet and Daisy and promptly began displaying the babies as "Brighton's United Twins". Exhibitions at street fairs, carnivals, and wax museums across England and Scotland followed. At eight years old, the girls came to the United States, eventually becoming the stars of sideshow, vaudeville, and burlesque circuits in the 1920s and 1930s.

Young Trot and the old captain, peg-legged Cap'n Bill, might seem like odd friends, but they are constant companions and Cap'n Bill taught her to love and appreciate the ocean. Trot was especially fascinated by the idea of mermaids and talked about them often with Cap'n Bill, who warned that no one who had met a mermaid had ever lived to tell the tale. One day while out sailing around, the pair is greeted by a beautiful mermaid who extends an invitation for them to come and visit their underwater kingdom and even become mermaids themselves for the adventure.

Out for a hike one scorching afternoon in Sycamore, Arizona, a newcomer to town stumbles across what appear to be human remains embedded in the wall of a dry desert ravine. As news of the discovery makes its way around town, Sycamore's longtime residents fear the bones may belong to Jess Winters, the teenage girl who disappeared suddenly some 18 years earlier, an unsolved mystery that has soaked into the porous rock of the town and haunted it ever since.

For the 150th anniversary of the publication of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Kate Bolick, Jenny Zhang, Carmen Maria Machado, and Jane Smiley explore their strong, lifelong personal engagement with Alcott's novel - what it has meant to them and why it still matters. These four voices come together to form a deep, funny, far-ranging meditation on the power of great literature to shape our lives.

In May 1875, Elizabeth Todd Edwards reels from news that her younger sister Mary, former first lady and widow of President Abraham Lincoln, has attempted suicide. Mary’s shocking act followed legal proceedings arranged by her eldest and only surviving son that declared her legally insane. Although they have long been estranged, Elizabeth knows Mary’s tenuous mental health has deteriorated through decades of trauma and loss. Yet is her suicide attempt truly the impulse of a deranged mind, or the desperate act of a sane woman terrified to be committed to an asylum?

The wealthy enclaves north of San Francisco are not the paradise they appear to be, and nobody knows this better than the students of a local high school. Despite being raised with all the opportunities money can buy, these vulnerable kids are navigating a treacherous adolescence in which every action, every rumor, every feeling, is potentially postable, shareable, viral.

From childhood, Katherine knows she is different and that her parents are not who they seem to be. But in becoming a mathematician, she faces the most human of problems - who is she? What is the cost of love, and what is the cost of ambition? On her quest to conquer the Riemann Hypothesis, the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time, she turns to a theorem with a mysterious history that holds both the lock and key to her identity and to secrets long buried during World War II.

A girl who’s always been in the shadows finds herself pursued by the unbelievably attractive new boy at school, who may or may not be the death of her. Another girl grows up mute because of a curse placed on her by a vindictive spirit, and later must decide whether to utter her first words to the boy she loves and risk killing everyone who hears her if the curse is real.

It's spring in Shady Hollow, and romance is in the air. Even reporter Vera Vixen is caught up in the season as her relationship with new police chief Orville Braun blossoms. But true love is not always smooth sailing, as two of the hollow's young residents come to find. Jonah Atwater and Stasia von Beaverpelt find themselves battling their families in order to be together. And when Alan's father, Shelby, goes over the top of Twilight Falls, all signs point to Stasia being the murderer.

In old Bari, everyone knows Maria De Santis as “Malacarne,” the bad seed. Nicknamed for her dark features, volcanic temperament, and resistance to rules, the headstrong girl can only imagine the possibilities that lie outside her poverty-stricken neighborhood. Growing up with her mother, two brothers, and a tyrannical father, Maria must abide. She does - amid the squalid life to which she was born, the cruelties of her small-minded neighbors, and violence in a constant threat of eruption.

In Barbara Quick's luminous novel, 18th-century Venice comes to life in all its splendor and decadence. The Grand Inquisitor's spies lurk everywhere, and yet the city's inhabitants abandon themselves to the revelry and masques of Carnival for half the year. This is the world as seen beyond the barred windows of her cloister by 14-year-old Anna Maria dal Violin, one of the orphan musicians of the Ospedale della Pietà, where Antonio Vivaldi is resident priest and composer.

It’s dreaded news for actress Lyla McCord and her husband, Nolan. Their eight-year-old daughter has vanished. To find her, Nolan reaches out to a psychic gifted with uncanny visions about the lost girl. But Lyla thinks she sees right through him. Is he a con artist or the real thing? Either way, he might be telling the truth. And that’s too frightening for Lyla to bear.

When Linda Ellis wrote her poem, "The Dash", in one afternoon twelve years ago, it would change her life forever. In 239 words, she captured the "Simple Truths" of why we were put on this earth. Since then, The Dash has been published hundreds of times in books, newspapers, magazines and company newsletters. It has also been read countless times at company meetings, graduations and funerals.