Showing results by narrator "Elisabeth Rodgers" in All Categories

Erica Donato - Brooklyn girl, urban history grad student, and single mom - is researching the 1930s, when Brownsville was the home of the notorious organized criminals the newspapers called Murder, Inc. She quickly learns that even in rapidly changing Brooklyn, Brownsville remains much as it was. It is still poor, it is still tough, and it still breeds fighters and gangs.

An unnamed narrator’s life is unraveling. Her only child has left home, and her twenty-year marriage is strained. Anticipation about her soon-to-be-released book of poetry looms. She seeks answers to the paradoxes of love, desire, and parenthood among the Greek and Roman gods at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As she passes her days teaching at a boys’ prep school, spending her off-hours sequestered in the museum’s austere galleries, she is haunted by memories of a yearlong friendship with a colleague, a fellow poet struggling with his craft.

Hell - part mystery, part domestic meditation, part horror story - is a brilliantly eerie novel in which three households coexist in a single restless vision: a dollhouse; a dysfunctional family in 1950s Philadelphia; and the cottage home of Edwina Moss, a 19th-century expert on domestic management. While the inhabitants of the dollhouse are powerless to shape their destiny, the four members of the Philadelphia family dedicate themselves to mutual vigilance. Edwina Moss concedes domestic control to the imagination and, finally, to the spirit of Antonin Careme.

Nathanael West: novelist, screenwriter, playwright, devoted outdoorsman was one of the most gifted and original writers of his generation, a comic artist whose insight into the brutalities of modern life proved prophetic. He is famous for two masterpieces, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939). Seventy years later, The Day of the Locust remains the most penetrating novel ever written about Hollywood.

For two years Jenny Latham has lived alone with her young son in the Colorado mountains, trying to manage her guilt over letting an abusive husband control her for too long. Her beauty makes her the object of many men's desires, but with a broken heart and an independent streak as strong as the mountains themselves, Jenny refuses them all. But when she accidentally shoots a stranger and takes it upon herself to nurse him back to health, she finds all of her defenses wavering.

Olivia Nikitas, a hardened journalist whose specialty is war zones, has been reporting from the front lines of the civil war in Aleppo, Syria. When Brian, an aid worker she reluctantly fell in love with, dies while following her into danger, she'd do anything to bring him back. In a makeshift death chamber beneath an ancient, sacred site, a strange technology is revealed to Olivia: the power to remake the future by changing the past. Following her heart and not her head, Olivia brings Brian back, accidentally shifting the world to the brink of nuclear and biological disaster.

With their distinctive greeting at the homes across the country, sales ladies brought door-to-door sales of makeup, perfume, and other products to American women beginning in 1886. Working for the company enabled women to earn money on the side and even become financially independent in a respectable profession. Ding Dong! Avon Calling! is the story of women and entrepreneurship, and of an innovative corporation largely managed by men that empowered women to exploit networks of other women and their community for profit.

C. J. Dunn is an expert at spinning her clients' image in the media and the perfect lawyer to deflect police interest in Rick Slater, head of security for a U.S. congressman from Miami. Slater was seen at a South Beach party with the recently vanished Alana Martin, but in election season, any hint of scandal could doom the congressman's chances. If she succeeds, friends of the congressman have assured her they will arrange a spot for her as a legal commentator on a national media outlet.

The Fulani are the largest surviving group of nomads on the planet. In Walking with Abel, Anna Badkhen embeds herself with a family of Fulani cowboys - nomadic herders in Mali's Sahel grasslands - as they embark on their annual migration across the savanna.

Public school is a daunting, tedious, occasionally bloody experience shared by millions of students, current and former. Classroom fights, incompetent teachers, sex in bathrooms, rigid social castes - it's shocking most of us graduated able to read. Take Out Your Earrings Before You Fight takes a dry, witty look at all the things you learn - and everything you don't - while slogging through the K-12 system.

A crime of unfathomable horror has a ripple-like effect on four profoundly different souls. Helen, a troubled inmate at Sloatsburg women's prison, is serving a life sentence for the murder of her children. Dr. Louise Forrest, the recently divorced mother of an eight-year-old boy, has forsworn the Park Avenue practice for which she trained in favor of the chief of psychiatry job at Sloatsburg.

Maybe I Should Drink More, like most books about young adults trying to find their place in the world, starts with a breakup. Stephanie Sparer explores the oddities of life in a series of candid essays about dating failures and dating wins, selfactualizing, work, and the slew of anxieties that come free with your college diploma.

A raw, smart, and darkly funny memoir, My Heart Is an Autumn Garage unapologetically chronicles a lifelong struggle with clinical depression. Anne Thriault neatly lays bare her heart, unsparingly detailing the naked self-loathing and self-destructive behaviors that led to her breakdown and subsequent hospitalization at the age of 21. Both an examination of the frightening and deeply dehumanizing treatment of psychiatric patients and a wry coming-of-age story, this book deftly explores the knife's edge between despair and hope.

When Lauren fails to pick her son up from school, a normal day turns into a nightmare - and Alice begins to realize that nothing will ever be ordinary again. The police desperately search for Lauren, who is nearly nine months pregnant. Alice, herself pregnant, realizes she's being followed and has the creeping fear that she and her unborn twins are in danger. As new life grows within her, she must fight to save her family - and herself.

This 5-point, week-by-week plan to help you change your lifestyle in a way that unlocks your body's natural ability to lose weight. The strategies will change your perspective about the roles of food, exercise, and rest in your life.

When ex-CIA agent Vera Kelly loses her job and her girlfriend in a single day, she reluctantly goes into business as a private detective. Heartbroken and cash-strapped, she takes a case that dredges up dark memories and attracts dangerous characters from across the Cold War landscape. Before it's over, she'll chase a lost child through foster care and follow a trail of Dominican exiles to the Caribbean. Forever looking over her shoulder, she nearly misses what's right in front of her: her own desire for home, connection and a new romance at the local bar.

Klara Walldéen was raised by her grandparents on a remote archipelago in the Baltic Sea, learning to fish and hunt and sail a boat through a storm. Now, as an EU Parliament aide in Brussels, she is learning how to navigate the treacherous currents of international politics: the lines between friend and enemy, truth and lies.

Young and naive, Kathleen Hill moves to newly independent Nigeria with her husband to teach at Igbobi College. It is the early 1960s, and Hill is soon caught up in the swirl of the times: The legacy of colonialism, chaos back in America, and violence and racism across the globe that touch even the quiet school where she teaches English literature. As a way of steadying and finding herself in this new place, she begins reading Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, and there discovers disturbing resonances with her own life.

Henry "Hen" Birnbaum's sister, Sarah, missing for over a year, has come home unexpectedly, with no explanation at all. But he can't leave well enough alone; Hen needs to figure out why she disappeared, even if she won't tell him. It's not like he has anything better to do. His girlfriend just dumped him and kicked him out of their band. He can't play the bass worth crap anyway. His social life consists of night after night of VH1 marathons with his best friend and next-door neighbor, the neurotic Emma Wood.

Forensic sculptor Eve Duncan lies in a hospital room in Carmel, California—but she has sworn to protect an innocent young girl, Cara Delaney, whose enemies are getting closer by the hour. Eve decides they must 'disappear' and so, after years of resistance, succumbs to John MacDuff's insistent plea to track down a treasure presumed buried in Scotland. The remote mountains should be a perfect hiding place, but they soon realize there is nowhere distant enough from those who are on their trail.