Charlemont - Tyler Memorial Library

"A Hero of Our Time" by Mikhail Lermontov, translated by Marr Murray and J. H. Wisdom, is a timeless classic of Russian literature that delves into the complexities of human nature, love, and the pursuit of meaning in a world marked by moral ambiguity and existential angst. Set against the stunning backdrop of the Caucasus Mountains, the novel follows the life of Pechorin, a young Russian officer whose enigmatic personality and reckless behavior...

Karr breaks down the key elements of great literary memoir, opening our concepts of memory and identity, and illuminating the cathartic power of reflecting on the past; anybody with an inner life or complicated history, whether writer or reader, will relate.

From the award-winning author of Legend of a Suicide: “A kind of modern fairy tale . . . Vann’s novels are striking, uncompromising portraits of American life” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
 
David Vann’s dazzling debut Legend of a Suicide was reviewed in over a 150 major global publications, won eleven prizes worldwide, was on forty “best books of the...

An NYRB Classics Original
 The first of the great Russian novels and one of the indisputable masterpieces of world literature, Dead Souls is the tale of Chichikov, an affably cunning con man who causes consternation in a small Russian town when he shows up out of nowhere proposing to buy title to serfs who, though dead as doornails, are still property on paper. What can he have up his sleeve, the local landowners wonder, even as some...

Susan Sontag has said that her earliest idea of what a writer should be was "someone who is interested in everything." Thirty-five years after her first collection of essays, the now classic Against Interpretation, our most important essayist has chosen more than forty longer and shorter pieces from the last two decades that illustrate a deeply felt, kaleidoscopic array of interests, passions, observations, and ideas.
"Reading" offers

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Celebrates the pleasures of reading and pays homage to the works and writers the author admires above all others, from Jane Austen to Charles Dickens to Jennifer Egan.

"From a dazzling new literary voice, a debut novel about a Palestinian family caught between present and past, between displacement and home ... On the eve of her daughter Alia's wedding, Salma reads the girl's future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel, and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they will all soon come to pass when the family is up rooted...

Since the publication of My Brilliant Friend, the first of the Neapolitan novels, Elena Ferrante's fame as one of our most compelling, insightful, and stylish contemporary authors has grown enormously. She has gained admirers among authors--Jhumpa Lahiri, Elizabeth Strout, Claire Messud, to name a few--and critics--James Wood, John Freeman, Eugenia Williamson, for example. But her most resounding success has undoubtedly been with readers, who have...

Embark on an intellectual odyssey through the pages of G. K. Chesterton's profound work, "Heretics," a literary masterpiece that challenges conventional thought and confronts the prevailing ideologies of the early 20th century. In this enlightening exploration, Chesterton delves into the realms of heresy, questions established norms and sparks a thought-provoking conversation about the nature of skepticism and belief. In "Heretics," Chesterton skillfully...