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  Sporting Guide - Los Angeles 1897

  Liz Goldwyn

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  A brilliantly imaginative recreation of an 1890s Los Angeles pocket guide, or "Sporting Guide," to the brothels of the day. 
   
  Before there was the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, Los Angeles was a rough place, building its way out to the global city of today. In the late nineteenth century it was a rapidly growing city filled with pimps and prostitutes, Chinese railwaymen, robbers, smugglers, and corrupt politicians. It was a city where losers and dreamers from all over the world could came to make their fortune. 
   
  This era of her native city has always fascinated author, fashion icon, and filmmaker Liz Goldwyn. In a series of beautiful, haunting interlinked stories she recreates the Los Angeles of the 1890s through stories of its pimps, politicians, prostitutes-male and female-businessmen, madams, and johns. She takes listeners inside the bordellos and velvet curtained rooms where sex entices but power and money rule. Based on her original research in the libraries and archives of LA, these fictional stories center around real historical characters-like the famous owner of LA's grandest brothel, Pearl Morton (whose tombstone Goldwyn discovered). Interspersed in those stories, Goldwyn writes about the historical realities of the time, from fashion to opium drug addiction to sexual practices and birth control. 
   
  Sporting Guide evokes a lost world of those on the margins of LA, of the hustlers who made it into one of the great cities of the world, and she gives a poignant voice to people and stories lost to time.

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  Gone to Soldiers - A Novel

  Marge Piercy

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  This sweeping New York Times bestseller is “the most thorough and most captivating, most engrossing novel ever written about World War II” (Los Angeles Times). Epic in scope, Marge Piercy’s sweeping novel encompasses the wide range of people and places marked by the Second World War. Each of her ten narrators has a unique and compelling story that powerfully depicts his or her personality, desires, and fears. Special attention is given to the women of the war effort, like Bernice, who rebels against her domineering father to become a fighter pilot, and Naomi, a Parisian Jew sent to live with relatives in Detroit, whose twin sister, Jacqueline—still in France—joins the resistance against Nazi rule.   The horrors of the concentration camps; the heroism of soldiers on the beaches of Okinawa, the skies above London, and the seas of the Mediterranean; the brilliance of code breakers; and the resilience of families waiting for the return of sons, brothers, and fathers are all conveyed through powerful, poignant prose that resonates beyond the page. Gone to Soldiers is a testament to the ordinary people, with their flaws and inner strife, who rose to defend liberty during the most extraordinary times.

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  The Manningtree Witches

  A. K. Blakemore

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  England, 1643. Puritanical fervor has gripped the nation. And in Manningtree, a town depleted of men since the wars began, the hot terror of damnation burns in the hearts of women left to their own devices. Rebecca West, fatherless and husbandless, chafes against the drudgery of her days, livened only occasionally by her infatuation with the handsome young clerk John Edes. But then a newcomer, who identifies himself as the Witchfinder General, arrives. A mysterious, pious figure dressed from head to toe in black, Matthew Hopkins takes over the Thorn Inn and begins to ask questions about what the women on the margins of this diminished community are up to. Dangerous rumors of covens, pacts, and bodily wants have begun to hang over women like Rebecca—and the future is as frightening as it is thrilling. Brimming with contemporary energy and resonance, The Manningtree Witches plunges its listeners into the fever and menace of the English witch trials, where suspicion, mistrust, and betrayal run amok as a nation's arrogant male institutions start to realize that the very people they've suppressed for so long may be about to rise up and claim their freedom.

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  November 22 - A Novel

  Bryan Woolley

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  A fictionalized account of the assassination of JFK as experienced by the people of Dallas and the world. 
   
  Through a myriad of characters both real and invented (and some whose names have been changed) journalist and author Bryan Woolley presents one of the best dissections of Dallas life in 1963 in his novel November 22. Covering the twenty-four hours surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Woolley accurately captures the essence of the day’s atmosphere, resulting in a rich cross section of a city more complex and diverse than many observers have been willing to acknowledge. He details the transformation of the world in the twinkling of an eye and peers into the shifting lives of all people affected by this shattering event. Readers will be surprised at how relevant the book is to the Dallas—and America—of right now. 
   
  Praise for November 22 
   
  ‘‘Knowing that Bryan is one of the best writers in Texas, I expected November 22 to be an incisive, insightful look at the Dallas of 1963. It is. What left me thunderstruck was how relevant the book is to the Dallas—and America—of right now. Bryan was a couple of decades ahead of his time. I’m thrilled that this book is once again available for a wide audience.” —Michael Merschel, The Dallas Morning News 
   
  “Bringing Bryan Woolley’s novel November 22 back into print is a great idea. It’s quite simply one of the best dissections of Big D on that dark day in 1963.” —Don Graham, J. Frank Dobie Regents Professor of American and English Literature, author of State of Minds: Texas Culture and Its Discontents 
   
  “There is no great Dallas novel, but November 22 is the closest thing to it.” —D Magazine

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  Night Train to Napier

  Wendy M. Wilson

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  When Sergeant Frank Hardy's father, James Hardy, arrives from England, he's accompanied by a woman he met on the voyage. In forced quarantine on Somes Island in Wellington Harbour, Frank is visited by a man claiming to be a detective from the Chinatown Squad in San Francisco, who warns Frank that his father is in deep trouble. The woman has enemies, and they are on the way to New Zealand to find her and kill her. If James Hardy gets in their way, he's a dead man. 
  Frank pursues the couple across the North Island by hansom cab, train, buggy and horse car; can he get to Napier and rescue his father before it's too late? Who is the mysterious man who keeps showing up? Is the detective whom he claims he is? Does James Hardy have a secret of his own? Find out in this gripping seventh book in The Frank Hardy Mysteries series.

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  Under Fire

  Henri Barbusse

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  The original translation of one of the first World War I novels—at first criticized for its harsh realism but now celebrated as a classic. Set in early 1916, Under Fire follows the point of view of an unnamed foot soldier in a squad of French volunteers on the western front. It combines soaring, poetic descriptions with the mundane, messy, human reality of soldiers living in their own filth. Gradually, names and features are given to the men who emerge from the mud, from the dignified leader, Corporal Bertrand, to the ebullient Volpatte and the obsessive Cocon. Intermingled with details of how the men navigate daily life in the putrefied atmosphere of the trenches is a political, pacifist argument about this war and war more generally. Caught up in events they cannot control, the soldiers go through their daily routines: foraging for food, reading letters from wives and mothers, drinking, fighting in battle, and, in harrowing scenes for which the novel is noted, discovering dead bodies in advanced stages of decomposition. Through it all, they talk about the war, attempting to make sense of the altered world in which they find themselves.Under Fire (originally published in French as Le Feu) drew criticism at the time of its publication for its brutal detail, but went on to win the Prix Goncourt, a prestigious literary award that Henri Barbusse—a World War I soldier who wrote from vivid, painful experience—shares with renowned authors such as Marcel Proust and Marguerite Duras. Here, the original translation by William Fitzwater Wray, which first appeared in 1917, captures both the intensity of the story and the essence of the era. A glossary is also provided.

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