Books that I love the most | Nashville Public Library

1) Beneath the underdog: his world as composed by Mingus

Author

Description

A chilling graphic novel set in suburban Seattle during the mid-1970s describes the lives of the area's teenagers, who are suddenly faced with a devastating, disfiguring, and incurable plague that has descended on the young people of Seattle.

3) The collected poems of Frank O'Hara

Author

O'Hara, Frank

Description

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The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara reflects the poet's growth as an artist from the earliest dazzling, experimental verses that he began writing in the late 1940s to the years before his accidental death at forty, when his poems became increasingly individual and reflective.

4) The Complete Cosmicomics

Author

Calvino, Italo

Formats:

eBook, Kindle

Description

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The complete collection of “nimble and often hilarious” short stories exploring the cosmos by the acclaimed author of Invisible Cities (Colin Dwyer, NPR).

Italo Calvino’s beloved cosmicomics cross planets and traverse galaxies, speed up time or slow it down to the particles of an instant. Through the eyes of a “cosmic know-it-all” with the unpronounceable name of Qfwfq, Calvino explores...

5) The dog of the South

Author

Portis, Charles

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook

Description

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Ray Midge tracks down his wife Norma, who has run off with her first husband, by following credit card receipts. The trail leads from Arkansas, to Mexico, and into Honduras.

6) Edisto: a novel

Author

Powell, Padgett

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

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Simons Manigault lives with his mother, an eccentric professor known locally as the Duchess, who is convinced her twelve-year-old son can become a writer of genius. She has immersed Simons in the literary classics since birth and has given him free rein to gather material in such spots as a nightclub called Marvin’s R.O. Sweet Shop and Baby Grand. At the center of Simons’s life on Edisto is an enigmatic character who tutors the boy in the...

7) Escape Velocity

Author

Portis, Charles

Description

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Collected here in Escape Velocity, edited by Jay Jennings, is his "miscellany" †"†" journalism, short fiction, memoir, and even the play Delray's New Moon, published for the first time in this volume. Â Portis covers topics as varied as the civil rights movement, road tripping in Baja, and Elvis' s visits to his aging mother for publications such as the New York Herald Tribune and Saturday Evening Post. Â Fans of Portis's droll Southern

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8) If on a winter's night a traveler

Author

Calvino, Italo

Series

Harvest/HBJ book

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle, eAudiobook

Description

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Calvino shows that the novel, far from being a dead form, is capable of endless mutations. If on a winter's night a traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author.

9) In Watermelon Sugar

Author

Brautigan, Richard

Description

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iDEATH is a place where the sun shines a different color every day and where people travel to the length of their dreams. Rejecting the violence and hate of the old gang at the Forgotten Works, they lead gentle lives in watermelon sugar. In this book, Richard Brautigan discovers and expresses the mood of the counterculture generation.

10) Infinite jest: a novel

Author

Wallace, David Foster

Series

Back Bay books

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle, eAudiobook

Description

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A spoof on our culture featuring a drug-and-alcohol rehabilitation house near Boston. The center becomes a hotbed of revolutionary activity by Quebec separatists in revolt against the Organization of North American Nations which now rules the continent.

11) Invisible Cities

Author

Calvino, Italo

Series

Harvest book

Notes

This is it. THE BOOK. I couldn't read any thing else for maybe a month after I read this the first time.

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle, eAudiobook

Description

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Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels—a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory.
"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else." In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and...

12) The Master and Margarita

Author

Bulgakov, Mikhail

Series

Penguin classics

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle, eAudiobook

Description

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Presents a satirical drama about Satan's visit to Moscow, where he learns that the citizens no longer believe in God. He decides to teach them a lesson by perpetrating a series of horrific tricks. Combines two distinct yet interwoven parts, one set in contemporary Moscow, the other in ancient Jerusalem.

13) Pale fire

Author

Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich

Series

Everyman's library volume 67

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

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An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, 'Pale Fire' offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreward and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit...

14) The sailor who fell from grace with the sea

Author

Mishima, Yukio

15) Sixty stories

Author

Barthelme, Donald

16) The summer book

Author

Jansson, Tove

Series

New York Review Books classics

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle, eAudiobook

Description

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"This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia's grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland."--Publisher's description.

17) You too can have a body like mine: a novel

Author

Kleeman, Alexandra

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle, eAudiobook

Description

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"A missing-person mystery told from the point of view of the missing person; an American horror story that concerns sex and friendship, consumption and appetite, faith and transformation, real food and reality television; and ... a wholly singular view of modern womanhood"--Dust jacket flap.