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Katherine's Story
by Kage Baker
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A newlywed has difficulty with the transition from New York City to her new husband's southern farm and the troubled birth of her baby during the tragic 1938 broadcast of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds. (Published: 2001)
Words: 4522 - Reading Time: 12-18 min.
Category: Mainstream
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132 Reader Ratings:
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2
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The American Chronicles: Decade One Dawn of the Century
by Robert Vaughan
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In Volume One of The American Chronicles, Robert Vaughan panoramically evokes America at the beginning of the Twentieth century, poised on the brink of greatness and fraught with the tumult of rapid change. A time of robber-baron industrialists and rapid territorial expansion both at home and abroad, the new music called "ragtime" is the soundtrack for a confident nation of ambitious dreamers. It is 1904 and the nation's eyes are on the St.Louis World's Fair, which features an astounding variety... more info>> (Published: 1992)
Words: 134242 - Reading Time: 383-536 min.
Category: Mainstream
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Cold War
by Robert Vaughan
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The launch of Sputnik. Rock 'n' roll fever. The struggle for civil rights. Robert Vaughan's seventh volume of the American Chronicles has America entering the fifties amidst the fright of a cold war with Russia and a fiery war in Korea. Prizewinning war correspondent Shaylin McKay and African-American war hero Travis Jackson have a date with destiny. Back home, sexy screen siren Marcella Mills and Hollywood's leading lady Demaris Hunter find both their careers and their emotions harnessed to the... more info>> (Published: 1992)
Words: 111358 - Reading Time: 318-445 min.
Category: Mainstream
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4
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The Water is Wide
by Pat Conroy
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Readers know Pat Conroy as a novelist of great reputation and success, but his first notable achievement as a writer was an autobiographical book called The Water is Wide, published in 1972--the story of a year in his life as a teacher of poor African-American children on a coastal island in South Carolina. The New York Times called The Water is Wide "a hell of a good story," and that observation points to one of Conroy's supreme gifts as a writer of fiction--the ability to craft an irresistible... more info>> (Published: 2002)
Category: Mainstream
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5
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The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
by Fay Weldon
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Ruth is, by her own admission, an unlucky woman. Ungainly, unattractive, unassertive, she trudges through life bowed under the weight of a loveless marriage to a brazen, cheating, indifferent man named Bobbo. Although she has patiently suffered through the small and not-so-small indignities occasioned by sharing a life with the uncaring Bobbo, as The Life and Loves of a She-Devil opens, Ruth's patience is wearing thin, and the pain and resentment she has been swallowing all these years are final... more info>>
Category: Mainstream
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6
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Kill the Guy with the Ball
by David Bulley
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A flashback to glory, helps a man do the right thing. (Published: 2000) Brassring.com War of the Words Winner
Words: 1049 - Reading Time: 2-4 min.
Category: Mainstream
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7
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Between the Train and Forever
by David Bulley
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Sometimes finding courage can lead to unexpected places. (Published: 2000)
Words: 3161 - Reading Time: 9-12 min.
Category: Mainstream
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8
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The Joy Luck Club
by Amy Tan
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A stunning literary achievement, The Joy Luck Club explores the tender and tenacious bond between four daughters and their mothers. The daughters know one side of their mothers, but they don't know about their earlier never-spoken-of lives in China. The mothers want love and obedience from their daughters, but they don't know the gifts that the daughters keep to themselves. Heartwarming and bittersweet, this is a novel for mother, daughters, and those that love them.
Category: Mainstream
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9
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Plastic Jesus
by Poppy Z. Brite
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The 1960's brought Seth and Payton all they'd fantasized about--perfect friendships, a successful four-man band, and most importantly, each other. Together they embarked on a tour that brought them stimulating highs and shattering lows, and they prospered and suffered in one another's arms. The two men carried each other and carried a group that created both a history and a future for rock. But at some point their music blurred with the news of their love and the world was faced with the choice ... more info>> (Published: 2000)
Words: 16690 - Reading Time: 47-66 min.
Category: Mainstream
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10
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The Last Angry Man
by Gerald Green
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The seismic shifts in American life in the years following World War II have inspired several generations of novelists, but few have described the fallout of those changes as poignantly and with as much understanding as Gerald Green did in The Last Angry Man, published in 1956. At a time when the world had begun to focus on angry young men, Green created a magnificently angry old one as his hero. Based on his father, the title character is a doctor and a man of principle whose life's work is abo... more info>> (Published: 2002)
Category: Mainstream
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11
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The Great Santini
by Pat Conroy
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The Great Santini is an affecting coming-of-age story that does not blink in its depiction of a tight and loving family on the edge of disaster. Set in the rich, sleepy atmosphere of coastal South Carolina in the early 1960s, the novel echoes the timeless tension that emerges between vigorous fathers and their maturing sons, the inevitable clash of personal pride and selfless love, the jealous frustration that comes with maturity. Bull Meecham, known to all as "The Great Santini," can't push his... more info>> (Published: 2002)
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12
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The Graduate
by Charles Webb
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Charles Webb's The Graduate, published in 1963, was a success for the young American writer, a sly and provocative first novel that is often forgotten in the shadow of Mike Nichols' sensational 1967 film and, more recently, an attention-grabbing stage adaptation in London with Kathleen Turner, then Jerry Hall as Mrs. Robinson. Among other things, Webb's novel is a book of its time, written when young Americans were beginning to question, for the first time, the materialistic values that the post... more info>> (Published: 2002)
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13
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Little Caesar
by W. R. Burnett
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W.R. Burnett knew, first-hand, of the world he describes in his terse, vivid 1929 novel with a brutally ironic title--Little Caesar. Burnett worked as reporter in Chicago in the 1920s, and he observed the nobodies willing to cheat and kill their way to being somebodies. The novel's hero, Cesare Bandello, known as Rico, is a "gutter Macbeth," a bad guy who claws his way up through the Chicago gang, circa 1928. Though the very idea of Rico is inseparable from Edward G. Robinson's star-making perfo... more info>> (Published: 2002)
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14
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The Prince of Tides
by Pat Conroy
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To tell his story, Tom Wingo, the scarred but proud hero of Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides, must go on a journey--a literal, geographical journey to New York from his home on the South Carolina coast that leads to a psychological journey from the present to the past, to a virtual prison of memory. What he finds there is both terrible and liberating, for him and for his whole broken but remarkable family. Ambitious and intoxicating, The Prince of Tides is Conroy's biggest and most popular novel... more info>> (Published: 1986)
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15
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The Pit of the Serpent
by Robert E. Howard
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The Pit and the Serpent is the first in the Steve Costigan series (about whom Robert Howard wrote more stories than any other character, including Conan). Able-bodied Seaman Costigan is in port in Manila, and while on shore leave, he gets into a fight over a beautiful girl ... and that's just the start of his trouble! Features a new introduction by Mark Finn and notes from editor Paul Herman about the story and Howard's classic boxing fiction. (Published: 1929)
Words: 8077 - Reading Time: 23-32 min.
Category: Mainstream
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16
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The Sorcerer's Apprentice
by John F. D. Taff
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"The search for the world's master assassin begins with a single question.... Would you kill a person if you knew you could get away with it? A simple question. An innocent question. David Benning, a successful accountant, is a man whose answers to life's questions lately have lately all been wrong. He has a dying father racking up charges at an expensive nursing home and a bank account with embezzled money sitting in it. When he's blackmailed by a shadowy organization known only as "The Group,"... more info>> (Published: 2001)
Words: 95066 - Reading Time: 271-380 min.
Category: Mainstream
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17
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Satin Doll
by Maggie Davis
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Samantha Whitfield is a highly successful fashion model, traveling from New York to Paris to London for her glamorous high-profile career. Her face is the one every photographer needs, her body what every designer imagines. She plays for keeps in the fast paced game of the fashion glitterati--only to risk it all on the demands of her own insatiable passions. Her world is fraught with the illicit dangers of sex and drugs, millionaires and hangers-on. A dazzling whirlwind of high fashion and high ... more info>> (Published: 1987)
Words: 98060 - Reading Time: 280-392 min.
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18
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Rommel's Gold
by Maggie Davis
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In Maggie Davis's exquisitely written novel, international espionage, forbidden love, and greed surround the search for General Rommel's gold. During World War II, Rommel buried it in the North African desert, then left to meet with Hitler. Now Sharon Hoyt, with her seductive Western ways, finds herself attracted to an Arab police chief and mixed up in the ex-Nazis' search for Rommel's gold. Will she be able to get out of the crossfire of a brewing Middle East conflict? (Published: 1971)
Words: 149764 - Reading Time: 427-599 min.
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19
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Eagles
by Maggie Davis
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They are intoxicating seductresses willing to do anything--absolutely anything--for love; however, these women can't rival the military aspirations of their men. The women try to fill the holes left in their hearts, but how much longer can they survive loneliness and rejection? How do they take possession of their men's hearts, hearts that only have room for the liberating expanse of the sky? The only way they can reach their stuck-in-the-clouds men is to use illicit affairs, sinful seduction, a... more info>> (Published: 1980)
Words: 142793 - Reading Time: 407-571 min.
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20
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Colonel Rutherford's Colt
by Lucius Shepard
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The itinerant gun show draws together many subcultures from the margins of society: survivalists, Aryan brotherhoods, and the team of Rita Whitelaw and Jimmy Roy Guy, dealers in collectible arms. Rita has made Jimmy an exception to her general disdain for whites--"not your typical Caucasian," as she describes him--for Jimmy's got a storytelling ability that borders on mystic vision. When Jimmy makes an agreement with the widow of Aryan martyr Bob Champion to broker her husband's infamous Colt .4... more info>> (Published: 2001)
Words: 56326 - Reading Time: 160-225 min.
Category: Mainstream
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21
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Spider Kiss
by Harlan Ellison
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If you thought the only thing Ellison writes is speculative fiction, craziness about giant cockroaches that attack Detroit or invaders from space who look like pink eggplant and smell like chicken soup, this dynamite novel of the emergent days of rock and roll will turn you around at least three times. No spaceships, no robots, just a nice kid from Louisville with a voice like an angel and an invisible monkey named Success riding him straight to hell. (Published: 1996)
Words: 69422 - Reading Time: 198-277 min.
Category: Mainstream
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22
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Riding the Dark Train Out
by Harlan Ellison
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A lecherous freight-bum can't believe his luck when his boxcar is graced by a young couple eloping to Philadelphia. (Published: 1961)
Words: 3238 - Reading Time: 9-12 min.
Category: Mainstream
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23
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Neither Your Jenny Nor Mine
by Harlan Ellison
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1964: With two friends and four hundred dollars, a pregnant teenager travels to Tijuana to take care of her 'condition'--a harrowing glimpse into the abortion subculture written before Roe vs. Wade. (Published: 1964)
Words: 16339 - Reading Time: 46-65 min.
Category: Mainstream
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24
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The End of the Time of Leinard
by Harlan Ellison
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Sheriff Frank Leinard cleaned up the Wild West town of Bartisville with the quick justice of his Colt Army .44 revolver, but that was years ago and on the eve of the twentieth century, times have changed ... Frank's style of Sherrifin' just ain't no good no more. (Published: 1958)
Words: 2705 - Reading Time: 7-10 min.
Category: Mainstream
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25
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Daniel White for the Greater Good
by Harlan Ellison
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Mainstream story of a Georgia town that bursts into racial hatred as a black man is accused of raping a sixteen year old white girl. The calm, savvy man from the NAACP comes to town to advise the black leaders in the community, but his suggestion goes beyond anything they could have imagined. This story was written during the civil rights movement. (Published: 1961)
Words: 4324 - Reading Time: 12-17 min.
Category: Mainstream
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