The Midnight Assassin

The Midnight Assassin
Author: Skip Hollandsworth
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2016-04-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0805097686

A New York Times bestseller, The Midnight Assassin is a sweeping narrative history of a terrifying serial killer--America's first--who stalked Austin, Texas in 1885. In the late 1800s, the city of Austin, Texas was on the cusp of emerging from an isolated western outpost into a truly cosmopolitan metropolis. But beginning in December 1884, Austin was terrorized by someone equally as vicious and, in some ways, far more diabolical than London's infamous Jack the Ripper. For almost exactly one year, the Midnight Assassin crisscrossed the entire city, striking on moonlit nights, using axes, knives, and long steel rods to rip apart women from every race and class. At the time the concept of a serial killer was unthinkable, but the murders continued, the killer became more brazen, and the citizens' panic reached a fever pitch. Before it was all over, at least a dozen men would be arrested in connection with the murders, and the crimes would expose what a newspaper described as "the most extensive and profound scandal ever known in Austin." And yes, when Jack the Ripper began his attacks in 1888, London police investigators did wonder if the killer from Austin had crossed the ocean to terrorize their own city. With vivid historical detail and novelistic flair, Texas Monthly journalist Skip Hollandsworth brings this terrifying saga to life.

Love, Ruby Lavender

Love, Ruby Lavender
Author: Deborah Wiles
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2001
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0152023143

Ruby Lavender has fun with her grandmother Miss Eula as they rescue chickens, paint a house pink and run their own secret post office. But what can Ruby dowhen Eula goes away?

Whistling Past the Graveyard

Whistling Past the Graveyard
Author: Susan Crandall
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2013-07-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1476707731

From an award-winning author comes a wise and tender coming-of-age story about a nine-year-old girl who runs away from her Mississippi home in 1963, befriends a lonely woman suffering loss and abuse, and embarks on a life-changing road trip. Whistling past the graveyard. That’s what Daddy called it when you did something to keep your mind off your most worstest fear... In the summer of 1963, nine-year-old Starla Claudelle runs away from her strict grandmother’s Mississippi home. Starla’s destination is Nashville, where her mother went to become a famous singer, abandoning Starla when she was three. Walking a lonely country road, Starla accepts a ride from Eula, a black woman traveling alone with a white baby. Now, on the road trip that will change her life forever, Starla sees for the first time life as it really is—as she reaches for a dream of how it could one day be.

The Empathy Exams

The Empathy Exams
Author: Leslie Jamison
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2014-04-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1555970885

From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014 Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other? By confronting pain—real and imagined, her own and others'—Jamison uncovers a personal and cultural urgency to feel. She draws from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory—from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration—in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.

Go Down, Moses

Go Down, Moses
Author: William Faulkner
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2011-05-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307792145

“I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” —William Faulkner, on receiving the Nobel Prize Go Down, Moses is composed of seven interrelated stories, all of them set in Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County. From a variety of perspectives, Faulkner examines the complex, changing relationships between blacks and whites, between man and nature, weaving a cohesive novel rich in implication and insight.

The Help

The Help
Author: Kathryn Stockett
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 546
Release: 2011
Genre: African American women
ISBN: 0425245136

Original publication and copyright date: 2009.

Ill Feelings

Ill Feelings
Author: Alice Hattrick
Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2022-05-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1558614133

An intrepid, galvanizing meditation on illness, disability, feminism, and what it means to be alive. In 1995 Alice’s mother collapsed with pneumonia. She never fully recovered and was eventually diagnosed with ME, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Then Alice got ill. Their symptoms mirrored their mother’s and appeared to have no physical cause; they received the same diagnosis a few years later. Ill Feelings blends memoir, medical history, biography and literary nonfiction to uncover both of their case histories, and branches out into the records of ill health that women have written about in diaries and letters. Their cast of characters includes Virginia Woolf and Alice James, the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson, John Ruskin’s lost love Rose la Touche, the artist Louise Bourgeois and the nurse Florence Nightingale. Suffused with a generative, transcendent rage, Alice Hattrick’s genre-bending debut is a moving and defiant exploration of life with a medically unexplained illness.

Bright Side

Bright Side
Author: Kim Holden
Publisher:
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2014-07-09
Genre: College students
ISBN: 9780991140237

Secrets.Everyone has one.Some are bigger than others.And when secrets are revealed,Some will heal you ...And some will end you.Kate Sedgwick's life has been anything but typical. She's endured hardship and tragedy, but throughout it all she remains happy and optimistic (there's a reason her best friend Gus calls her Bright Side). Kate is strong-willed, funny, smart, and musically gifted. She's also never believed in love. So when Kate leaves San Diego to attend college in the small town of Grant, Minnesota, the last thing she expects is to fall in love with Keller Banks.They both feel it.But they each have a reason to fight it.They each have a secret.And when secrets are revealed,Some will heal you ...And some will end you.

Fugitive Days

Fugitive Days
Author: Bill Ayers
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2009-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780807032770

Bill Ayers was born into privilege and is today a highly respected educator. In the late 1960s he was a young pacifist who helped to found one of the most radical political organizations in U.S. history, the Weather Underground. In a new era of antiwar activism and suppression of protest, his story, Fugitive Days, is more poignant and relevant than ever.

Firelight

Firelight
Author: Kristen Callihan
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2014-07-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0349406006

For fans of Diana Gabaldon, Amanda Quick and Nalini Singh comes the Darkest London series. In Victorian London, magic lurks in every shadowy corner . . . 'Callihan has a great talent for sexual tension and jaw-dropping plots' - Diana Gabaldon 'A sizzling paranormal with dark history and explosive magic! Callihan is an impressive new talent' - Larissa Ione London, 1881 Once the flames are ignited . . . Miranda Ellis is a woman tormented. Plagued since birth by a strange and powerful gift, she has spent her entire life struggling to control her exceptional abilities. Yet one innocent but irreversible mistake has left her family's fortune decimated and forced her to wed London's most nefarious nobleman. They will burn for eternity . . . Lord Benjamin Archer is no ordinary man. Doomed to hide his disfigured face behind masks, Archer knows it's selfish to take Miranda as his bride. Yet he can't help being drawn to the flame-haired beauty whose touch sparks a passion he hasn't felt in a lifetime. When Archer is accused of a series of gruesome murders, he gives in to the beastly nature he has fought so hard to hide from the world. But the curse that haunts him cannot be denied. Now, to save his soul, Miranda will enter a world of dark magic and darker intrigue. For only she can see the man hiding behind the mask. 'Evocative and deeply romantic, Firelight was fascinating from the very first page' - Nalini Singh 'Callihan has a great talent for sexual tension and jaw-dropping plots' - Diana Gabaldon 'A sizzling paranormal with dark history and explosive magic! Callihan is an impressive new talent' - Larissa Ione 'Debut author Callihan pens a compelling Victorian paranormal with heart and soul' - Publishers Weekly 'A taut tale filled with sexual tension. This is one of the finest debuts of the season' - RT Book Reviews Kristen Callihan is RITA nominated and the bestselling author of The Hook Up