The Overstory: A Novel

The Overstory: A Novel
Author: Richard Powers
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2018-04-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0393635538

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction Winner of the William Dean Howells Medal Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Over One Year on the New York Times Bestseller List A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post, Time, Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year "The best novel ever written about trees, and really just one of the best novels, period." —Ann Patchett The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

Study Guide for Book Clubs: The Overstory

Study Guide for Book Clubs: The Overstory
Author: Kathryn Cope
Publisher: Kathryn Cope
Total Pages: 59
Release: 2020-10-23
Genre: Study Aids
ISBN:

An essential tool for all reading groups! No reading group should be without this book club companion to Richard Powers's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Overstory. This comprehensive guide includes useful literary context; a full plot summary, discussion of themes and symbols; detailed character notes; thought-provoking discussion questions; recommended further reading and a quick quiz. Study Guides for Book Clubs are designed to help you get the absolute best from your book club meetings. They enable reading group members to appreciate their chosen book in greater depth than ever before. Please be aware that this is a companion guide and does not contain the full text of the novel.

The Overstory Book

The Overstory Book
Author: Craig R. Elevitch
Publisher: PAR
Total Pages: 550
Release: 2004
Genre: Gardening
ISBN: 0970254431

Whether in a small backyard or a larger farm or forest, trees are vital to the web of life. Protecting and planting trees can restore wildlife habitat, heal degraded land, conserve soil, protect watersheds, diversify farm or garden products, beautify landscapes, and enhance the economic and ecological viability of land use systems. Careful planning and sound information is needed to reach these goals. The Overstory Book distills essential information about working with trees into 134 short, easy-to-read, single-subject chapters. Each chapter shares key concepts and useful information, so readers can get back to planting and protecting more trees, gardens, and forests, more effectively. * Discover time-tested agricultural and conservation techniques from indigenous and traditional peoples * Work with beneficial microorganisms, from mycorrhizal fungi to nitrogen-fixing bacteria and more * Create abundance with fruit trees, timber trees, vine crops, vegetables, mushrooms, and more * Form alliances with animals, from wildlife, birds, and insects to integrated, free-range livestock * Design effective tree-based windbreaks, noise barriers, live fences, and erosion buffers * Understand how to grow or obtain the highest quality seeds, seedlings, and plant materials * Restore fertility, productivity, and biodiversity with trees * Work with multipurpose plants including trees, palms, bamboos, and more * Market products effectively to improve economic returns sustainably * Locate helpful internet sites, organizations, people, and publications * And much more!

Bewilderment: A Novel

Bewilderment: A Novel
Author: Richard Powers
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2021-09-21
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0393881156

AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB SELECTION An Instant New York Times Bestseller Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction Longlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction A heartrending new novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning and #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Overstory. The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He’s also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin’s emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother’s brain… With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son’s ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers’s most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?

Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral

Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral
Author: Kris Radish
Publisher: Listening Library
Total Pages: 570
Release: 2006
Genre: Bereavement
ISBN: 0739326171

Annie Freeman, left one final request, a traveling funeral, and she wants the most important women in her life as pallbearers. From Sonoma to Manhattan, Katherine, Laura, Rebecca, Jill, and Marie will carry Annie's ashes to the special places in her life. At every stop there's a surprise encounter and a small miracle waiting, and as they whoop it up across the country, attracting interest wherever they go, they share their deepest secrets--tales of broken hearts and second chances, missed opportunities and new beginnings. And as they grieve over what they've lost, they discover how much is still possible if only they can unravel the secret Annie left them.

The End We Start From

The End We Start From
Author: Megan Hunter
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 89
Release: 2017-11-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0735235031

**NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING JODIE COMER, EXECUTIVE PRODUCED BY BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH, AND WRITTEN BY ALICE BIRCH (NORMAL PEOPLE)** “The End We Start From by Megan Hunter is a short, concentrated book—a shot of distilled story, like the pulp of a tale boiled to a thick spiced paste. . . . With passages from mythology interspersed with its imagined future, the book is engrossing, compelling and finally hopeful.” —Naomi Alderman, author of The Power “The End We Start From is a beautifully spare, haunting meditation on the persistence of life after catastrophe. I loved it.” —Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven Longlisted for the 2018 Aspen Words Literary Prize Finalist for the Barnes & Noble 2017 Discover Great New Writers Award An indelible and elemental debut—a lyrical vision of the strangeness and beauty of new motherhood, and a tale of endurance in the face of unimaginable change. In the midst of a mysterious environmental crisis, as London is submerged below flood waters, a woman gives birth to her first child, Z. Days later, the family is forced to leave their home in search of safety. As they move from place to place, shelter to shelter, their journey traces both fear and wonder as Z's small fists grasp at the things he sees, as he grows and stretches, thriving and content against all the odds. This is a story of new motherhood in a terrifying setting: a familiar world made dangerous and unstable, its people forced to become refugees. Startlingly beautiful, Megan Hunter's The End We Start From is a gripping novel that paints an imagined future as realistic as it is frightening. And yet, though the country is falling apart around them, this family's world—of new life and new hope—sings with love.

Study Guide for Book Clubs: the Overstory

Study Guide for Book Clubs: the Overstory
Author: Kathryn Cope
Publisher:
Total Pages: 89
Release: 2019-05-28
Genre:
ISBN: 9781070465692

An essential tool for all reading groups - a detailed guide to the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, 'The Overstory'. A comprehensive guide to Richard Powers's remarkable novel, this discussion aid includes a wealth of information and resources: thirty-two thought-provoking discussion questions; useful literary and historical context; an author biography; a plot summary; analyses of themes & imagery; character analysis; recommended further reading and even a quick quiz.This companion guide takes the hard work out of preparing for your book group meeting and guarantees productive discussion. For solo readers, it encourages a deeper examination of a rich, rewarding text.

Count the Ways

Count the Ways
Author: Joyce Maynard
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 566
Release: 2021-07-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062398296

In her most ambitious novel to date, New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard returns to the themes that are the hallmarks of her most acclaimed work in a mesmerizing story of a family—from the hopeful early days of young marriage to parenthood, divorce, and the costly aftermath that ripples through all their lives Eleanor and Cam meet at a crafts fair in Vermont in the early 1970s. She’s an artist and writer, he makes wooden bowls. Within four years they are parents to three children, two daughters and a red-headed son who fills his pockets with rocks, plays the violin and talks to God. To Eleanor, their New Hampshire farm provides everything she always wanted—summer nights watching Cam’s softball games, snow days by the fire and the annual tradition of making paper boats and cork people to launch in the brook every spring. If Eleanor and Cam don’t make love as often as they used to, they have something that matters more. Their family. Then comes a terrible accident, caused by Cam’s negligence. Unable to forgive him, Eleanor is consumed by bitterness, losing herself in her life as a mother, while Cam finds solace with a new young partner. Over the decades that follow, the five members of this fractured family make surprising discoveries and decisions that occasionally bring them together, and often tear them apart. Tracing the course of their lives—through the gender transition of one child and another’s choice to completely break with her mother—Joyce Maynard captures a family forced to confront essential, painful truths of its past, and find redemption in its darkest hours. A story of holding on and learning to let go, Count the Ways is an achingly beautiful, poignant, and deeply compassionate novel of home, parenthood, love, and forgiveness.

The Time of Our Singing

The Time of Our Singing
Author: Richard Powers
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 642
Release: 2004-01-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374706417

“The last novel where I rooted for every character, and the last to make me cry.” - Marlon James, Elle From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory and the Oprah's Book Club selection Bewilderment comes Richard Powers's magnificent, multifaceted novel about a supremely gifted—and divided—family, set against the backdrop of postwar America. On Easter day, 1939, at Marian Anderson’s epochal concert on the Washington Mall, David Strom, a German Jewish émigré scientist, meets Delia Daley, a young Black Philadelphian studying to be a singer. Their mutual love of music draws them together, and—against all odds and their better judgment—they marry. They vow to raise their children beyond time, beyond identity, steeped only in song. Jonah, Joseph, and Ruth grow up, however, during the civil rights era, coming of age in the violent 1960s, and living out adulthood in the racially retrenched late century. Jonah, the eldest, “whose voice could make heads of state repent,” follows a life in his parents’ beloved classical music. Ruth, the youngest, devotes herself to community activism and repudiates the white culture her brother represents. Joseph, the middle child and the narrator of this generation-bridging tale, struggles to find himself and remain connected to them both. Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing is a story of self-invention, allegiance, race, cultural ownership, the compromised power of music, and the tangled loops of time that rewrite all belonging.

On a Night of a Thousand Stars

On a Night of a Thousand Stars
Author: Andrea Yaryura Clark
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2022-03-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1538720310

In this moving, emotional narrative of love and resilience, a young couple confronts the start of Argentina's Dirty War in the 1970s, and a daughter searches for truth twenty years later. New York, 1998. Santiago Larrea, a wealthy Argentine diplomat, is holding court alongside his wife, Lila, and their daughter, Paloma, a college student and budding jewelry designer, at their annual summer polo match and soiree. All seems perfect in the Larreas’ world—until an unexpected party guest from Santiago's university days shakes his usually unflappable demeanor. The woman's cryptic comments spark Paloma’s curiosity about her father’s past, of which she knows little. When the family travels to Buenos Aires for Santiago's UN ambassadorial appointment, Paloma is determined to learn more about his life in the years leading up to the military dictatorship of 1976. With the help of a local university student, Franco Bonetti, an activist member of H.I.J.O.S.—a group whose members are the children of the desaparecidos, or the “disappeared,” men and women who were forcibly disappeared by the state during Argentina’s “Dirty War”—Paloma unleashes a chain of events that not only leads her to question her family and her identity, but also puts her life in danger. In compelling fashion, On a Night of a Thousand Stars speaks to relationships, morality, and identity during a brutal period in Argentinian history, and the understanding—and redemption—people crave in the face of tragedy. ​Includes a Reading Group Guide.