The Good Neighbor

The Good Neighbor
Author: Maxwell King
Publisher: Abrams
Total Pages: 557
Release: 2018-09-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1683353498

The New York Times bestseller: “A superb, thoughtful biography” of the creator and star of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (David McCullough). Fred Rogers was an enormously influential figure in the history of television and in the lives of tens of millions of children. Through his long-running television program, he was a champion of compassion, equality, and kindness. Rogers was fiercely devoted to children and to taking their fears, concerns, and questions about the world seriously. The Good Neighbor, the first full-length biography of Fred Rogers, tells the story of this utterly unique and enduring American icon. Drawing on original interviews, oral histories, and archival documents, Maxwell King traces Rogers’s personal, professional, and artistic life through decades of work. King explores Rogers’s surprising decision to walk away from his show to make television for adults, only to return to the neighborhood with increasingly sophisticated episodes, written in collaboration with experts on childhood development. An engaging story, rich in detail, The Good Neighbor is the definitive portrait of a beloved figure, cherished by multiple generations.

Good Neighbors

Good Neighbors
Author: Sarah Langan
Publisher: Atria Books
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2021-02-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 198217143X

“A modern-day Crucible….Beneath the surface of a suburban utopia, madness lurks.” —Liv Constantine, bestselling author of The Last Mrs. Parrish “Sarah Langan is a phenomenal talent with a wicked sense of wry humor. Good Neighbors knocked me out. Like Shirley Jackson, Langan’s work blends a bleak streak with an underlying sense of the humane that wrung my heart.” —Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling Celeste Ng’s enthralling dissection of suburbia meets Shirley Jackson’s creeping dread in this propulsive literary noir, when a sudden tragedy exposes the depths of deception and damage in a Long Island suburb—pitting neighbor against neighbor and putting one family in terrible danger. Welcome to Maple Street, a picture-perfect slice of suburban Long Island, its residents bound by their children, their work, and their illusion of safety in a rapidly changing world. Arlo Wilde, a gruff has-been rock star who’s got nothing to show for his fame but track marks, is always two steps behind the other dads. His wife, beautiful ex-pageant queen Gertie, feels socially ostracized and adrift. Spunky preteen Julie curses like a sailor and her kid brother Larry is called “Robot Boy” by the kids on the block. Their next-door neighbor and Maple Street’s Queen Bee, Rhea Schroeder—a lonely community college professor repressing her own dark past—welcomes Gertie and family into the fold. Then, during one spritzer-fueled summer evening, the new best friends share too much, too soon. As tensions mount, a sinkhole opens in a nearby park, and Rhea’s daughter Shelly falls inside. The search for Shelly brings a shocking accusation against the Wildes that spins out of control. Suddenly, it is one mom’s word against the other’s in a court of public opinion that can end only in blood. A riveting and ruthless portrayal of American suburbia, Good Neighbors excavates the perils and betrayals of motherhood and friendships and the dangerous clash between social hierarchy, childhood trauma, and fear.

Love Thy Neighbor

Love Thy Neighbor
Author: Ann Warren Turner
Publisher: Dear America
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2003
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 9780439153089

In Greenmarsh, Massachusetts, in 1774, thirteen-year-old Prudence Emerson keeps a diary of the troubles she and her family face as Tories surrounded by American patriots at the start of the American Revolution.

Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing
Author: Margaret Moan Rowe
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 145
Release: 1994-10-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1349236225

Through close readings of Doris Lessing's novels from The Grass is Singing to The Fifth Child, Margaret Moan Rowe maps many of the literary and cultural negotiations that make Doris Lessing both a maverick and a mainstream novelist. Examining the pull of paternal and maternal biographical and literary identification in Lessing, Rowe relates them to the tensions between the ordinary and the visionary in her fiction.

The Older Woman in Recent Fiction

The Older Woman in Recent Fiction
Author: Zoe Brennan
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2014-12-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0786480289

This critical study explores late twentieth century novels by women writers--including Doris Lessing, May Sarton and Barbara Pym--that feature female protagonists over the age of sixty. These novels' discourses on aging contrast with those largely pejorative ones that dominate Western society. They break the silence that normally surrounds the lives of the aged, and this book investigates how older female protagonists are represented in relation to areas such as sexuality, dependence and everyday life. Beginning with an investigation of popular opinions about aging and a survey of hypotheses from disciplines including gerontology, psychology and feminism, the text reviews literary critical attitudes toward fictions of aging; analyzes representations of physically dependent characters, whose anger over their failing bodies is often eased by relationships with their female friends; discusses how paradigms of female sexuality exclude the possibility of older women being sexually desirable; examines characters that live a contented life, finding a more polemical side to them than is noted in more conventional literary critiques; and analyzes the aged sleuth in classical detective fiction.

A Feast of Words

A Feast of Words
Author: Anna Shapiro
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 234
Release: 1996
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 9780393039795

Presents food scenes excerpted from twenty-five classic novels and stories including Jane Austen's "Emma" and Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick," and provides commentary and original recipes that complement the text.