Alice Walker - The Color Purple

Recognized as one of the leading voices among black American women writers, Alice Walker has produced an acclaimed and varied body of work, including poetry, novels, short stories, essays, and criticism. Her writings portray the struggle of black people throughout history, and are praised for their insightful and riveting portraits of black life, in particular the experiences of black women in a sexist and racist society. Her most famous work, the award-winning and best-selling novel The Color Purple, chronicles the life of a poor and abused southern black woman who eventually triumphs over oppression through affirming female relationships. Walker has described herself as a "womanist" — her term for a black feminist —
The Color Purple
Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her father and attempting to protect her sister from the same fate, and continuing over the course of her marriage to "Mister," a brutal man who terrorizes her. Celie eventually learns that her abusive husband has been keeping her sister's letters from her and the rage she feels, combined with an example of love and independence provided by her close friend Shug, pushes her finally toward an awakening of her creative and loving self.

FS Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby - 240p

American short-story writer and novelist, known for his depictions of the Jazz Age (the 1920s). With the glamorous Zelda Sayre (1900-48), Fitzgerald lived a colorful life of parties and money-spending. At the beginning of one of his stories Fitzgerald wrote the rich "are different from you and me". This privileged world he depicted in such novels as THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED (1922) and THE GREAT GATSBY (1925), which is widely considered Fitzgerald's finest novel.

"It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers - because if you ask a writer anything, you usually get an answer - still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying - only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers." (from The Last Tycoon, 1941)

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St Paul, Minnesota of mixed Southern and Irish descent. He was given three names after the writer of The Star Spangled Banner, to whom he was distantly related. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, was a salesman, a Southern gentleman, whose furniture business had failed. Mary McQuillan, his mother, was the daughter of a successful wholesale grocer, and devoted to her only son. The family moved regularly, but settled finally in 1918 in St. Paul. At the age of 18 Fitzgerald fell in love with the 16-year-old Ginevra King, the prototype of Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby.
The Great Gatsby
In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.

It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem.

Jim Harrison - A Good Day to Die -180p easy

Jim Harrison is a widely admired poet, novelist, essayist, and screenwriter who received B.A. and M.A. degrees in English and Comparative Literature from Michigan State University in 1960 and 1966 respectively. Born in Grayling in 1937, raised in Reed City and Haslett, he is the son of a county agent who moved the Harrison family to the East Lansing area so his children could attend Michigan State University.
His work has been translated into 11 languages.

He currently lives with his family on a farm in northern Michigan.
A Good Day to Die
If you have never read Harrison, this is a great place to start. An entertaining read and fine introduction to the humor, wit, and insight of one of our most engaging authors. You'll hear Harrison's voice for weeks after finishing this book. And you'll want to read more.

Tobias Wolf - This Boy's life 288p

Born in Alabama in 1945, Tobias Wolff traveled the country with his peripatetic mother, finally coming to ground in Washington State, where he grew up. He attended the Hill School in Pennsylvania until he was expelled for repeated failures in mathematics in his final year, whereupon he joined the Army. He spent four years as a paratrooper, including a tour in Vietnam. Following his discharge he attended Oxford University in England, where he received a First Class Honours degree in English in 1972. Returning to the United States, he worked variously as a reporter, a teacher, a night watchman and a waiter before receiving a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University in 1975. He is currently Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the Humanities at Stanford, where he lives with his wife Catherine. They have three children.
This Boy's Life
In PEN/Faulkner Award-winner Wolff's fourth book, he recounts his coming-of-age with customary skill and self-assurance. Seeking a better life in the Northwestern U.S. with his divorced mother, whose "strange docility, almost paralysis, with men of the tyrant breed" taught Wolff the virtue of rebellion, he considered himself "in hiding," moved to invent a private, "better" version of himself in order to rise above his troubles. Primary among these were the adultsdrolly eccentric, sometimes dementedwho were bent on humiliating him. Since Wolff the writer never pities Wolff the boy, the author characterizes the crew of grown-up losers with damning objectivity, from the neurotic stepfather who painted his entire house (piano and Christmas tree included) white, to the Native American football star whose ultimate failure was as inexplicable as his athletic brilliance. Briskly and candidly reportedWolff's boyhood best friend "bathed twice a day but always gave off an ammoniac hormonal smell, the smell of growth and anxiety"his youth yields a self-made man whose struggle to fit the pieces together is authentic and endearing.

Alexander McCall Smith - The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency

Alexander McCall Smith was born in Zimbabwe (called Southern Rhodesia at the time) and was educated there and in Scotland. He became a law professor in Scotland, and it was in this role that he first returned to Africa to work in Botswana, where he helped to set up a new law school at the University of Botswana. He is currently Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh, but has been a visiting professor at a number of other universities elsewhere, including ones in Italy and the United States (where he has twice been visiting professor at SMU Law School in Dallas, Texas).
The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency
“The Miss Marple of Botswana.” –The New York Times Book Review

“Smart and sassy . . . Precious’ progress is charted in passages that have the power to amuse or shock or touch the heart, sometimes all at once.” –Los Angeles Times

“I haven’t read anything with such unalloyed pleasure for a long time.” –Anthony Daniels, The Sunday Telegraph

A second book has been added due to the great demand.
Tears of the Giraffe is the follow up in the adventures of Precious Ramotswe, Botswana's only- and finest- female private detective.