Ocean State Libraries

The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth into an unforgettable meditation on race, religion, gender, and a far-off past that is ever present—in prose that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem.
“They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” So begins

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Abjuring the city for a pastoral life, a group of utopians set out to reform a dissipated America. But the group is a powerful mix of competing ambitions and its idealism finds little satisfaction in farmwork. Instead, of changing the world, the members of the Blithedale community individually pursue egotistical paths that ultimately lead to tragedy. Hawthorne's tale both mourns and satirizes a rural idyll not unlike that of nineteenth-century America...

"Farah moves into Liberty House--an arcadia, a community in harmony with nature--at the tender age of six, with her family. The commune's spiritual leader, Arcady, preaches equality, non-violence, anti-speciesism, free love, and uninhibited desire for all, regardless of gender, age, looks, or ability. On her fifteenth birthday, Farah learns she is intersex, and begins to question the confines of gender, and the hypocritical principles those within...

"When a young woman leaves her family, and the civilized world, to join an off-the-grid community headed by an enigmatic leader, she discovers that belonging comes with a deadly cost, in this lush and searing debut novel. At nineteen, Berie encounters a seductive and mysterious man at a bus station near her home in North Carolina. Shut off from the people around her, she finds herself compelled by his promise of a new life. He ferries her into a place...

"A fifty-year-old cold case involving California royalty comes back to life-with potentially fatal consequences-in this gripping standalone novel from the New York Times bestselling author of the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series The Gardener Estate is one of the most storied and beloved places on the West Coast: a magnificent house in vast formal grounds, home to a family that shaped California-and fought hard to conceal the turmoil and eccentricities...

From the acclaimed author of Visitation Street, a visionary portrait of contemporary Los Angeles in all its facets, from the Mojave Desert to the Pacific, from the 110 to Skid Row. During a typically crowded morning commute, a naked runner is dodging between the stalled cars. The strange sight makes the local news and captures the imaginations of a stunning cast of misfits and lost souls. There's Ren, just out of juvie, who travels to LA in search...

"On a cozy street in Philadelphia, three neighboring families have become the best of friends. They can't imagine life without one another until one family outgrows their tiny row house. In a bid to stay together, a crazy idea is born: What if they tear down the walls between their homes and live together under one roof? And so an experiment begins. Celia and Mark now have the space they need. But is this really what Celia's increasingly distant husband...

"Sixty years after the publication of his first novel, Cat Man, Edward Hoagland is publishing his twenty-fifth book at the age of eighty-three. This capstone novel, set in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, introduces Press, a stockbroker going blind. Press has lost his job and his wife and is trying to figure out his next move, holed up in his Vermont cabin surrounded by a hippy commune, drug runners, farmers-gone-bust, blood-thirsty auctioneers, and general...

"Ferguson. Tottenham. Clichy-Sous-Bois. Oakland. Within capital's core, the riot looms increasingly large within the repertoire of struggles. Rather than inchoate spasms or immiserated absence of the revolutionary idea, this book locates the riot within longue duree of capitalist transformation: facts not failures. Just as the turn to the strike two centuries ago signaled recompositions of class and society, the return of the riot testifies to current...