Las Animas - Bent County Library District

When he buys a beach house on the Carolina coast, David Sedaris envisions long, relaxing vacations spent playing board games and lounging in the sun with those he loves most. And life at the Sea Section, as he names the vacation home, is exactly as idyllic as he imagined, except for one tiny, vexing realization: it's impossible to take a vacation from yourself. Sedaris sets his powers of observation toward middle age and mortality, that vertiginous...

"One of the most frequently read and performed of all stage works, Shakespeare's Hamlet is unsurpassed in its complexity and richness. Now the most extensively annotated version of Hamlet to date makes the play completely accessible to readers in the twenty-first century. It has been carefully assembled with students, teachers, and the general reader in mind." "Eminent linguist and translator Burton Raffel offers generous help with vocabulary and...

A photo-essay featuring patterns that appear in nature, from animal colorings to physical phenomena. Sumario en español: Un foto-ensayo que ofrece los patrones que aparecen en naturaleza, de los colorantes animales a los fenómenos físicos.

A Schoolboy’s Diary brings together more than seventy of Robert Walser’s strange and wonderful stories, most never before available in English. Opening with a sequence from Walser’s first book, “Fritz Kocher’s Essays,” the complete classroom assignments of a fictional boy who has met a tragically early death, this selection ranges from sketches of uncomprehending editors, overly passionate readers, and dreamy artists to tales of...

Valeria Luiselli is an evening cyclist; a literary tourist in Venice, searching for Joseph Brodsky's tomb; an excavator of her own artifacts, unpacking from a move. In essays that are as companionable as they are ambitious, she uses the city to exercise a roving, meandering intelligence, seeking out the questions embedded in our human landscapes.

Umberto Eco was an international cultural superstar. In this, his last collection, the celebrated essayist and novelist observes the changing world around him with irrepressible curiosity and profound wisdom. He sees with fresh eyes the upheaval in ideological values, the crises in politics, and the unbridled individualism that have become the backdrop of our lives-a "liquid" society in which it's not easy to find a polestar, though stars and starlets...

Later Novels and Other Writings begins with The Lady in the Lake (1943). Written during the war, the story takes Marlowe out of the seamy L.A. streets to the deceptive tranquility of the surrounding mountains, as the search for a businessman's missing wife expands into an elegy of loneliness and loss. The darker tone typical of Chandler's later fiction is evident in The Little Sister (1949), in which an ambitious starlet, a blackmailer, and a seemingly...

The story of Oliver Twist - orphaned, and set upon by evil and adversity from his first breath - shocked readers when it was published. After running away from the workhouse and pompous beadle Mr Bumble, Oliver finds himself lured into a den of thieves peopled by vivid and memorable characters - the Artful Dodger, vicious burglar Bill Sikes, his dog Bull's Eye, and prostitute Nancy, all watched over by cunning master-thief Fagin. Combining elements...