315 results for The Company Town

“A lush mystery-within-a-coming-of-age-tale-within-a-Southern-Gothic.” —NPR Books“A richly textured portrait of small-town dysfunction and murder . . . Secrets abound, imaginations run wild.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Welcome to Spencerville, Virginia, 1977. Eight-year-old Rocky worships his older brother, Paul. Sixteen and full of rebel cool, Paul spends his days cruising in his Chevy Nova blasting Neil Young, cigarette…

“These are not just nine Irish lives but nine extraordinary lives, their struggles universal, their causes never more important than today. As the saying goes, the best stories belong to those who can tell them. And these are well told, by some of our best storytellers.” —Timothy Egan, New York Times bestselling author of The…

“If you call yourself a serious reader but still haven’t discovered Lewis Nordan, shame on you.” —The Seattle TimesLewis Nordan’s cult following began in 1991 when Algonquin published his first novel, Music of the Swamp. His second novel, Wolf Whistle, was inspired by one of the nation’s most volatile and notorious racial incidents. Nordan was…

Lewis Nordan is famous for his special vision of the Mississippi Delta. His characters, for whom the closest-though hopelessly inadequate-description might be "eccentrics," share the stage with swamp elves and midgets living in the backyard. His fiction is unlike anybody else's and is as dark, hilarious, and affecting as any ever written. It's also writing…

A swashbuckling story of two very different cat brothers and their adventures at sea. Anton and Cecil are as different as port and starboard. Cecil, stocky and black with white patches, thirsts for seafaring adventure. Slim, gray Anton prefers listening to the sailors’ shanties at the town saloon. One day when Anton goes to the…

A fisherman on the Santa Monica Pier. The vineyards of Napa Valley. Surfers in Malibu. An Indian village in Yosemite and the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset. Artist Diana Gessler captures the color and character of our third largest and most populous state. In lively watercolors, sketches, and stories, Gessler shares her adventures on the…

On a bone-chilling New Year's Day, when all the mountain roads are slick with ice, Clay's mother, Anneth, insists on leaving her husband. She packs her things, and with three-year-old Clay in tow, they inch their way toward her hometown along the treacherous mountain roads. That journey ends in the death of Clay's mother. It's…

The sheriff has come to "put away" Elizabeth Miller--to take her to the state mental hospital. "Well, I may be crazy," Elizabeth tells us, "but I know I'm not wild-crazy, just maybe quiet-crazy, and I don't know which one is worse." For someone about to be penned up with the "crazy folks," you wouldn't think…

  Catherine Strayed is living a quiet, un?remarkable life in a secluded college town following the mysterious death of her husband, a promising writer whose death may have been an accident, a suicide, or perhaps even a murder. When her former mentor (and onetime lover)—a powerful critic who singlehandedly destroyed her late husband’s chance for…

It is the summer of 1948 when a handsome, charismatic stranger, Charlie Beale, recently back from the war in Europe, shows up in the town of Brownsburg, a sleepy village nestled in the Valley of Virginia. All he has with him are two suitcases: one contains his few possessions, including a fine set of butcher…

Not every book will change your life, but any book can. Not every discussion will make a difference, but a conversation can change the world. In this timely retelling of an ancient Buddhist parable, peace activist Satish Kumar has created a small book with a powerful spiritual message about ending violence. It is a tale…

In Michael Parker’s new novel, Joel Dunn Jr. tells the story of how he did everything he could to save his family after his mother left and his father’s tenuous hold on sanity unraveled. On a journey from the town of Trent, North Carolina, to the coast, Joel and his little brother Tank thread their…

"This book is too good to keep to yourself. Read it aloud with someone you love, then send it to a friend. But be sure to keep a copy for yourself, because you'll want to read it again and again."-- Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey Raney is a small-town Baptist. Charles is a liberal from Atlanta. And…

Father and Son tells the story of five days following Glen Davis’s return to the small Mississippi town where he grew up. Five days. In this daring psychological thriller, these are five days you’ll never forget.Convicted and sentenced on a vehicular homicide charge, Glen is the bad seed--the haunted, angry, drunken, and dangerous son of…

As the obituary writer in a spectacularly beautiful but often dangerous spit of land in Alaska, Heather Lende knows something about last words and lives well lived. Now she’s distilled what she’s learned about how to live a more exhilarating and meaningful life into three words: find the good. It’s that simple--and that hard.Quirky and…

At the foot of the Elwha River, the muddy outpost of Port Bonita is about to boom, fueled by a ragtag band of dizzyingly disparate men and women unified only in their visions of a more prosperous future. A failed accountant by the name of Ethan Thornburgh has just arrived in Port Bonita to reclaim…

Award-winning novelist Steve Stern’s exhilarating epic recounts the story of how a nineteenth-century rabbi from a small Polish town ends up in a basement freezer in a suburban Memphis home at the end of the twentieth century. What happens when an impressionable teenage boy inadvertently thaws out the ancient man and brings him back to…

“Here is the real thing — good old-fashioned American values coming from small-town Alaska.” —The Boston GlobeThe Alaskan landscape—so vast, dramatic, and unbelievable—may be the reason the people in Haines, Alaska (population 2,400), so often discuss the meaning of life. Heather Lende thinks it helps make life mean more. Since her bestselling first book, If…

"Ore­gon contains multitudes, for this is a state that spans a tremendous range of people, cultures, and terrains. It’s a range that this book seeks to illuminate, along with Ore­gon’s spectacularly beautiful and varied landscape." —Nicholas D. Kristof, from the foreword Oregon is a big, beautiful state filled with mountains, valleys, deserts, cities, towns, an…

Recommended by the American Community Gardening Association Community gardening enhances the fabric of towns and cities through social interactions and accessibility to fresh food, creating an enormously positive effect in the lives of everyone it touches. LaManda Joy, the founder of Chicago’s Peterson Garden Project and a board member of the American Community Gardening Association,…

Oregon became the 33d state in the Union on February 14, 1859. Portland had wooden sidewalks, and gold glittered in southern Oregon streams. Towns like Lookingglass, Needy, and Sodaville were springing up all around. It is a time to remember—and to revisit—today, 150 years later, with this detailed and lively guide. Janice Marschner provides all…

With humor and poise, Jenna Woginrich describes her adventurous self-education in homesteading. Poignant offbeat observations on learning to farm by trial and error punctuate the story of her quest to find a permanent home for herself and her livestock: chickens, geese, sheep, ducks, rabbits, a goat, and a turkey. Alone and on a shoestring budget,…

A New York Times bestsellerThe Haunting of Sunshine Girl,in active development for television by The Weinstein Company, a hit paranomal YA series based on the wildly popular YouTube channel about an "adorkable" teenager living in a haunted house. Shortly after her sixteenth birthday, Sunshine Griffith and her mother Kat move from sunny Austin, Texas, to…

It's late in the fall in Edinburgh and late in the career of Detective Inspector John Rebus. As he is simply trying to tie up some loose ends before his retirement, a new case lands on his desk: a dissident Russian poet has been murdered in what looks like a mugging gone wrong. Rebus discovers…