Bandon Public Library

Joe Allston, the retired literary agent of Stegner's National Book Award-winning novel, The Spectator Bird, returns in this disquieting and keenly observed novel. Scarred by the senseless death of their son and baffled by the engulfing chaos of the 1960s, Allston and his wife, Ruth, have left the coast for a California retreat. And although their new home looks like Eden, it also has serpents: Jim Peck, a messianic exponent of drugs, yoga,...

A fourteen-year-old boy attempts to be the youngest person to reach the top of Mount Everest

Includes short stories, poems, and excerpts from plays that relate what it is like growing up Asian American

One of our best-known and best-loved literary critics turns his attention to the more bizarre areas of literature in this miscellany of fact and trivia. Which author had the heaviest brain? What was the original title of 1984? What do 12% of all winners of the Booker prize have in common? When did cigarettes start making an appearance in English literature? And, while we're at it, who wrote the first Western, and is there any link between asthma and...

""There are books that are suitable for a million people, others for only a hundred. There are even remedies--I mean books--that were written for one person only...A book is both medic and medicine at once. It makes a diagnosis as well as offering therapy. Putting the right novels to the appropriate ailments: that's how I sell books." Monsieur Perdu calls himself a literary apothecary. From his floating bookstore in a barge on the Seine, he prescribes...