Anyone who has ever lived in a small town certainly knows that secrets are sometimes not so secret. Susie Duncan Sexton has lived her entire life in a small town—indeed, in the same house where she grew up. As an adult, she taught at the same grammar school that she attended as a child, and many of the relationships she cultivated while growing up, including her marriage, have endured over the years. Always one to document the present and offer her sometimes unorthodox ideas and opinions, Susie Duncan Sexton has tickled the keys of her trusty old typewriter for nearly five decades, and now that venerable machine is ready to reveal its secrets. This book may be about small town life, but the ideas contained within it are expansive. The written accounts of the life of a ‘smart and sassy small town girl’ are as urbane as those of any city dweller. From ’50s and ’60s nostalgia to modern-day values, and from the drama and insight of America’s great books and motion pictures to politics, religion and animal rights, Susie Duncan Sexton’s ‘secrets’ always hit the mark with unexpected candor and a unique perspective.

Secrets of an Old Typewriter: Stories from a Smart and Sassy Small Town Girl

Biographies & Memoirs

Sexton, Susie Duncan

Memoirs

Open Books

Sometimes the only way to find yourself is to leave behind everything you've ever known... and become a stranger.  Abandoning a life filled with loss of family, love, and personal integrity, Doran Seeger is flying through a blinding storm on his way to a political awakening in Amsterdam, an unexpected affair in the Swiss Alps, a brush-by encounter on a train platform and the serendipitous discovery of a wadded up handbill that will lead him into a land where a gleefully absurd culture still embraces real civility: Greece.

Xenos: A Romantic Novel of Travel and Self-Discovery in the Grecian Isles

Literature & Fiction

Ross, David A.

Contemporary

Motivated to expatriate by guilt after helping to design guidance systems for the U.S. Military, Doran Seeger has lived the past decade in Europe. Wandering from country to country, he has encountered new societies and new ideas, though he still struggles to appease his conscience. Living in Prague and working as an underground art dealer, a chance encounter with the sister of his former lover persuades him to return to Greece, where a society that embraces real civility tenderly draws the habitual itinerant out of reticence and cynicism. With his longtime Greek friend Modestos Thromos by this side, Doran plants a winter garden; and as he patiently tills the Grecian soil, he reclaims his integrity, his sense of joy, and his humanity.

A Winter Garden: A Novel

Under the guise of mentor and muse, a frustrated writer and her ambitious teenage protégé take an illicit summer road trip fraught with racial and sexual tension. This is a compelling psychological novel about social norms, artistic ambition, and obsession. Maggie Barnett works in the media center of a school in Flint, Michigan where she meets Taezha Riverton, an aspiring teenage writer. After discovering that Maggie is also a writer, Taezha turns to her as both mentor and friend. Alone and childless, it's not enough for Maggie to take Tae to restaurants and poetry slams. Although Tae’s mother has nothing against Maggie, she is less than thrilled when Maggie proposes to take her daughter on a summer road trip. Permission is never explicitly granted, but shortly after school is out for the summer, Maggie and Tae head for the Southeast.

A Mentor and Her Muse

Sage, Susan

Genre Fiction

The Ballet Lover exposes the beauty and cruelty of ballet, the performances, the back stage moments, and the personal dramas of the famous ballet dancers Rudolf Nureyev and Natalia Makarova as seen through the eyes of an American female journalist. Paris, 1970s: the orchestra plays the first ominous note of Swan Lake. In the audience sits Geneva, an American journalist and ballet lover, waiting for the heart-stopping beauty and seduction of the romantic duet to start, but instead she witnesses Rudolf Nureyev failing to catch his Russian partner Natalia Makarova, allowing her to fall with a crash upon the stage.
Geneva interprets the fall as an act of cruelty, a man with all the fame and power in the world brutally letting fall his delicate, wraith-like artistic partner. When other critics defend Nureyev and accuse Makarova of causing her own tumble, Geneva vows revenge on the page, creating havoc in her own career and discovering surprising parallels between herself and the fallen ballerina. The Ballet Lover is a refined, mesmerizing, fictional account of two of the most celebrated dancers in the dance world, how one compromised the other, and how the drama on the stage often mirrors those played out in real life.

The Ballet Lover

Baer, Barbara L.

Every Happy Ending implies a not-so-happy beginning, and David Rat's story-from a groundbreaking career as the drummer of the 'Noise-Rock' cult band Rat At Rat R to a devastating addiction to heroin-follows a path from soaring heights (and highs) to the hellish basement of desperate addiction (the lowest of all possible lows).David Rat's gripping memoir is written not in conventional prose but rather, true to his highly artistic nature, in modern free-verse. His story documents not only his addiction but new-found loves, and lost loves too, and ultimately focuses on the source of his eventual recovery-his young son James.Indeed, fatherhood was David Rat's inspiration, as well as his motivation, to beat the needle. Brutally honest, gripping and openly apologetic, David Rat's story stands as a testament to hope, as well as a tribute to young James, and confirms that even in the darkest of circumstances a Happy Ending is still possible.

Happy Ending

Rat, David

Arts & Literature

A mother, her son, and mania. In this fictionalized memoir, a mother recounts the emotional journey she and her son take when he becomes mentally ill. Jack is known as the Sun King because as a child he resembled the illustrated boy in his mother's deck of tarot cards. Already on the verge of madness, Jack leaves for college in Ohio but secretly decides not to take his medicine. When Jack becomes manic, his mother must retrieve him from a psychiatric hospital and bring him home to Oklahoma. She and Jack spend the next year dealing with court hearings, doctor appointments, and counseling sessions precipitated by his bipolar disorder and resultant psychosis. Guiding Jack back to sanity leads his mother to a fateful decision—one that brings about her own emotional unraveling. In the end, it is the Sun King who must save his mother.

The Sun King

Palmer, Allison Lee

"The writing is beautiful and the characterisation tender, funny and satisfyingly voyeuristic."—Hannah Eaton, author of Naming Monsters Mameluke Bath is the bizarre story of Christie Smithkin, a 39-year-old misfit, misanthrope and virgin, who lives in the nightmarish English city of St Pauly. Friendless, paranoid, and lacking the funds she needs for the completion of her PhD thesis, mixed-race Christie’s only hope lies in a new ‘asylum-seeker mentoring’ scheme for which she has recently volunteered as a mentor. Offering guidance to recently-arrived African refugees fleeing torture will, she prays, provide her with a sense of social purpose and perhaps even emotional connection. Christie’s plan goes awry when she discovers that Mukelenge, her Congolese mentee, has already been assigned a mentor: Damon, a cheerful, vapid, white male nurse. Worse still, Mukelenge is settling into urban East Midlands society with unnerving confidence and poise. Piqued by the immigrant’s miraculous feats of integration, Christie becomes uncontrollably jealous when she realises that Mukelenge is also casting a spell of seduction over the handsome, doll-like Damon. Christie’s determination to solve the mystery of Mukelenge’s identity, to rescue Damon from the real or imagined horrors of a zombie-factory deep in the woods, and to come to terms with her own terrifying childhood, will hurtle all three protagonists towards a macabre conclusion in the nearby spa town of Mameluke Bath.

Mameluke Bath

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Asibong, Andrew

Fantasy

Orgasmo is author Donald O'Donovan's autobiographical account of a long ignored writer's vow to never write again. But, alas, the vow is as destined to failure as O'Donovan's puckish alter-ego is to literary obscurity. A love letter (of sorts) to LA, O'Donovan is in rare form as we watch his calliope of characters, hustlers and hopefuls alike, whirl past to chronicle the writer's long and perilous journey from penny-a-word hack writer for a pulp fiction mill to an underground literary beacon.

Orgasmo

O'Donovan, Donald

Literary

Heartbeats is the light-hearted memoirs of one of the pioneers in modern cardiac surgery, Constantine "Dino" Tatooles, M.D. Dino's stories, as told to his brother James E. Tatooles, will quite literally "warm your heart" as well as provide a background to the advances in cardiac surgery made over the past fifty years. After Medical School, Dr. Tatooles interned at the University of Chicago and received a grant from the Heart Association to open his own medical laboratory. Later, the National Heart Institute selected Dr. Tatooles as one of five doctors to study at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. "That's where we started to perfect a lot of the new operative procedures that are used today," recounts Dr. Tatooles. Ironically, Dr. Tatooles recently had some difficult medicine of his own to swallow when he discovered that he needed a quintuple bypass. As his brother James E. Tatooles relates in Heartbeats, a procedure that Dino helped to develop eventually saved his life.

Heartbeats: The light-hearted memoirs of a pioneer heart surgeon Constantine J. "Dino" Tatooles, M.D.

Tatooles, James E.

Professionals & Academics

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