Inyo County Free Library - New Acquisitions

These are books and media new to the library and cataloged by the Inyo County Free Library.

Additional information about each title can be found in the catalog (click on the title). For older acquisition lists choose from Select another list. To request any of these titles please contact your local library branch.

1 to 17 of 17

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The essentials of persuasive public speaking

By Wyeth, Sims

Publishing Date: 2014

Classification: 800

Call Number: 808.51 WYE

In this portable, brief, and lucid guide to presenting, Wyeth counsels how to calm a thumping heart and reveals techniques on preparation, delivery, and visual aids as he gives you vivid stories and rubber meets the road advice. And he does more than simply ease your dread, he inspires you with historical accounts and incisive observations on the power and purpose of speaking well. From advice on the pitch and pace of your speaking voice to admonishments against squirrel paw hands and data crammed PowerPoint slides, Wyeths pointers will give you the focus and confidence to stand up straight, lean forward, and tell your story well.

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Madness, rack, and honey: collected lectures

By Ruefle, Mary

Publishing Date: c2012

Classification: 800

Call Number: 809.1 RUE

Over the course of fifteen years, Mary Ruefle delivered a lecture every six months to a group of poetry graduate students. Collected here for the first time, these lectures include "Poetry and the Moon," "Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World," and "Lectures I Will Never Give." Intellectually virtuosic, instructive, and experiential,Madness, Rack, and Honey resists definition, demanding instead an utterand utterly pleasurableimmersion. Finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. Mary Ruefle has published more than a dozen books of poetry, prose, and erasures. She lives in Vermont.- (Perseus Publishing) This is one of the wisest books I've read in years... New York Times Book Review

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Our Andromeda

By Shaughnessy, Brenda

Publishing Date: c2012

Classification: 800

Call Number: 811.54 SHA

Honored as a New York Times Book Review "100 Notable Books of 2013" "A heady, infectious celebration."--The New Yorker "Shaughnessy's voice is smart, sexy, self-aware, hip . . . consistently wry, and ever savvy."--Harvard Review Brenda Shaughnessy's heartrending third collection explores dark subjects--trauma, childbirth, loss of faith--and stark questions: What is the use of pain and grief? Is there another dimension in which our suffering might be transformed? Can we change ourselves? Yearning for new gods, new worlds, and new rules, she imagines a parallel existence in the galaxy of Andromeda.

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Jump soul: new and selected poems

By Smith, Charlie

Publishing Date: c2014

Classification: 800

Call Number: 811.54 SMI

This selection of poems highlights the best work from the artist's previous seven poetry collections, drawing on the lush and haunting prose contained within Red Roads, Women of America and Word Comix.

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Windows into Western life: trail tales and Western verse

By Parsons, Jim

Publishing Date: c2005

Classification: 800

Call Number: 811.6 PAR

The author's poetry is a record of the experiences he has had & the people he has met while working as a part time wrangler and a packer since 1972.

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Life on Mars: poems

By Smith, Tracy K.

Publishing Date: [2011]

Classification: 800

Call Number: 811.6 SMI

Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize * A New York Times Notable Book of 2011 and New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * A New Yorker, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year * New poetry by the award-winning poet Tracy K. Smith, whose "lyric brilliance and political impulses never falter" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) You lie there kicking like a baby, waiting for God himself To lift you past the rungs of your crib. What Would your life say if it could talk? —from "No Fly Zone" With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. With this remarkable third collection, Smith establishes herself among the best poets of her generation. - (McMillan Palgrave)

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The real Wizard of Oz: the life and times of L. Frank Baum

By Loncraine, Rebecca

Publishing Date: c2009

Classification: 800

Call Number: 813.4 LON

Explores the life of the unconventional author and entrepreneur, examining the era in which he lived and its influence on his work.

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Dashiell Hammett: man of mystery

By Cline, Sally

Publishing Date: c2014

Classification: 800

Call Number: 813.52 CLI

In this compact new biography, Sally Cline uses fresh research, including interviews with Hammett's family and Hellman's heir, to reexamine the life and works of the writer whom Raymond Chandler called "the ace performer.

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Blue nights

By Didion, Joan

Publishing Date: 2011

Classification: 800

Call Number: 813.54 DID

In this memoir, the author shares her observations about her daughter as well as her own thoughts and fears about having children and growing old, in a personal account that discusses her daughter's wedding and her feelings of failure as a parent. It opens on July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintana's wedding in New York seven years before. Today would be her wedding anniversary. This fact triggers vivid snapshots of Quintana's childhood, in Malibu, in Brentwood, at school in Holmby Hills. Reflecting on her daughter but also on her role as a parent, Didion asks the candid questions any parent might about how she feels she failed either because cues were missed or perhaps displaced. Seamlessly woven in are incidents Didion sees as underscoring her own age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept.

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Call Me Burroughs: A Life

By Miles, Barry

Publishing Date: 2014

Classification: 800

Call Number: 813.54 MIL

"Fifty years ago, Norman Mailer asserted, "William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius." Few since have taken such literary risks, developed such individual political or spiritual ideas, or spanned such a wide range of media. Burroughs wrote novels, memoirs, technical manuals, and poetry. He painted, made collages, took thousands of photographs, produced hundreds of hours of experimental recordings, acted in movies, and recorded more CDs than most rock bands. Burroughs was the original cult figure of the Beat Movement, and with the publication of his novel Naked Lunch, which was originally banned for obscenity, he became a guru to the 60s youth counterculture. In CALL ME BURROUGHS, biographer and Beat historian Barry Miles presents the first full-length biography of Burroughs to be published in a quarter century-and the first one to chronicle the last decade of Burroughs's life and examine his long-term cultural legacy. Written with the full support of the Burroughs estate and drawing from countless interviews with figures like Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, and Burroughs himself, CALL ME BURROUGHS is a rigorously researched biography that finally gets to the heart of its notoriously mercurial subject. "--

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Representative speeches, 2013-2014

Publishing Date: 2014

Classification: 800

Call Number: 815.6

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Dear Mark Twain: letters from his readers

Publishing Date: c2013

Classification: 800

Call Number: 818.409

Collects two hundred letters from readers of Mark Twain to the author himself, offering a glimpse into the lives and sensibilities of nineteenth-century children, preachers, con artists, inmates, and other fans of the author's work.

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The boy detective: a New York childhood

By Rosenblatt, Roger

Publishing Date: [2013]

Classification: 800

Call Number: 818.8409 ROS

A story of the author's childhood in New York City in the 1950s.

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Jonathan Swift: his life and his world

By Damrosch, Leopold

Publishing Date: 2013

Classification: 800

Call Number: 828.509 DAM

Leo Damrosch draws on discoveries made over the past thirty years to tell the story of Swift's life anew. Probing holes in the existing evidence, he takes seriously some daring speculations about Swift's parentage, love life, and various personal relationships and shows how Swift's public version of his life--the one accepted until recently--was deliberately misleading. Swift concealed aspects of himself and his relationships, and other people in his life helped to keep his secrets. . Assembling suggestive clues, Damrosch re-narrates the events of Swift's life while making vivid the scents, sounds, and smells of his English and Irish surroundings.Through his own words and those of a wide circle of friends, a complex Swift emerges: a restless, combative, empathetic figure, a man of biting wit and powerful mind, and a major figure in the history of world letters.

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Patrick Modiano

By Morris, Alan

Publishing Date: 1996

Classification: 800

Call Number: 843.914 MOR

Winner of some of France's most prestigious literary prizes, Patrick Modiano is considered one of the most fascinating French novelists alive today. This is the first English literary critique of this best-selling French author, whose works are found increasingly in translation throughout the world and who is attracting considerable critical attention outside France. In this lucid study, Alan Morris explores Modiano's fifteen major novels. He also traces Modiano's development as a writer and the tragedies which have influenced his works: the death of his younger brother, the neglect of his father and the horrors of the German occupation. Morris delves into Modiano's themes of time, memory, identity and the past, clearly demonstrating this intriguing writer's key place in French writing today.- (McMillan Palgrave)

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Sophia Tolstoy: a biography

By Popoff, Alexandra

Publishing Date: 2010

Classification: 800

Call Number: 891.733 POP

A sympathetic profile draws on Leo Tolstoy's wife's unpublished memoir and reveals how the classic author's most devout followers actively suppressed the truth about Sophia's dedication to her husband and his work, presenting her as an intelligent and caring woman who shared Tolstoy's values. - (Baker & Taylor)

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American stories

By Nagai, Kafū

Publishing Date: c2000

Classification: 800

Call Number: 895.6344 NAG

American Stories is based on Nagai Kafu's sojourn from Japan to Michigan, Washington State, and New York City in the early years of the twentieth century. Like Tocqueville a century before him, Kafu casts a fresh, keen eye on a vibrant and diverse America, painting a broad portrait of the challenges of American life for the poor, the foreign born, and the disaffected. Many vignettes involve encounters with fellow Japanese or Chinese immigrants. Mitsuko Iriye's introduction provides important cultural and biographical background and literary analysis to fully appreciate the intellectual and artistic achievements of Kafu's collection.- (Columbia Univ Pr)

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