NEA Big Read

An Illustrated Memoir

by Bui, Thi

Graphic Novel - 2017

An American Book Award winner, a National Book Critics Circle finalist in autobiography, and an Eisner Award finalist in reality-based comics, Bui’s memoi...Show more An American Book Award winner, a National Book Critics Circle finalist in autobiography, and an Eisner Award finalist in reality-based comics, Bui’s memoir traces her family’s daring escape after the fall of South Việt Nam in the 1970s and their effort to build new lives for themselves in America. Bui documents parental sacrifice, excavates family histories, and grapples with the inherited struggles of displacement and diaspora. Show less

All copies in use Availability details Holds: 5 on 6 copies

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An American Sunrise

Poems

by Harjo, Joy

eBook - 2019

2022 NEA Big Read Selection: In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Terr...Show more 2022 NEA Big Read Selection: In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family's lands and opens a dialogue with history...Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where her people, and other indigenous families, essentially disappeared. From her memory of her mother's death, to her beginnings in the Native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo's personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings. Her poems sing of beauty and survival, illuminating a spirituality that connects her to her ancestors and thrums with the quiet anger of living in the ruins of injustice. Show less

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Circe

by Miller, Madeline

Audiobook CD - 2018

2021 NEA Big Read Selection: In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child, not pow...Show more 2021 NEA Big Read Selection: In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child, not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology. Show less

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Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

by Chast, Roz

Book - 2014

2020 NEA Big Read Selection: In her first memoir, Roz Chast brings her signature wit to the topic of aging parents. Spanning the last several years of the...Show more 2020 NEA Big Read Selection: In her first memoir, Roz Chast brings her signature wit to the topic of aging parents. Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through four-color cartoons, family photos, and documents, and a narrative as rife with laughs as it is with tears, Chast's memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents. When it came to her elderly mother and father, Roz held to the practices of denial, avoidance, and distraction. But when Elizabeth Chast climbed a ladder to locate an old souvenir from the "crazy closet"--with predictable results--the tools that had served Roz well through her parents' seventies, eighties, and into their early nineties could no longer be deployed. While the particulars are Chast-ian in their idiosyncrasies--an anxious father who had relied heavily on his wife for stability as he slipped into dementia and a former assistant principal mother whose overbearing personality had sidelined Roz for decades--the themes are universal: adult children accepting a parental role; aging and unstable parents leaving a family home for an institution; dealing with uncomfortable physical intimacies; managing logistics; and hiring strangers to provide the most personal care. Show less

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True Grit

by Portis, Charles

Book - 2021

2017 NEA Big Read Selection: Mattie Ross is just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shoots her father down in Fort Smith,...Show more 2017 NEA Big Read Selection: Mattie Ross is just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shoots her father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robs him of his life, his horse, and $150 in cash money. Mattie leaves home to avenge her father's blood. With the one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest available U.S. Marshal, by her side, Mattie pursues the murderer into Indian Territory. Show less

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A Wizard of Earthsea

by Le Guin, Ursula K.

eBook - 2013

2018 NEA Big Read Selection: The greatest sorcerer in all Earthsea was once a reckless youth, hungry for power and knowledge, who tampered with long-held ...Show more 2018 NEA Big Read Selection: The greatest sorcerer in all Earthsea was once a reckless youth, hungry for power and knowledge, who tampered with long-held secrets and loosed a terrible shadow upon the world. This is the tale of his testing, how he mastered the mighty words of power, tamed an ancient dragon, and crossed death's threshold to restore the balance. Show less

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Fahrenheit 451

by Bradbury, Ray

Streaming Audiobook - 2010

2014 NEA Big Read Selection: A frightening vision of the future, where firemen don't put out fires, they start them in order to burn books. He had been a ...Show more 2014 NEA Big Read Selection: A frightening vision of the future, where firemen don't put out fires, they start them in order to burn books. He had been a fireman for ten years and never questioned the pleasure of the midnight runs nor the joy of watching pages consumed by flames. He never questioned anything until he met a seventeen-year-old girl who told him of a past when people were not afraid and a professor who told him of a future in which people could think. Guy Montag suddenly realized what he had to do. Show less

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To Kill A Mockingbird

by Lee, Harper

Large Print - 2010

2013 NEA Big Read Selection: A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views ...Show more 2013 NEA Big Read Selection: A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, Scout, as her father, Atticus Finch--a crusading local lawyer--risks everything to defend a Black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime. Show less

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The Shawl

by Ozick, Cynthia

Streaming Audiobook - 2008

2010 NEA Big Read Selection: At once fiercely immediate and complex in their implications, The Shawl and Rosa succeed in imagining the unimaginable: the h...Show more 2010 NEA Big Read Selection: At once fiercely immediate and complex in their implications, The Shawl and Rosa succeed in imagining the unimaginable: the horror of the Holocaust and the emptiness of its aftermath. They were written in 1977 but were first published in the early 1980s in The New Yorker. Both The Shawl and Rosa won first prize in the O. Henry Prize Stories and were chosen for Best American Short Stories. In The Shawl, a woman named Rosa Lublin watches a concentration camp guard murder her daughter. In Rosa, that same woman appears thirty years later, a madwoman and a scavenger in a Miami hotel. And in both stories there is a shawl--a shawl that can sustain a starving child or inadvertently destroy her or even magically conjure her back to life. Show less

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