Welcome to Little Wing. It’s a place like hundreds of others, but for four boyhood friends—all born and raised in this small Wisconsin town—it is home. One of them never left, still working the family farm, but the others felt the need to move on. One trades commodities, another took to the rodeo circuit. One of them hit it big as a rock star. And then there’s Beth, a woman who has meant something special in each of their lives.
An intimate story of brotherhood, love, sacrifice, and betrayal set against the panoramic backdrop of an early twentieth-century America that eerily echoes our own time, The Cold Millions offers a portrait of a nation grappling with the chasm between rich and poor, between harsh realities and simple dreams.
THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET is a 1984 novel by Mexican-American author Sandra Cisneros. Structured as a series of vignettes, it tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, a 12-year-old Chicana girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago. Based in part on Cisneros’s own experience, the novel follows Esperanza over the span of one year in her life […]
Waukesha Reads featured When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka as our 2020 NEA Big Read title! (Click HERE for the NEA’s Reader Resources.) About the Book A day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Julie Otsuka’s grandfather was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on suspicion of being a Japanese spy. Her mother, grandmother, and uncle […]
Lab Girl is a nature lover’s story about digging in dirt and discovering new things about old growth. It’s a scientist’s story about running experiments and waiting and wondering and asking for funds and fending off doubt.
In a small town in Ohio in 1977, the oldest daughter and favorite child of a biracial couple — her mother is white, her father is Chinese-American — is found drowned in a lake. As her parents and siblings struggle to solve the mystery of her death, a web of family secrets emerges to reveal how fragile the relationships between husband and wife, parent and child, and brother and sister can be when ambitions are thwarted, societal pressures mount, and fears and desires are kept buried.
Waukesha Reads featured True Grit, one of the great American Western novels, as our 2017 NEA Big Read title. True Grit by Charles Portis was published in 1968 and tells the story of a woman named Mattie Ross, who recounts the time when she was a young girl and sought retribution for the murder of her father.
Waukesha Reads/NEA Big Read 2016 featured To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird is the rare American novel that can be discovered with excitement in adolescence and reread into adulthood without fear of disappointment. Few novels so appealingly evoke the daily world of childhood in a way that seems convincing whether you are sixteen or sixty-six.
Waukesha Reads/The Big Read 2015 featured A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. A Wizard of Earthsea is a classic coming-of-age novel and arguably the most widely admired American fantasy novel of the past fifty years. Originally published as a young-adult novel in 1968, Le Guin’s adventure tale is so imaginatively engaging and psychologically profound it captivates readers of all ages.
It’s time to say the obvious. No author stays internationally popular for 150 years by accident. Edgar Allan Poe is one of the classic authors of American literature—a master of the short story, a magician of the short poem, and a critic of brilliance and originality. And no small part of his artistic sleight of hand is that he appeals to readers from childhood to old age.
The Big Read in Waukesha focused on Into the Beautiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea. Activities took place September 27 – November 3, 2013. In the book, nineteen-year-old Nayeli works at a taco shop in her Mexican village and dreams about her father, who journeyed to the US to find work.
Written in 1948, 1984 was George Orwell’s chilling prophecy about the future. And while 1984 has come and gone, Orwell’s narrative is timelier than ever. As literary political fiction and as dystopian science-fiction, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a classic novel in content, plot, and style. Many of its terms and concepts, such as Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, and memory hole, have entered everyday use since its publication in 1949.
The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of master mystery writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most accomplished stories. Sherlock Holmes and his companion Dr. Watson confront one of their most difficult cases ever: is there truly a curse on the old Baskerville estate? Is there truly a ghostly beast lurking on the dark, eerie moors?
A beloved American classic, Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918) is best summarized by its epigraph-“the best days are the first to flee.” In it, the adult narrator, Jim Burden, remembers his childhood through the memory of his friend, Ántonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant.
Ernest Hemingway’s third novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929), was crafted from his earliest experience with war. As a teenager just out of high school, Hemingway volunteered to fight in the First World War but was rejected because of poor eyesight. Instead, he drove a Red Cross ambulance on the Italian front, where he was wounded in 1918 by a mortar shell. While recovering in a hospital, Hemingway fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, a nurse seven years his senior.
The Great Gatsby may be the most popular classic in modern American fiction. Since its publication in 1925, Fitzgerald’s masterpiece has become a touchstone for generations of readers and writers, many of whom reread it every few years as a ritual of imaginative renewal. The story of Jay Gatsby’s desperate quest to win back his first love reverberates with themes at once characteristically American and universally human, among them the importance of honesty, the temptations of wealth, and the struggle to escape the past.
When did science fiction first cross over from genre writing to the mainstream of American literature? Almost certainly it happened on October 19, 1953, when a young Californian named Ray Bradbury published a novel with the odd title of Fahrenheit 451. In a gripping story at once disturbing and poetic, Bradbury takes the materials of pulp fiction and transforms them into a visionary parable of a society gone awry.
