Akron Public Library

Marjorie Morgenstern is nineteen years old when she is offered the job of her dreams working in a summer stock company for Noel Airman, its talented and intensley charismatic director.Released from th esocial constraints of her old-fasghioned New York Jewish family, and thrown into the glorious, colorful world of theatrican invention, Marjorie finds herself entangled in a powerful affair with the man destined to become the greatest- and the most destructive-...

Eleanor knows she's a mess. But today, she will tackle the little things. She will shower and get dressed. She will have her poetry and yoga lessons after dropping off her son, Timby. She won't swear. She will initiate sex with her husband, Joe. But before she can put her modest plan into action, life happens. Today, it turns out, is the day Timby has decided to fake sick to weasel his way into his mother's company. It's also the day Joe has chosen...

How do you move on after losing the person you loved? How do you build a life worth living? Louisa Clark is no longer just an ordinary girl living an ordinary life. After the transformative six months spent with Will Traynor, she is struggling without him. When an extraordinary accident forces Lou to return home to her family, she can't help but feel she's right back where she started. Her body heals, but Lou herself knows that she needs to be kick-started...

The Yellow Wallpaper (original title: "The Yellow Wall-paper. A Story") is a 6,000-word short story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine.It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's health, both physical and mental.Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries...

"Cussy Mary Carter is the last of her kind, her skin the color of a blue damselfly in these dusty hills. But that doesn't mean she's got nothing to offer. As a member of the Pack Horse Library Project, Cussy delivers books to the hill folk of Troublesome, hoping to spread learning in these desperate times. But not everyone is so keen on Cussy's family or the Library Project, and the hardscrabble Kentuckians are quick to blame a Blue for any trouble...

THURSDAYS AT EIGHT, New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber's new hardcover novel from MIRA Books, is the story of four friends, each at a turning point in her life. Each woman's story is unique, told with the warmth and compassion that demonstrates why the author has become one of the leading voices in women's fiction today.Four women come to a journal-writing class with different needs and goals. What they found was friendship -- a closeness...

Humiliated to discover that her ex-boyfriend has been chronicling their sex life in a series of articles called "Loving a Larger Woman" in a popular women's magazine, journalist Cannie Shapiro embarks on an adventure-filled odyssey as she confronts her losses, makes peace with the past, and comes to terms with herself.

"1950s Philadelphia: fifteen-year-old Ruby Pearsall is on track to becoming the first in her family to attend college, in spite of having a mother more interested in keeping a man than raising a daughter. But a taboo love affair threatens to pull her back down into the poverty and desperation that has been passed on to her like a birthright. Eleanor Quarles arrives in Washington, DC, with ambition and secrets. When she meets the handsome William Pride...

The story of three very different women as they navigate one of life's most wonderful and perilous transitions: the journey of new motherhood.

In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, or "old same," in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. Snow Flower introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she has wirtten a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps...