Frank Carlson Library

On a beautiful June day in 1965, a dozen girls-classmates at a picturesque Blue Ridge women's college-launched their homemade raft (inspired by Huck Finn's) on a trip down the Mississippi. It's Girls A-Go-Go Down the Mississippi read the headline in the Paducah, Kentucky, paper. Thirty-five years later, four of those "girls" reunite to cruise the river again. This time it's on the luxury steamboat, The Belle of Natchez, and there's no publicity....

Emily Hunt went missing from her affluent liberal arts school on graduation weekend. Her body was found floating in a river, and a quiet loner who most people on campus really didn’t know died by suicide. A tenuous link—one text—bound the two dead students together and was enough for law enforcement to close the case. But they got it wrong and now someone is determined to set it right. Twelve years later, college friends gather...

Intellectually precocious high school senior Quentin Coldwater escapes the boredom of daily life by re-reading a series of beloved fantasy novels set in an enchanted land called Fillory. Like everybody else, he assumes that magic isn't real -- until he finds himself unexpectedly admitted to a very secret, very exclusive college of magic in upstate New York. But something is missing. Magic doesn't bring Quentin the happiness and adventure he thought...

Once again, the author takes a remarkable shard of history and brings it to vivid life. In 1665, a young man from Martha's Vineyard became the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College. Upon this slender factual scaffold, she has created a luminous tale of love and faith, magic and adventure. The narrator of the story is Bethia Mayfield, growing up in the tiny settlement of Great Harbor amid a small band of pioneers and Puritans. Restless...

Based in Lev Grossman's New York Times best seller, this centers on Quentin, a brilliant grad student chosen to attend Brakebills University for Magical Pedagogy, a secret upstate New York university specializing in magic. He and his twenty something friends soon discover that the magical fantasy world they read about as children is all too real, and poses a grave danger to humanity.

"A romantic, vivid novel that takes place in the tender time of a young woman's life: Heather has graduated from college and is traveling around Europe with her two best friends. She's left school responsibility behind and adult responsibility is looming, but this is her one, ONE last summer to be free. Heather doesn't expect to even meet Jack, let alone fall in love with him. Jack is an enigmatic Vermonter a few years older than she is, who is following...