Frank Carlson Library

It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret. But it's not the secret of his affair, at seventy-one, with Faunia Farley,...

Winner of the National Book Award when it was first published in 1964, Herzog traces five days in the life of a failed academic whose wife has recently left him for his best friend. Through the device of letter writing, Herzog movingly portrays both the internal life of its eponymous hero and the complexity of modern consciousness. Like the protagonists of most of Bellow's novels—Dangling Man, The Victim, Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King,...

Carl Zwick is an aging Chicago Cubs baseball player. Sometimes he feels like he's spent his life hitting into double plays, but he's finally gotten onto the right track. Then tragedy strikes him out. Anita Mills is a pretty single black mother just trying to get by. A random act of brutality in one of Chicago's rougher neighborhoods permanently ends her struggle. Richard Allen Smith walks the streets of ChiTown saying God has sent him. He has an...

Handcuffed to a dead man, Lieberman vows to take on the Chicago mob Thirty-three years ago, Connie Gower decided to raise hell in a synagogue. Drunk, armed, and out for revenge, he came to hunt down Abe Lieberman, a young cop he believed had killed his brother in a shoot-out. Lieberman takes him down, unafraid to return fire. Since then, Gower has had few run-ins with the law, even as he made a name for himself as one of the Chicago mob's most feared...

It's 1830s England, and Culinarians--doyens who consult with society's elite to create gorgeous food and confections--are the crème de la crème of high society. Helena Higgins, top of her class at the Royal Academy, has a sharp demeanor and an even sharper palate--and knows stardom awaits her if she can produce greatness in her final year. Penelope Pickering is going to prove the value of non-European cuisine to all of England. Her contemporaries...

The deep forests of Poland and Belorussia are the domain of the occupying Germans during World War II. The three Bielski brothers go into the forests to undertake the impossible task of foraging for food, weapons and survival, not just for themselves but for a large mass of Polish Jews fleeing from the German war machine. The brothers, living with the fear of discovery, must contend with neighboring Soviet partisans and deciding whom to trust. They...

Experience the visual splendor, thundering action, and towering drama of the record-setting winner of eleven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Charlton Heston brings a muscular physical and moral presence to his role of Judah Ben-Hur, a Jewish nobleman in Palestine whose heroic odyssey includes enslavement by the Romans, vengeance against his tormentors during a furious arena chariot race, and a fateful encounter with Jesus Christ. An enduring...