Cranston Public Library

"Nightmare Alley "begins with an extraordinary description of a freak-show geek--alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic crowd's gleeful disgust and derision--going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There's no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him. And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak...

"In exile from his home country of Peru, Ricardo Funes embodies the ultimate starving artist. Fired from almost every job he's held-usually for paying more attention to literature than work-he sets himself up in a rundown shack where he works on writing stories to enter in regional contests across Spain, and foisting his judgements about literature on anyone who will listen as one of the last remaining members of the "negacionismo" poetry movement....

Fictional reminiscences of an 111-year-old man telling of his checkered career as plainsman, Indian scout, and squaw man and of his colorful acquaintances.

A foundling of mysterious parentage brought up by Mr. Allworthy on his country estate, Tom Jones is deeply in love with the seemingly unattainable Sophia Western, the beautiful daughter of the neighboring squire--though he sometimes succumbs to the charms of the local girls. When Tom is banished to make his own fortune and Sophia follows him to London to escape an arranged marriage, the adventure begins. A vivid Hogarthian panorama of eighteenth-century...

An exotic dance that beguiles and entices ... The enchanted and enchanting account of a contemporary Scheherazade, a wide-eyed American teller-of-tales who triumphs over harsh reality through the creative power of her own imagination ... Born in the back room of the mansion where her mother toils, and herself in service from an early age, the enchanting and ever-enchanted Eva Luna escapes oppression through story telling. Rolf Carle flees Germany...

This novel recounts the unconventional exploits of a man who preferred to change jobs constantly in an age of specialization.

Humorous adventures of Welsh family's travels in England, Scotland and Wales are related in letters home. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, Tobias Smollett's last published novel and most celebrated work, appeared in June 1771, three months before the author's death. A classic in the history of the English novel, it takes the form of a collection of letters written by various members of Mr. Matthew Bramble's family (for whom Humphry Clinker is a...

"From the award-winning, internationally bestselling author, a romp of a novel, at once intimate and panoramic, about the adventures and misadventures of a 19th-century zelig. One man, many lives . . . Cashel Greville Ross experiences more of everything than most, from the rapturous to the devastating, from surprising good luck to unexpected loss. Born in 1799, Cashel seeks his fortune across the turbulence of multiple continents, from County Cork...

"Kyril Bonfiglioli, the groundbreaking satirist whose writing The New Yorker described as "an unholy collaboration between P. G. Wodehouse and Ian Fleming," was truly a writer ahead of his time. In this hilarious novel, Bonfiglioli takes us back in time to an ironical maritime romp--Master and Commander by way of Monty Python. Inspired by a shotgun blast in the seat of his breeches, young Karli Van Cleef quits his native Holland to seek his fortune....

"Pedro and Marques Take Stock is a modern picaresque novel and a vivid satire on social mobility set in the favelas of Brazil, telling the story of two supermarket stock clerks whose lives are upturned when their small-time marijuana business takes off"--