Central Skagit Library District

"From the Man Booker-shortlisted and Baileys Prize-winning author of How to be both: a breathtakingly inventive new novel--about aging, time, love, and stories themselves--that launches an extraordinary quartet of books called Seasonal. Readers love Ali Smith's novels for their peerless innovation and their joyful celebration of language and life. Her newest, Autumn, has all of these qualities in spades, and--good news for fans!--is the first installment...

Ignacio Zaragoza Seguin was born in Goliad, Texas, in 1829, when Texas was part of Mexico. His family lived on a Mexican fort because his father was a soldier in the army. Ignacio wanted to be a just like his father! When he was seven, Texas became independent from Mexico, and the family had to move to Matamoros, Mexico. Later they moved to Monterrey. Ignacio tried to join the Mexican army in 1846 when the United States declared war, but he was too...

First performed in 1882, "Ghosts" is the controversial and tragic play by the famed Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It is the story of Helen Alving, a wealthy widow who was unhappily married to her unfaithful husband. Helen has tried to shelter her son, Oswald, from the corrupting influence of his father's immoral behavior and has sent him away only to discover that he is suffering from syphilis inherited from his father. Oswald has also unfortunately...

The sheer number of casualties in the Holocaust defies the imagination. In this lecture, Professor Liulevicius guides you through this troubling history. You'll learn about German goals and actions, Nazi collaborators who helped produce the Holocaust, and resistance from within the Jewish community and in the world at large.

"Spring Awakening" is German playwright's Frank Wedekind's controversial and shocking drama of sexuality and repression. First performed in 1906 in Berlin, though written by Wedekind several years earlier, the play focuses on the lives on several adolescents coming of age in late nineteenth century Germany. Three teenage boys, Melchior, Moritz, and Wendl, and girls Wendla and Martha, struggle with abuse, a lack of information and acceptance, and their...

All's Well That Ends Well (1607) is a comedy by William Shakespeare. All's Well That Ends Well was likely inspired by the tale of Giletta di Narbona from Boccaccio's Decameron. Unpopular during Shakespeare's lifetime, the play remains one of his least staged works to this day. Despite this, scholars praise All's Well That Ends Well for its moral ambiguity. "The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together, our virtues would be proud...

One of George Bernard Shaw's most performed and studied plays, "Arms and the Man" is a classic example of Shaw's comedic wit. First produced in 1894, the play is set during the Serbo-Bulgarian war and tells the story of Raina Petkoff, a young Bulgarian woman, who is engaged to Sergius, a soldier away at war whom she idolizes. While both her father and fiancé are away fighting, Raina, at home with her mother, has a very innocent and romantic idea...

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.Widely regarded as a masterpiece of nineteenth-century French poetry, Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal ("The Flowers of Evil") is celebrated for its daring explorations of the dualities of the human soul in its struggle between good and evil, beauty and debasement, spirit and flesh, as well as for its realistic yet fantastical modern urban landscapes. The first...

C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) lived in relative obscurity in Alexandria, and a collected edition of his poems was not published until after his death. Now, however, he is regarded as the most important figure in twentieth-century Greek poetry, and his poems are considered among the most powerful in modern European literature. This revised bilingual edition of Collected Poems offers the reader the original Greek texts facing what are now recognized as...

Gerald Arbuthnot receives a promotion from Lord Illingworth, a worldly politician who has a sordid history of women, one of whom is Gerald's widowed mother. When their connection is revealed, the young man questions his past, present and future aspirations. A Woman of No Importance opens with a high-class party featuring a group of society's most illustrious citizens. In the midst of the event, Gerald Arbuthnot enters and announces his new position...