National Network for Equitable Library Service

The Towers of Babylon tracks a group of hapless Millennials trying to find meaning in a world that consistently rejects them. What do you do when you have a graduate degree and are stuck working for minimum wage at a bagel shop? Or you've snagged a steady, middle-income job only to find that its plunging you into a moral abyss. Or you've (over)worked your way up into the upper echelons of the finance sector and are trying to shake off depression with brute will.

February in Newfoundland is the longest month of the year. Another blizzard is threatening to tear a strip off downtown St. John's, while inside The Hazel restaurant a storm of sex, betrayal, addiction, and hurt is breaking. Iris, a young hostess from 'round the bay, is forced to pull a double despite resolving to avoid the charming chef and his wealthy restaurateur wife. Just tables over, Damian, a hungover and self-loathing server, is trying to navigate a potential punch-up with a pair of lit customers who remain oblivious to the rising temperature in the dining room.

For ten years, Estrin Lancaster has fled Philadelphia. Her latest destination is Belfast, in Northern Ireland. Here the spiteful Farrell O'Phelan wrangles through the maze of factions in the North by despising every side. Farrell's affair with the curious Estrin is nonetheless a meeting of two loners.

The story begins in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets, the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else. As they grow--and as their paths repeatedly diverge and converge--Elena and Lila remain best friends whose respective destinies are reflected and refracted in the other. They are likewise the embodiments of a nation undergoing momentous change.

Two English people take a road trip from an unnamed African capitol to their enclave. The further they travel, the more they cross the line separating privileged outsiders from horrified victims.

"Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: give me leave to do my utmost." This line from "Babette's Feast" lends itself to both of the stories in this audio collection, which tell of unbreakable human spirit and total commitment to life choices. "Babette's Feast," now an award-winning film, takes a humorous look at a pure-spirited community in which love, lost youth, self-denial, and creative urges contribute to making the right choices. And "Sorrow-Acre," the most anthologized of Isak Dinesen's stories, challenges the most profound choice of all.

The Unnamable is the third novel in Beckett's trilogy, three remarkable prose works in which men of increasingly debilitating physical circumstances act, ponder, consider, and rage against impermanence and the human condition. The Unnamable is without doubt the most uncompromising text and it is read here in startling fashion by Sean Barrett.

Molloy is less a novel than a set of two monologues narrated by Molloy and his pursuer Moran. In the first section, while consumed with the search of his mother, Molloy lost everything. Moran takes over in the second half, describing his hunt for Molloy. Within this simple outline, spoken in the first person, is a remarkable story, raising the questions of being and aloneness that marks so much of Beckett's work, but is richly comic as well.

Hoping to erase her unhappy old life, Hazel jumps in her beat-up old car and speeds away. When she pulls up to the Evening and Morning Star Trailer Park, where nothing turns into even more of nothing, she decides it just might be the new life she's looking for. At the centre of this new life is King, a motorcycle-riding, hard-drinking, guitar-playing kind of guy. Hazel loves him to death. He spends his days fixing cars, while Hazel spends hers working at the town’s thrift shop. Evenings they spend with Spiney and Sissy, playing cards or drinking at Old Joe’s.

The X Gang face off with Earl Turner, a presidential candidate straight out of their nightmares. It is a dangerous, divisive time in America. A far-right political candidate is seeking the presidency and stirring up hatred against minorities. The X Gang, meanwhile, have lost one of their friends to that presidential candidate — and are encountering manifestations of hate practically everywhere they go.