Community members, primarily of Mexican-American descent, band together and protest the construction of a police station on designated parkland and transform it into a vibrant cultural hub adorned with colorful murals that celebrate their heritage. Includes backmatter on Chicano Park in San Diego California.

A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil-literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul-it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly...

"A modern take on the classic coming-of-age novel, inspired by Anne of Green Gables In the grand tradition of Anne of Green Gables, Bridget Jones's Diary, and The Three Weissmanns of Westport, Andi Teran's captivating debut novel offers a contemporary twist on a beloved classic. Fifteen-year-old orphan Ana Cortez has just blown her last chance with a foster family. It's a group home next-unless she agrees to leave East Los Angeles for a farm trainee...

"When your fiancé breaks up with you on your 49th birthday, what do you do? If you're April May, you buy a huge Victorian home on a whim and open a tearoom featuring lace tablecloths, exotic teas, and dainty sandwiches. No one told her the house came with a cat in the attic who might just be guarding a treasure. How else to explain people breaking into her house? From the moment she moves in, nothing goes right, but her problems seem minor when a...

"Midway through her career, Ursula K. Le Guin embarked on one of her most detailed, impressive literary projects, a novel that took more than five years to complete. Blending story and fable, poetry, artwork, and song, Always Coming Home is this legendary writer's fictional ethnography of the Kesh, a people of the far future living in a post-apocalyptic Napa Valley. Having survived ecological catastrophe brought on by relentless industrialization,...

"There's never a dull moment for amateur sleuth Molly Pink. Now she has to manage a high-profile bookstore event for a former Hollywood columnist who's dishing the dirt in a juicy tell-all. When the author collapses and dies in the store just as she's about to reveal an incriminating tidbit, the police suspect foul play. Molly is convinced that whoever did the deed wanted to silence the author before she could expose their dark secret. As she finally...