Boo Chat: October 26: Howl at the Moon Night

Where else can you learn a valuable lesson from a Frosted Flakes prize winner whose winnings are about to destroy his family? Humorous and insightful stories run the gamut of themes in a fiction collection that features John Grisham's response to a major typo, a school principal bent on erasing arithmetic from the curriculum.

"A novel about an artist trying to outrun his past. Years ago, a well-known expressionist painter named Jim Stegner shot a man in a bar. The man lived, Jim served his time, and he has learned to live with the dark impulses that sometimes overtake him. Jim enjoys a quiet life in the valleys of Colorado. He works with a lovely model, he doesn't drink, he goes fly fishing in the evenings. His paintings fetch excellent prices at a posh gallery in Santa...

"The inspiring autobiography of NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, who helped launch Apollo 11"--

Letts offers the tale of Nicky Jack Harjo, who mysteriously disappeared from DeClare, Oklahoma, as a baby and then puts in an appearance 30 years later. Dr. Mark Allbright arrives in town. Mark has just learned that he is adopted and that his mother was Gaylene Narjo, from DeClare, and he now wants to confront her and ask why she didn't want him.

At the age of twelve, under the Wind moon, Will is given a horse, a key, and a map, and sent alone into the Indian Nation to run a trading post as a bound boy. It is during this time that he grows into a man, learning, as he does, of the raw power it takes to create a life, to find a home. In a card game with a white Indian named Featherstone, Will wins a mysterious girl named Claire. As Will's destiny intertwines with the fate of the Cherokee Indians,...

"A dazzling new novel about memory and identity set in Paris, Tennessee in the aftermath of the American civil war from the Booker Prize shortlisted author Winona Cole, an orphaned child of the Lakota Indians, finds herself growing up in an unconventional household on a farm in West Tennessee. Raised by her adoptive father John Cole and his brother-in-arms Thomas McNulty, this odd little family scrapes a living on Lige Magan's farm with the help two...

Truffles attract dreamers, schemers, and sensualists. People spend years training dogs to find them underground. They plant forests of oaks and wait a decade for truffles to appear. They pay $3,000 a pound to possess them. They turn into quivering puddles in their presence. Jacobsen takes us into a world of secretive hunts, misty woods, black-market deals, obsessive chefs, quixotic scientists, and muddy dogs to show us that there's more to truffles...