San Antonio College Library

John O'Brien's books have established him as a writer who communicated the voice of the loner with blistering realness and unmistakable force. In Leaving Las Vegas, he wove a love story of incredible passion among two lost souls. In The Assault on Tony's, he unfolded a psychological drama among five drunks who spend their last days barricaded in a bar. Stripper Lessons is perhaps O'Brien's most interior and intense book, a powerful story of a man's...

"Disgraced school-teacher turned public writer, Broken Glass fails abysmally to stay out of trouble, as one drinker after another wants to make sure that their portrayal in the notebook, (not so golden this one), will reflect their dynamic, ebullient personality. Like the photographer whose subjects always want to smile for him, Broken Glass is sickened by this false show of success and drowns his sorrows in red wine and riffs on the literature of...

"Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's war on heavy industry has put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for his artistic brother and practical sister. She dreams of...

Sy Levin, a 30-year-old high school teacher beset by alcohol and bad decisions, leaves New York for the Pacific Northwest to start over as a college professor, imagining that an extraordinary new life awaits him there. Soon after arriving, he realizes that he had fallen for the myth of the West as a place of personal reinvention.

"Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul, has come to Quauhnahuac, Mexico. His debilitating malaise is drinking ... On ... the Day of the Dead, 1938, his wife, Yvonne, arrives in Quauhnahuac, inspired by a vision of life together away from Mexico and the circumstances that have driven their relationship to the brink of collapse. She is determined to rescue Firmin and their failing marriage, but her mission is further complicated by the presence of...

"In a mega-stakes, high-suspense race against time, three of the most unlikely and winning heroes Stephen King has ever created try to stop a lone killer from blowing up thousands. In the frigid pre-dawn hours, in a distressed Midwestern city, hundreds of desperate unemployed folks are lined up for a spot at a job fair. Without warning, a lone driver plows through the crowd in a stolen Mercedes, running over the innocent, backing up, and charging...

This tale, set during the Depression, tells about Francis Phelan and other inhabitants of skid row in Albany, New York. Ironweed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is the best-known of William Kennedy's three Albany-based novels. Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, full-time drunk, has hit bottom. Years ago he left Albany in a hurry after killing a scab during a trolley workers' strike; he ran away again after accidentally - and fatally...

"The story of the dangerous first love of two young men: Mungo and James. Born under different stars--Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic--they should be sworn enemies if they're to be seen as men at all. Their environment is a hyper-masculine and sectarian one, for gangs of young men and the violence they might dole out dominate the Glaswegian estate where they live. And yet against all odds Mungo and James become best friends as they find a...

As Jay Follet hurries back to his home in Knoxville, Tennessee, he is killed in a car accident -- a tragedy that destroys not only a life, but also the domestic happiness and contentment of a young family. A novel of great courage, lyric force, and powerful emotion. "Published in 1957 to wide acclaim, James Agee's A Death in the Family was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. However, the novel had been so heavily edited by publisher...

Three key works by the early twentieth-century author include the 'prophetic journalism' experiment of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Death in the Family, and the novella The Morning Watch. Let us now praise famous men: In the summer of 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration...