Happy Birthday, Oak Park! A Brief Selection of Oak Park Authors

"From the internationally bestselling author of The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World, a heartfelt coming-of-age story that Karen Joy Fowler calls "a timeless classic book you will read and reread." Mary Frances "Frankie" Lombard is fiercely in love with her family's sprawling apple orchard and the tangled web of family members who inhabit it. Content to spend her days planning capers with her brother William, competing with her brainy cousin Amanda,...

"Rusty Brown" is a fully interactive, full-color articulation of the time-space interrelationships of six complete consciousnesses on a single midwestern American day and the tiny piece of human grit about which they involuntarily orbit. A sprawling, special snowflake accumulation of the biggest themes and the smallest moments of life, "Rusty Brown" literately and literally aims at nothing less than the coalescence of one half of all of existence...

The last novel Ernest Hemingway saw published, The Old Man and the Sea has proved itself to be one of the enduring works of American fiction. It is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal: a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. Using the simple, powerful language of a fable, Hemingway takes the timeless themes of courage in the face of defeat and personal triumph won from...

Twelve-year-old Alfa Merryfield, his older sister, and their grandmother struggle for rent money, food, and their dignity as they participate in the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott in the summer of 1956.

Curated by award-winning and best-selling poets, this wide-ranging poetry anthology represents twenty years of poetry from the students and alumni of Chicago's Oak Park River Forest High School Spoken Word Club.