Good Night Thoughts

The House on Mango Street

The House on Mango Street is one of the most cherished novels of the last fifty years. Readers from all walks of life have fallen for the voice of Esperanza Cordero, growing up in Chicago and inventing for herself who and what she will become. “In English my name means hope,” she says. “In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting.”

Told in a series of vignettes—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes joyous—Cisneros’s masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery and one of the greatest neighborhood novels of all time. Like Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street or Toni Morrison’s Sula, it makes a world through people and their voices, and it does so in language that is poetic and direct. This gorgeous coming-of-age novel is a celebration of the power of telling one’s story and of being proud of where you’re from.

More Non-Juvenile Books

  • Learning to Disagree Better by John Inazu
    Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect by John Inazu As a constitutional scholar, legal expert, and former litigator, John has spent his career learning how to disagree well with other people. In Learning to Disagree, John shares memorable stories and draws on the practices that legal training imparts–seeing the complexity in every issue and inhabiting the mindset of an opposing point of view–to help us handle daily encounters and lifelong relationships with those who see life very differently than we do.This groundbreaking, poignant, and highly practical book equips us to:
    • Understand what holds us back from healthy disagreement
    • Learn specific, start-today strategies for dialoguing clearly and authentically
    • Move from stuck, broken disagreements to mature, healthy disagreements
    • Cultivate empathy as a core skill for our personal lives and our whole society
    If you are feeling exhausted from the tattered state of dialogue in your social media feed, around the country, and in daily conversations, you’re not alone. Discover a more connected life while still maintaining the strength of your convictions through this unique, often-humorous, thought-provoking, and ultimately life-changing exploration of the best way to disagree.
  • Readers were first introduced to the considerable talents of Lisa Ko with the release of her “masterful” (Redbook) and “ambitious” (The New York Times Book Review) debut novel, The Leavers. Named a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction and selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Kingsolver to receive the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, The Leavers catapulted Ko into the literary stratosphere, highlighting the powerful ways in which her “achingly beautiful” prose (The Christian Science Monitor) and “unforgettable narrative voice” (NYLON) “mirror America’s own urgent and timely political landscape” (W magazine).
  • England, 1840. Two decades after the death of her beloved sister, Jane, Cassandra Austen returns to the village of Kintbury and the home of her family friends, the Fowles. In a dusty corner of the vicarage, there is a cache of Jane’s letters that Cassandra is desperate to find. Dodging her hostess and a meddlesome housemaid, Cassandra eventually hunts down the letters and confronts the secrets they hold, secrets not only about Jane but about Cassandra herself.
  • Retired publisher Susan Ryeland is living the good life. She is running a small hotel on a Greek island with her long-term boyfriend Andreas. It should be everything she's always wanted. But is it? She's exhausted with the responsibilities of making everything work on an island where nothing ever does, and truth be told she's beginning to miss London.