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Wisconsin Library Association Literary Awards

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Author: Louise Nayer

"Burned: A Memoir is a beautifully written, touching, and emotionally charged story of a family and the tragic event that changed their lives forever. Weezie is only 4 when the accident happens. Through her young eyes we see the struggle of her parents to recover not only their physical but emotional selves in the aftermath of horrific injuries. Weezie and her sister, swept away to other caregivers, struggle to understand what has happened and to believe they will be reunited with their parents."

“In recreating the setting, emotions, and dialogue, Nayer writes in a way that makes the reader feel like a part of the story,” said Jean Anderson, Co-Chair of the Literary Awards Committee. “We want to reach out and stop Weezie’s mom from lighting the match that ignited the fire. We are deeply touched by the resilience and strength shown by the author and her family and are grateful she chose to share her story with us.”

Review from the WLA Literary Awards Announcement

The Poisoner's Handbook

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Author: Deborah Blum

The untold story of how poison rocked Jazz Age New York City. A pair of forensic scientists began their trailblazing chemical detective work, fighting to end an era when untraceable poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime. Chief medical examiner Charles Norris and toxicologist Alexander Gettler investigate a family mysteriously stricken bald, factory workers with crumbling bones, a diner serving poisoned pies, and many others. Each case presents a deadly new puzzle and Norris and Gettler create revolutionary experiments to tease out even the wiliest compounds from human tissue. From the vantage of their laboratory it also becomes clear that murderers aren't the only toxic threat--modern life has created a kind of poison playground, and danger lurks around every corner.

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Author: M. Caren Connolly

These twenty homes, built between 1854 and 1939, represent the varied architecture in Wisconsin. They offer an intimate tour of residential treasures-- built for captains of industry, a beer baron, Broadway stars, and more-- that have endured the test of time.

Stiltsville : a novel

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Author: Susanna Daniel

Miami,1969. Frances is captivated by the community of houses built on pilings in the middle of Biscayne Bay. On the dock of one stilt house, she meets Dennis, and turns away from her predictable life. Stiltsville becomes their island oasis-- until suddenly it's gone, and Francis is forced to figure out how to make her family work on dry land.

Tomorrow River

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Author: Lesley Kagen

When her mother's bizarre disappearance in the summer of 1968 triggers her twin sister's traumatic inability to speak, eleven-year-old Shenandoah is prompted to discover the truth of her mother's fate when her alcoholic father cruelly threatens to remarry and send her sister away.

At the Dark End of the Street

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Author: Danielle L. McGuire

A history of America's civil rights movement traces the pivotal influence of sexual violence that victimized African American women for centuries, revealing Rosa Parks's contributions as an anti-rape activist years before her heroic bus protest.

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Author: Michael Schumacher

In Will Eisner: A Dreamer's Life in Comics, Michael Schumacher delves beneath Eisner's public persona to draw connections between his life and his art. Eisner's career spanned a remarkable eight decades, from his scrappy survival at the dawn of comics' Golden Age in the late 1930s to the beginning of the twenty-first century, when Pulitzers began going to graphic novels (a term Eisner is widely credited with creating). Schumacher's extensive research and interviews with Eisner's family, friends, and colleagues, as well as other comics creators who have built upon his work, create a detailed portrait of Eisner the man and Eisner the artist.

My Hollywood

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Author: Mona Simpson

A wonderfully provocative and appealing novel, from the much-loved author of "Anywhere But Here" and "A Regular Guy, " her first in ten years. It tells the story of two women whose lives entwine and unfold behind the glittery surface of Hollywood.
 

A Curable Romantic : a novel

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Author: Joseph Skibell

When Dr. Jakob Josef Sammelsohn arrives in Vienna in the 1890s, he happens to meet Sigmund Freud, has a series of affairs, is haunted by the ghost of his abandoned wife, and eventually ends up in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940. His adventures illuminate a Europe moving between a new scientific age and age-old superstitions and beliefs.

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Author: Patrick Somerville

From an award-winning novelist come characters, stories, and stray thoughts that revolve around the The Machine of Understanding Other People, the story of a Chicago man who is bequeathed a supernatural helmet that allows him to experience the inner worlds of those around him.

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Author: Mary Helen Stefaniak

"Narrator Gladys Cailiff is eleven years old in 1938 when a new, well-traveled young schoolteacher turns a small Georgia town upside down. Miss Grace Spivey believes in field trips, Arabian costumes, and reading aloud from her ten-volume set of The Thousand Nights and a Night. The real trouble begins when she decides to revive the annual town festival as an exotic Baghdad bazaar....Populated by unforgettable characters--including three impressive camels--The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia rides a magic carpet from a segregated schoolroom in Georgia to the banks of the Tigris (and back again) in an entrancing feat of storytelling."

Birds of Wisconsin: Poems

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Author: B. J. Best

An intimate collection of magical poems where birds behave as humans, experiencing love, loss, and faith. 

We Don't Know We Don't Know : Poems

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Author: Nick Lantz

Winner of the 2008 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for Poetry, Nick Lantz's poems introduce a startling new voice. Taking its title from a dodging statement from former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, "We Don't Know We Don't Know "assesses what it means to claim new knowledge within a culture that professes to know everything already. The result is a poetry that upends the deeply and dangerously assumed concepts of such a culture--that new knowledge is always better knowledge, that history is a steady progress, that humans are in control of the natural order.

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Author: Nick Lantz

Nick Lantz explores the transformative power of tragic and miraculous experiences, through these poems that illuminate near misses of tragedy and transcendence. His gaze is both roving and microscopic--the "Challenger" explosion, Bigfoot, a love letter written from inside a missile silo, a mother naming and re-naming a family's short-lived pets, and a plea for post-9/11 redemption. Lantz never lets his subjects or his readers off the hook, plunging head first into worlds that are both eccentric and familiar, alarming and hopeful

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Author: Sean Carroll

An award-wining biologist takes us on the dramatic expeditions that unearthed the history of life on our planet... Carroll recounts the most important discoveries in two centuries of national history — from Darwin’s trip around the world to CharlesWalcott’s discovery of pre-Cambrian life in the Grand Canyon; from Louis and Mary Leakey’s investigation of our deepest past in East Africa to the trailblazers in modern laboratories who have located a time clock in our DNA. Join him in a rousing voyage of discovery, from the epic journeys of pioneering naturalists to the breakthroughs making headlines today.  (publisher's description)