Monroe Free Library

When history teacher Ben Ross starts a classroom experiment, with the intention of showing students the processes behind social control in Nazi Germany, things get out of hand and the power of group pressure becomes a frightening reality.

"In the quiet of my forgotten office in the old country courthouse, behind the plastic doorplate that reads 'Deputy David Mapstone, Sheriff's Office Historian', I fiddled with the tribal fashion of cops. The tan uniform blouse with epaulets and pocket flaps, the opening above the pocket made for a cheap Cross pen, and the gold-plated 'MCSO' letters running parallel on each side of the collars. An off-white felt Stetson sat on my desk. We might be...

One man's quiet life is shattered when he's forced to confront terrifying secrets he'd thought buried high in the Italian Alps The New York Times has called his work "daring and remarkably assured," The Washington Post has dubbed it "shamelessly entertaining," and the Los Angeles Times claims it renders "the raw elegence of the human experience itself." Now Paul Watkins returns with his most engaging and atmospheric novel yet. The ice soldier of...

This tightly constructed tale by PEN/Faulkner finalist Steve Yarbrough tells the story of a Mississippi history teacher who's determined to unravel the truth about one tragic day in 1962. Even as he pursues an affair with a long-lost friend, he wonders if she could hold the missing piece to this racially charged puzzle.

"Cities of Women is a work of historical literary fiction inspired by a decade of research on the medieval life and times of the proto-feminist, Christine de Pizan, the first European woman of letters to support herself as a writer. Like A.S. Byatt's Possession, the story moves between present and past in a dual narrative, evoking the spare joys and monumental pitfalls facing medieval women artists, and a contemporary woman who becomes obsessed with...

"Alif is a middle-aged, mild-mannered history teacher, living in contemporary Delhi, at a time when Muslims in India are seen either as hapless victims or live threats. Though his life's passion is the history he teaches, it's the present that presses down on him: his wife is set on a bigger house and a better car while trying to ace her MBA exams; his teenage son wants to quit school to get rich; his supercilious colleagues are suspicious of a Muslim...