Books like It wasn't pretty, folks, but didn't we have fun? by Carol Polsgrove

During World War II, a foster girl in Nazi Germany steals books to share with neighbors and a hidden Jewish man, proving literature’s power to nourish the soul amid darkness.

Twenty‑five year‑old Belly Conklin returns to the family summer home on the coast, where a cancer diagnosis forces her to confront love, loss, and growing up amid the familiar rhythm of beach life.

A young woman raised alone in a North Carolina marsh is accused of murder after a local man's death, weaving a tale of survival, love, and secrets in the wilderness.

In the orderly suburb of Shaker Heights, a new family’s arrival and a custody dispute ignite tension, revealing secrets, art, and the complex pull of motherhood in a tightly knit community.

Sisters Vianne and Isabelle are pulled into the turmoil of World War II, each forging a path of courage and resistance against the Nazi occupation of France.

Don Tillman, a genetics professor with Asperger’s, designs a scientific survey to find a wife, only to meet Rosie Jarman, a drinker and late arriver who challenges his controlled worldview and leads him to discover that love can’t be measured.

At Pirriwee Public, a beachside school, a routine trivia night spirals into chaos when a parent dies—raising questions of murder, accidental death, or toxic truths. Parents discover how small lies can become deadly.

In 1714 London, Daniel Waterhouse returns from the Americas to confront a covert war between Isaac Newton’s Master of the Mint and his counterfeiting rival, Jack the Coiner, whose schemes threaten Britain’s fledgling monetary system.

January Scaller, a forgotten ward in a vast mansion, discovers a mysterious book that opens doors to other worlds, intertwining her fate with adventure, love, and peril.

A diverse collection of American science fiction stories by renowned authors, including Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, and others.

From its modest beginnings in the form of a 1933 pamphlet on men's tailoring, Esquire magazine has gone on to achieve incredible publishing success and cultural power. Its editors offered readers for the first time an "unholy combination" of highbrow literature by writers such as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Erskine Caldwell, the bawdy cartoons of E. Simms Campbell and Varga, and articles on upper-class men's fashion. As Hugh Merrill points out, Esquire has since not only revolutionized the magazine industry, but also become part and parcel of substantial changes in American society: attitudes about sex, men's needs, pop and "high" culture, and the exploitation of an unexplored mass market - menswear. This book chronicles the first two decades of this publishing phenomenon with a keen eye on the American cultural landscape: the stories of the men who created Esquire - Arnold Gingrich, the founding editor, and David Smart, the first publisher - their battles with censorship, the history of a now-forgotten magazine empire that included Coronet and Ken, and how Esquire's formula for success became the basis for Playboy in the 1950s and even today's New Yorker.

See https://openlibrary.org/works/OL19781733W/Eleanor_Oliphant_Is_Completely_Fine

Robert Gottlieb, longtime editor of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and The New Yorker, recounts his career shaping American publishing and biographies, from editing classics like Catch‑22 to overseeing the nation’s preeminent magazine.