An all-in-one-day love story perfect for fans of The Sun is Also a Star about two first-time teen voters who meet at their polling place and overcome obstacle after obstacle in order to cast a ballot in a critical election.
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The Burning
There’s nothing to trace Anna back to her old life. Nothing to link her to the incident. At least that’s what she thinks—until the whispers start up again. As time begins to run out on her secrets, Anna finds herself irresistibly drawn to the tale of Maggie, a local woman accused of witchcraft centuries earlier. A woman whose story has terrifying parallels to Anna’s own.
Sand Talk
With the world in constant crisis—from environmental damage to corrupt leaders to human rights violations—it can be hard to imagine a way forward, a system of thinking that can pull us back from the brink of catastrophe and into a sustainable future. In Sand Talk, Aboriginal scholar and artist Tyson Yunkaporta shows us what can be gained by viewing global systems through the lens of Indigenous Knowledge. Touching on everything from cooking to Schrodinger’s cat to sex, he offers a new (and ancient) paradigm to reimagine our relationship to sustainability, money, power, and education. Each chapter is based on oral cultural exchanges with people from diverse cultures and communities, including a Tasmanian Indigenous thinker, a Worimi artist, and the deputy principal of a remote Aboriginal community school. To think through these yarns, Yunkaporta uses sand talk, honoring an Aboriginal custom of drawing images on the ground to convey knowledge and, ultimately, help us better understand the world. Sand Talk is a dynamic, engaging look at how we can use Indigenous thinking to confront the problems that plague us and return to the pattern of creation.
Here We Are
A deeply felt, beautifully crafted meditation on friendship and loss in the vein of A Year of Magical Thinking, and a touching portrait of Philip Roth from his closest friend.
I had a baseball question on the tip of my tongue: What was the name of “the natural,” the player shot by a stalker in a Chicago hotel room? He gave me an amused look that darkened into puzzlement, then fear. Then he pitched forward into the soup, unconscious. When I entered the examining room twenty minutes after our arrival at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital, Philip said, “No more books.” Thus he announced his retirement.
So begins Benjamin Taylor’s Here We Are, the unvarnished portrait of his best friend and one of America’s greatest writers. Needless to say, Philip Roth’s place in the canon is secure, but what is less clear is what the man himself was like. In Here We Are, Benjamin Taylor’s beautifully constructed memoir, we see him as a mortal man, experiencing the joys and sorrows of aging, reflecting on his own writing, and doing something we all love to do: passing the time in the company of his closest friend.
Here We Are is an ode to friendship and its wondrous ability to brighten our lives in unexpected ways. Benjamin Taylor is one of the most talented writers working today, and this new memoir pays tribute to his friend, in the way that only a writer can. Roth encouraged him to write this book, giving Taylor explicit instructions not to sugarcoat anything and not to publish it until after his death. Unvarnished and affectionately true to life, Taylor’s memoir will be the definitive account of Philip Roth as he lived for years to come.
The Book of Eels
Part H Is for Hawk, part The Soul of an Octopus, The Book of Eels is both a meditation on the world’s most elusive fish—the eel—and a reflection on the human condition. Remarkably little is known about the European eel, Anguilla anguilla. So little, in fact, that scientists and philosophers have, for centuries, been obsessed with what has become known as the “eel question”: Where do eels come from? What are they? Are they fish or some other kind of creature altogether? Even today, in an age of advanced science, no one has ever seen eels mating or giving birth, and we still don’t understand what drives them, after living for decades in freshwater, to swim great distances back to the ocean at the end of their lives. They remain a mystery. Drawing on a breadth of research about eels in literature, history, and modern marine biology, as well as his own experience fishing for eels with his father, Patrik Svensson crafts a mesmerizing portrait of an unusual, utterly misunderstood, and completely captivating animal. In The Book of Eels, we meet renowned historical thinkers, from Aristotle to Sigmund Freud to Rachel Carson, for whom the eel was a singular obsession. And we meet the scientists who spearheaded the search for the eel’s point of origin, including Danish marine biologist Johannes Schmidt, who led research efforts in the early twentieth century, catching thousands upon thousands of eels, in the hopes of proving their birthing grounds in the Sargasso Sea. Blending memoir and nature writing at its best, Svensson’s journey to understand the eel becomes an exploration of the human condition that delves into overarching issues about our roots and destiny, both as humans and as animals, and, ultimately, how to handle the biggest question of all: death. The result is a gripping and slippery narrative that will surprise and enchant.
Hollywood Park: A Memoir
Hollywood Park is a remarkable memoir of a tumultuous life. Mikel Jollett was born into one of the country’s most infamous cults, and subjected to a childhood filled with poverty, addiction, and emotional abuse. Yet, ultimately, his is a story of fierce love and family loyalty told in a raw, poetic voice that signals the emergence of a uniquely gifted writer.
The Book of Rosy
When Rosayra Pablo Cruz left Guatemala to seek asylum in the U.S. with two of her children, Fernando (age 5) and Yordy (age 15), she knew the journey would be incredibly difficult, dangerous, and potentially life-threatening. But turbulent violence had made life untenable, so Rosy made the wrenching decision to cross the border into the U.S. with her sons. After surviving a perilous journey that left them dehydrated, starved, and exhausted, Rosy, Fernando, and Yordy crossed into Arizona, together. Almost immediately, Rosy and her children were forcibly separated by government officials under the dictate of a “zero tolerance” policy. In The Book of Rosy, Rosy, along with her co-author Julie Schwietert Collazo, who founded Immigrant Families Together, a passionate group of activists who helped reunite mothers with their children, offers the first book-length account of the devastating trauma of family separation. Rosy describes the cruel conditions of the detention facilities, the unbearable anxiety of being ripped away from her children, and the faith and love that helped her get through the darkest time. The Book of Rosy is an unflinching look at the human cost of inhumane policies, and the unbreakable bonds of family, faith, and community, offering a much-needed glimpse into the human side of a polarizing issue that has gripped our nation’s politics.
Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs
From bestselling author of She’s Not There, New York Times opinion columnist, and human rights activist Jennifer Finney Boylan, Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs is a memoir of the transformative power of loving dogs. It is a universal account of a remarkable story: showing how a young boy became a middle-aged woman—accompanied at seven crucial moments of growth and transformation by seven memorable dogs.
The New One
With laugh-out-loud observations on the rollercoaster ride that is being a new parent, New York Times bestselling author and award-winning comedian Mike Birbiglia delivers a book that is perfect for anyone who has ever raised a child, been a child, or refuses to stop acting like a child.
Valentine
Written with the haunting emotional power of Elizabeth Strout and Barbara Kingsolver, an astonishing debut novel that explores the lingering effects of a brutal crime on the women of one small Texas oil town in the 1970s. Mercy is hard in a place like this . . .It’s February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town’s men embrace the coming prosperity, its women intimately know and fear the violence that always seems to follow. In the early hours of the morning after Valentine’s Day, fourteen-year-old Gloria Ramirez appears on the front porch of Mary Rose Whitehead’s ranch house, broken and barely alive. The teenager had been viciously attacked in a nearby oil field—an act of brutality that is tried in the churches and barrooms of Odessa before it can reach a court of law. When justice is evasive, one of the town’s women decides to take matters into her own hands, setting the stage for a showdown with potentially devastating consequences.
Valentine is a haunting exploration of the intersections of violence and race, class and region in a story that plumbs the depths of darkness and fear, yet offers a window into beauty and hope. Told through the alternating points of view of indelible characters who burrow deep in the reader’s heart, this fierce, unflinching, darkly funny, and surprisingly tender novel illuminates women’s strength and vulnerability, and reminds us that it is the stories we tell ourselves that keep us alive.