Check out these highly anticipated new releases featuring fiction and nonfiction titles. Click on the title to request a copy or get your name on the waitlist. Don’t forget to watch for more featured releases next month, and check out WPL's Reader's Corner for more book suggestions!
Nonfiction
An eye-opening story of the people who make the census, the United States' largest and most consequential dataset, and the growing threats to their crucial work. By many measures, the US census is the government's largest non-wartime operation, and one of the world's oldest and biggest data-making endeavors. The 2020 census required more than a decade of planning and technical work--not to mention managing nearly a quarter of a million temporary workers simultaneously--to collect data about the American public. That data was then processed to count each of 331,449,281 residents once--and only once--and in the right place. The operation is also one of the country's most consequential. Census data determine how political power and federal funding are allocated. Census data make politics, and consequently, politics make census data. In this urgent book, danah boyd explores what it took for the Census Bureau to make the 2020 census, amidst a global pandemic and natural disasters, and while navigating political forces that constrained the budget, micro-managed the schedule, and attacked statisticians' methods. With rare insider access to the Census Bureau, boyd observed and interviewed hundreds of government civil servants who made the 2020 census. By documenting the perspectives of government workers, Data Are Made, Not Found provides a rare glimpse into what it takes to make democracy's data. Each chapter reveals a different challenge--ranging from the last-minute fights about a citizenship question to the not-so-helpful help of well-intended stakeholders to avoid undercounts--and shows how civil servants responded to each problem, controversy, and hurdle. Boyd shows how many of the challenges that the Census Bureau faced in 2020 resulted from decades of political operatives, data users, and various stakeholders playing what boyd calls "Jenga politics," weakening the administrative state for short-term political gains by removing support and adding more requirements. Civil servants saved the 2020 census, but future censuses--and other data-making efforts related to elections, health, and the economy--are precarious. Boyd's message is clear and compelling: protecting democracy means protecting the people and institutions that produce this data. (courtesy of the publisher)
Veteran Bay Area indie cartoonist Noland (Our Little Wild Time) delivers a finely crafted and illuminating biography of Marshall "Major" Taylor, a Black bicycle racer who became an international superstar in the late 19th century. Growing up in the upper Midwest, Taylor exhibits a talent for performing bicycle tricks and later begins competitive racing, becoming a genuine force in the sport. Eventually, he's invited to compete in France and Australia and is celebrated as a hero by locals in both countries. But on his home turf Taylor faces racial discrimination, including sports organizations that vote to ban Black cyclists from membership. He's physically attacked on several occasions, most notably by fellow racer William Becker, who comes in third place following Taylor's win and who chokes him unconscious. Through his triumphs and travails, Taylor relies on his religious faith, as well as his family, mentors, and sports heroes like fellow biking legends Arthur "the Jersey Skeeter" Zimmerman and Louis "Birdie" Munger. Noland's skillful, seemingly effortless cartooning evokes Taylor's era with dynamism. Adroitly drawn historical context includes the origins of the bicycle and its "elegant yet simple" design, and various ways it influenced society and culture, such as how it became popular with suffragists. Honoring its subject and Black sports history, this graphic biography goes the distance. Copyright 2026 Publishers Weekly
In this landmark examination of the racist roots of the American immigration system, MacArthur "genius" grant winner Hernández (Bad Mexicans) argues that "U.S. immigration control operates as a whites-only machine." Hernández traces U.S. immigration law from its earliest days during the Haitian revolution, when lawmakers sought to keep Black Caribbeans out of the states, through today's ICE raids and mass deportations. Much of the current immigration system, she notes, grew out of federal laws to deter Chinese laborers from participating in the California gold rush, creating a precedent for state-sanctioned exclusion, punishment, and removal of nonwhite immigrants that "has subsequently allowed racial discrimination to persist into the present." As eugenicist junk science was popularized in the 1910s and "Nordic nationalism" grew following WWI, new tools for exclusion like literacy tests and quota systems emerged, even as employers continued to utilize immigrant labor through limited guest worker permits with no pathway to citizenship. As other areas of public policy have shifted to distance themselves from racism and xenophobia, U.S. immigration control has "remained programmed to easier, quicker, safer, and cheaper for Europeans and their descendants." Throughout, Hernández surfaces heartening ways that "defiant migrants and their advocates have always figured out how to sabotage the machine." It's a definitive and forceful call for reform. (Sept.) Copyright 2026 Publishers Weekly
Fiction
A big novel with a bigger heart, American Hagwon opens in 1992, when John Koh, a manager at a multinational trading company; his wife Helen; and their teenage kids, Mido, Bo, and DH, move back to Seoul from Sydney, where John had been stationed for work. In Seoul, families clamor for status, and education is a preoccupation, with kids routinely studying late into the night. Helen struggles to overcome financial roadblocks to get her children into a respectable hagwon, but things fall apart when the South Korean economy tanks in 1997. The family then moves to Southern California, where a new kind of education begins. John takes a lowly job at a fish restaurant, and Mido works at an American hagwon and discovers a passion for teaching. But when tragedy strikes the Kohs, more and more responsibility falls to the younger generation.
Copyright 2026 Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2026 Publishers Weekly
Laurel Salter, a biologist and fungi specialist in crisis, takes a chance on a life-changing opportunity: a job as a dishwasher at the McMurdo Station research base in Antarctica. Ostensibly safe from all reminders of her previous life, she explores and adapts to the rhythms of her new, extremely isolated life with her coworkers. Laurel observes and inquires about the Arc, a mysterious, glowing dome over the ice. Questions about the Arc start to draw scientists from all over the world; before long, Laurel’s physicist ex-husband arrives too. Negotiating their history and shared pain leads them to Laurel’s thoughts on the possibilities of the Arc, based on Eli’s theory of a duoverse. They decide to test the Arc, using it to travel back in time to try to rescue their child before he’s lost to them forever. Benjamin’s immersive and atmospheric novel is a heartfelt and intellectually gripping missive to the planet, to loss, and to connection. VERDICT Fans of Benjamin’s The Immortalists will be thrilled as she again delivers on all levels. Equally appropriate for fans of mycelium, odes to the magic of the Earth, and speculation on the myriad possibilities for humanity. Copyright 2026 Library Journal
The Weight of Angels by John Boyne A dazzling counterfactual gives Oscar Wilde the long life he was denied. What if Oscar Wilde had never risen to the Marquess of Queensberry’s bait? What if, instead of pursuing the libel case that destroyed him, he had ignored the infamous calling card accusing him of “posing as a sodomite”? In this bold, richly entertaining counterfactual, Boyne imagines a 20th-century life for Wilde, one in which disgrace falls first on his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, known as Bosie—Queensberry’s son—who is tried for gross indecency, sentenced to hard labor, and later writes De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol. It is a deliciously provocative reversal, and one of the novel’s sharpest pleasures is watching Boyne redistribute history’s punishments and glories. Boyne is a gifted ventriloquist. His Wilde is extravagantly witty, sometimes too much so, but the epigrams are rarely mere decoration. They mask loneliness, vanity, and the sheer labor of living in a society where, as Wilde observes, “Everyone knows what I am, but no one dares say it aloud.” The novel’s great achievement is not simply that Wilde lives, but that he keeps living: through Edwardian England, two world wars, the advent of Hollywood, and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. That long life gives the book its melancholy power. Wilde becomes a Nobel laureate, a writing collaborator of Churchill, and, finally, a wistful judge of his own moral failings toward his late wife, Constance. The “weight of angels” is ultimately the weight of the dead: Bosie; Constance; Wilde’s son, Cyril; lovers; friends; and all those men ruined by laws Wilde himself escaped. Not everything is convincing. Some secondary figures are broadly drawn, and scenes of domestic ease between Wilde, his lover Gus, and Wilde’s sons can feel wishful, even sentimental. Yet even when the details feel awry, the central conceit is irresistible. A witty and melancholy act of literary resurrection. Copyright 2026 Kirkus Reviews
