New Releases: May Edition

Did one of the book covers on our homepage catch your eye? They are all new titles being released in May 2021, and all are well-reviewed and anticipated. You can watch the video or read the description of each below, then click the linked title to request a copy or get your name on the wait list. And don't forget to watch for more featured releases next month!

Featured Fiction Titles for May

Hour of the Witch by Chris Bohjalian
Boston, 1662. Mary is twenty-four-years-old. In England she might have had many suitors, but here in the New World Mary is the second wife of Thomas, a man as cruel as he is powerful. When Thomas drives a fork into the back of Mary's hand, she resolves that she must divorce him. But in a world where every neighbor is watching for signs of the devil, Mary soon becomes an object of suspicion. When tainted objects are discovered in her garden, when a boy she has treated with herbs dies, and when their servant runs screaming from her home, Mary must fight to escape both her marriage and the gallows. 

Arsenic and Adobo: A Tita Rosie's Kitchen Mystery, Book One by Mia P. Manansala
When Lila moves back home to recover from a breakup, she's tasked with saving her Tita Rosie's restaurant and has to deal with matchmaking aunties. But when a nasty food critic (who happens to be her ex) drops dead after a confrontation with Lila, her life turns into an Agatha Christie case. With the cops treating her like she's the only suspect, and the landlord looking to kick her family out and resell the storefront, Lila's must conduct her own investigation. Armed with nosy aunties, her barista best bud, and her trusted Dachshund, Lila takes on the twisted case.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Ryland is the sole survivor on a desperate mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his name, let alone his assignment. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a long time. And he’s just awakened millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company. His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes an impossible task confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species. 

Featured Nonfiction Titles for May

The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel
Bechdel tells the story of her fascination with every fitness craze from Jack LaLanne in the 60s to the oddness of present-day spin classes. Readers will see their pasts flash before their eyes through a panoply of running shoes, bicycles, and skis. As Bechdel tries to improve herself, she turns for enlightenment to philosophers and literary figures, including Jack Kerouac, whose search for self-transcendence appears in conversation with the author’s own. The artist and not-getting-any-younger exerciser concludes the secret to superhuman strength lies in facing her interdependence with others.

Punch Me Up to the Gods: A Memoir by Brian Broome

This book shows a powerful new talent in Broome, whose years growing up in Ohio as a Black boy harboring crushes on other boys propel forward this unforgettable debut. Brian’s recounting of his experiences—in all their cringe-worthy, hilarious, and heartbreaking glory—reveal an outsider trying to find his way in. Indiscriminate sex and escalating drug use help to soothe his hurt, usually to uproarious and devastating effect. A no-nonsense mother and broken father play crucial roles in this story. But it is Brian’s voice that shows the depth of vulnerability for young Black boys that is often near to bursting.

Everybody: A Book about Freedom by Olivia Laing

The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, vulnerable and radiant with power. In her 6th book, Laing charts the struggle for bodily freedom, using the life of the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to explore gay rights and sexual liberation, feminism, and the civil rights movement. Drawing on her experiences in protest and alternative medicine, and traveling from Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, Laing grapples with complicated figures of the past―among them Nina Simone, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag, and Malcolm X. Despite its burdens, the body remains a source of power, even in an era as technologized as our own.