Check out these highly anticipated August 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!
Fiction
Carlotta Mercedes has been misunderstood her entire life. When she was pulled into a robbery gone wrong, she still went by the name she'd grown up with in Brooklyn. But not long after her conviction, she took the name Carlotta and began to live as a woman. In her fifth appearance before the parole board, Carlotta is at last granted conditional freedom and returns to a much-changed city. Over a whirlwind Fourth of July weekend, she struggles to reconcile with the son she left behind, to reunite with a family reluctant to accept her, and to avoid any minor parole infraction that might get her consigned back to lockup.
Graduating into the long maw of an American recession, Sneha moves to Milwaukee for an entry-level
corporate job. She
soon develops a burning crush on Marina, a beguiling dancer who always seems just out of reach. But before long, trouble
arrives. Jobs are lost, secrets are revealed. Sneha struggles to be truly close and open with anybody, even as her
friendships deepen, even as she throws herself headlong into a dizzying romance
with Marina. It’s then that her friend Tig begins to draw up a radical solution
to their problems, hoping to save them all.
At thirty-five, Mika Suzuki’s life is a mess. Her last
relationship ended in flames. Her roommate-slash-best friend might be a
hoarder. She’s a perpetual disappointment to her traditional Japanese parents.
And, most recently, she’s been fired from her latest dead-end job. Mika is at
her lowest point when she receives a phone call from Penny—the daughter she
placed for adoption sixteen years ago. Mika must face the truth—about herself, her
family, and her past—and answer the question, just who is Mika in real life?
Nonfiction
Written in intimate, gleefully TMI prose, Knocking Myself Up is the irreverent account of Tea’s route to parenthood—with a group of ride-or-die friends, a generous drag queen, and a whole lot of can-do pluck. Along the way she falls in love with a wholesome genderqueer a decade her junior, attempts biohacking herself a baby with black market fertility meds (and magicking herself an offspring with witch-enchanted honey), learns her eggs are busted, and enters the Fertility Industrial Complex in order to carry her younger lover’s baby.
When Casey Parks came out as a lesbian in college back in 2002, she assumed her life in the South was over. Her mother shunned her, and her pastor asked God to kill her. But then Parks's grandmother, a stern conservative who grew up picking cotton, pulled her aside and revealed a startling secret. "I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man," and then implored Casey to find out what happened to him. Diary of a Misfit is the story of Parks's life-changing journey to unravel the mystery of Roy Hudgins, a small-town country singer, all the while confronting ghosts of her own.
Chef Keith Corbin got his start cooking crack at age thirteen, becoming so skilled that he was
flown across the country to cook for drug operations in other cities. After his
criminal enterprises caught up with him, though, Corbin spent years in
California’s most notorious maximum security prisons. After his release, Corbin got a job managing the kitchen at
LocoL, an ambitious fast food restaurant spearheaded by celebrity chefs Roy
Choi and Daniel Patterson. As he battles private demons while
achieving public success, Corbin traces the origins of his vision for
“California soul food."
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