Check out these highly anticipated May 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!
Yellowface by R.F Kuang Plagiarism, white lies, snarky humor, biting satire, cultural appropriation and deadly consequences, all wrapped up in this fast-moving page turner by author R. F. Kuang, best known for writing fantasy. First-time author Juniper Song is a literary sensation. Her new novel is at the top of the charts. Juniper should be thrilled, but there is just one problem — well, make that three. Juniper is not who she says she is, she didn’t actually write the book, she claims to have written, and she certainly is not Asian American. Instead, she is June Hayward, self-described “basic white girl” who takes advantage of the sudden death of her friend, the brilliant writer Athena Liu, to….umhh....steal her manuscript and make it her own—under an assumed name and fraudulent credentials of course. Hayward reasons that a book this good deserves to be published no matter who the author happens to be, right? What could possibly go wrong?
Sing Her Down by Ivy Pochoda Author Pochoda set out to write a feminist Western thriller, every bit as dark and gritty as Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. Hard-core noir in other words, but with female protagonists. When Florida Baum and Diosmary Sandoval, inmates at an Arizona Women’s prison, are given an unexpected reprieve, they set out for Los Angeles across a COVID-haunted landscape, making one bad decision after another until they draw the attention of Lobos, a detective with a few secrets of her own. A riveting cat and mouse game ensues, and the story moves toward its inevitable, explosive end.
The Covenant of Water
by Abraham Verghese In his highly anticipated new novel, Verghese, author of the best-selling Cutting for Stone, follows the fortunes of a South Indian family afflicted with a
mysterious condition. In each generation, at least one member of the family dies from
drowning. This sweeping saga of love, family, faith, politics and medicine, has
already garnered a host of nothing less than ecstatic reviews.
NONFICTION
Traffic: Genius,
Rivalry and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to go Viral by Ben Smith This is one of the latest entries among the reams of books devoted to analyzing the impact that
digital media has had on our lives. Ben
Smith, controversial former Editor-in-Chief of the now defunct BuzzFeed News, brings us back to the heady beginning when
larger-than-life characters and the companies they established, including Buzzfeed, Gawker and HuffPost competed fiercely for the
attention of a voracious, click-ready
online audience, and invented the now ubiquitous term, “going viral.”
Our Migrant Souls: A
Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of Latino by Hector Tobar Latin
people, writes Pulitzer-Prize winning author Hector Tobar, “are brown, Black,
white and Indigenous and they are European, Asian and African. Some speak
excellent Spanish; many do not. In Our Migrant Souls, Tobar explores what it means to be identified in as Latino (Latina, Latinx) in 21st
century American society. He interweaves anecdotes of his childhood as the son
of Guatemalan immigrants in LA, with historical vignettes, and a critique of
the one-dimensional way in which Latinos
are portrayed in popular culture. Spoiler alert: suffering refugees, and
ruthless drug cartels, dominate in the media.
Timely and thought-provoking.
Quietly Hostile:
Essays by Samantha Irby Readers who have laughed their way through any of
Irby’s three previous titles have been looking forward to Quietly Hostile, big
time. Anyone who has not yet encountered
the work of this self-described “sick fat, and queer” comic may want to start
here. Irby’s essays tackle “all the gory details of modern life" including
incontinence, QVC, Justin Bieber, Trader Joes, and Dave Matthews.
