New Releases: May Edition

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! 

FICTION

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 21^st 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.