New Releases: January 2024 Edition

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!

FICTION

You Dreamed of Empires: A Novel by Álvaro Enrigue. When the armies of Hernando Cortes first enter the city of Tenochtitlan in 1519, many in his entourage are dazzled by the size, grandeur and strangeness of the city. The Aztecs covet the invaders’ horses, but are baffled of their kings, and by their Christian faith. As Cortes and the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma prepare to meet, tensions rise and some among the Spaniards begin to wonder if they’ll get out alive let alone conquer an empire. What follows is a vividly imagined clash between two cultures, two languages, two religions and two possible futures. Be warned: This is not your typical historical novel. Enrigue has produced a feverish hallucinatory work that is in the words of one reviewer, “so electric, so unique that it feels like a dream.”

Blizzard by Marie Vingtras. A young boy goes missing in the midst of an Alaskan blizzard, and four diverse individuals converge in the effort to find him. As the hours pass, the storm strengthens, the atmosphere becomes increasingly ominous, and secrets that each character harbors are slowly revealed. Despite the novel’s North American setting, Vingras is actually French and Blizzard has become a runaway best seller in her home country.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar.  This luminous work of fiction by first-time novelist Akbar, focuses on Cyrus Shams, Iranian immigrant and Midwesterner who is a poet, an orphan a recovering addict and a seeker. Obsessed with finding meaning in his own life as well as in the lives of his deceased parents, he embarks on a journey to uncover a family secret that leads him into an unlikely friendship with a dying poet living out her days in the Brooklyn Museum. Grief, violence, the joy of language, displacement, martyrdom, homesickness and belonging are all woven into a rich and compelling quest tale.

NONFICTION

 I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn about Money by Madeline Pendleton. Well, she may not have wanted to, but Tik-Tok star and entrepreneur Madeline Pendleton surely did learn about money. Her new memoir/financial guide describes her childhood in a financially-strapped household headed by her punk father and Goth mother and her couch-surfing years working a series of low-end, dead-end jobs. Eventually, she found a compassionate employer, learned what she needed to know about-you got it-money and started her own successful clothing company, Tunnel Vison, where she is committed to fostering an equitable corporate structure. Pendleton offers practical advice to her fellow Gen-Zers, as well as a searing indictment of our socioeconomic system, which she says, “you could describe as dog-eat-dog, except dogs are more cooperative.”  

Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks by Crystal Wilkinson. Author Wilkinson is a native of Appalachia and former poet laureate of Kentucky so it may come as no surprise that she has produced a lyrical “praisesong” in honor of her homeland, her family, and “Affrilachian” culinary history. Her work incorporates family lore, archival photographs, and, and of course, recipes. How about green beans with new potatoes, or chicken and dumplings, or a lighter-than-air angel food cake? In a word, yum.

Toxic: Women, Fame and the Tabloid 2000s by Sarah Ditum. Welcome to the “noughties” roughly the first decade of the early 2000s when social media exploded and the words slut shaming, fat shaming, and revenge porn became part of our vocabulary. In this book, author Ditum profiles nine young women, most of them household names, who were caught in the crosshairs of the cyber revolution. The idea that we as a society place our idols on a pedestal only to gleefully tear them down is not new, but Ditum argues that the cost of celebrity rose exponentially during this era due to the lack of privacy and reach that social media affords. Interestingly, she does not portray all of these women as helpless victims. Some were indeed destroyed (Amy Winehouse) or continue to struggle (Britney Spears), but others adapted. Paris Hilton instinctively understood that her role was to “stand for privileged nothingness” and she played it with aplomb. And, Kim Kardashian? Doing just fine. An interesting lens through which to view our very recent past.

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