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!
NONFICTION

Food for Thought: Essays and Ruminations by Alton Brown. Food Network host Brown (Good Eats: The Final
Years) details his culinary career in this appealing memoir in essays, which
takes readers from the author’s early life in North Hollywood, Calif., through
his stints at Iron Chef America and Cutthroat Kitchen. As a
child with a penchant for “unorthodox flavors,” Brown developed an early
fascination with food science, and attended culinary school in New England
before finding work at a bakery. While in school, he dreamed up the concept for
his first show, Good Eats, which put a cheeky spin on food science, and
recounts the bumpy road to getting it produced on the Food Network. Elsewhere,
Brown reveals what he hates to cook (hard shell blue crab); examines famous
scenes of cooking and eating in Hollywood blockbusters including The Godfather and Apocalypse
Now; and shares some of his favorite regional dishes, like Nebraska’s unlikely
combination of chili and cinnamon rolls. The author’s dry wit (“I’ll never go
back because I don’t want to see the inevitable change that forty years have wrought,”
he writes of a magical trip to an Italian village. “Looking in the mirror is
bad enough”) makes this irresistible for home cooks and foodies alike. It’s
another delicious treat from Brown. Copyright 2024 Publishers Weekly.

Fearless and Free: A Memoir by Josephine Baker, Anam Zafar, Sophie Lewis & Ijeoma Oluo. Published in the U.S. for the first time, this memoir captures the experience of talking to Baker (1906–75) more than the experience of being her, leaving her mystery intact. Released in France in 1949, it comprises Baker's side of her dialogue with journalist Marcel Sauvage, who began interviewing her in 1926. Some interviews were initially translated into French and are now retranslated to English, so there are several layers of interpretation between Baker and the page. However, the memoir captures how Baker thinks and feels (her empathy for suffering people comes up often) and her philosophies of life and performance (she says she never rehearses because she's not a machine and finds randomness beautiful). It only lightly covers some experiences that readers would surely like to hear about (such as how Baker came to perform in Manhattan's Plantation Club) but covers others, such as her travels through Europe, in detail. Baker also speaks vividly about working in French intelligence during World War II and being used as a political symbol. VERDICT This dialogue with Baker revels in her poetic and often humorous way of speaking. Pair with Chris Chase and Jean-Claude Baker's authoritative biography Josephine Baker: The Hungry Heart.—Sarah Wolberg Copyright 2025 Library Journal.

American Poison: A Deadly Invention and the Woman Who Battled for Environmental Justice by Daniel Stone. Science writer Stone (Sinkable) offers an enthralling biography of Alice Hamilton (1869–1970), who led a prescient but failed battle to ban leaded gasoline in the 1920s. A medical doctor interested in pathology, by her early 30s Hamilton had “singlehandedly” created the field of industrial medicine, the study of the impacts of chemicals and other environmental factors on industrial workers. As the first woman offered an appointment at Harvard, she began documenting cases of dementia, palsy, and early death in workers—and found they were all connected to lead exposure. This put her on a collision course with engineer Thomas Midgly Jr., inventor of leaded gasoline, a cheaper and more efficient fuel that was quickly adopted by the burgeoning automobile industry. Hamilton led the crusade against leaded gas, offering studies that proved “lead was harmful in almost any context... to every bodily organ.” The U.S. surgeon general called a 1925 summit to investigate the matter; Stone paints the proceedings as a masterpiece of manipulation by Midgly’s Ethyl Corporation, which lied and obfuscated its way to victory. (Leaded gasoline wasn’t fully banned until 1996.) Stone’s depiction of Hamilton is a captivating portrait of a privileged daughter of wealth whose eyes are slowly opened to capitalism’s exploitation of the poor (“I had begun to realize how narrow had been my education, how sheltered my life. I wanted to go into that underworld and see for myself,” she later wrote). Readers will be riveted. Copyright 2025 Publishers Weekly.
FICTION
Harlem Rhapsody by Victoria Christopher Murray. In 1919, high school teacher Jessie Redmon Fauset's passion for writing captures the attention of W.E.B. Du Bois and secures her a trailblazing job as the first Black woman literary editor at The Crisis, the NAACP magazine founded by Du Bois. An excited Jessie moves from Washington, DC, to New York City to start the job, but she's hiding a secret: Du Bois, Jessie's new boss, has also been her long-distance lover for years. Now that they're both in Harlem, it will be harder for Jessie and the married Du Bois to keep their affections hidden from everyone. As years pass, Jessie becomes a more and more integral part of The Crisis, especially in cultivating new young writing talents such as a 17-year-old Langston Hughes and a 16-year-old Countee Cullen. But when she finds herself clashing, both professionally and personally, with Du Bois, Jessie is faced with an agonizing choice between her loves. Copyright 2024 Library Journal.
Moonlight Healers by Elizabeth Becker. Becker debuts with a work of historical fiction and magical realism. The Winston women have long been able to bring people back to life. This is news to Louise Winston, who accidentally brings back her best friend when he dies in an accident. Desperate to know what happened, she turns to her grandmother and, through a tattered family diary, learns her family's history and begins to navigate her own legacy. Copyright 2024 Library Journal.
Loca by Alejandro Heredia. Heredia's debut novel looks into the lives of two friends, Sal and Charo, who are from the Dominican Republic but find themselves in New York in the late 1990s. Strong narratives present readers with a taste of what life was like for these friends growing up under challenging conditions in which one had to be tough and have street smarts to survive; life in New York is not any easier for either of them. Charo is a 25-year-old mother who works in a supermarket and is in a controlling relationship. Sal teaches science to kids and is in a relationship with his boyfriend, Vance. . . VERDICT With themes of relationships, love, and family, this tale will resonate with readers who have faced hardships and who have had to search for and embrace their identity. A welcome addition to collections.—Shirley Quan. Copyright 2025 Library Journal.
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