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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