List

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Audience

Big Rig Rescue! (Big Rescue)

Chris Gall

Chris Gall gives truck books a fresh set of wheels in a bright story of wreckers, tools, towing, and teamwork.

When a semi-truck crashes in the snow, Big Orange is ready. With a crane, chains, a webbing strap, outriggers, and a winch, Orange will get the semi back on its wheels—and when the job is too tough to tackle alone, Big Blue is there to help. Together they get the semi free and upright. Now, Orange is ready to tow the semi back to the shop, but a storm is coming.?.?.?.?Good thing Blue is around to help when Orange hits ice!

With lively storytelling and engaging artwork, acclaimed author-illustrator Chris Gall motors through a brave and stormy tale of big-rig gadgets and collaboration.

 

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Doggo and Pupper

Katherine Applegate

An old dog has to welcome a new puppy to the household, in this chapter book by #1 New York Times bestselling author Katherine Applegate.

Doggo is used to things being a certain way in his family. He likes routine. Cat says he’s become boring. That is, until Pupper shows up!

Pupper is playful and messy, and turns the house upside down. Soon, the humans realize that Pupper needs some training, and off he goes to puppy school.

When Pupper comes back, he’s well-behaved. He’s not playful. He’s not messy. But Doggo soon realizes that Pupper also isn’t happy. So Doggo steps in to help, and rediscovers what it means to have fun.

Doggo and Pupper launches a delightful new series by beloved author Katherine Applegate, featuring illustrations by Charlie Alder.

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Pinkalicious: Happy Birthday!

Victoria Kann

Pinkalicious goes on a birthday adventure in this new Pinkalicious Level One I Can Read story, brought to you by #1 New York Times bestselling author Victoria Kann.

Pinkalicious wants the most pinkatastic birthday party ever, and all she needs is some extra pink pizzazz. When she ties more and more balloons to her chair, she accidentally goes on a pinkamazing birthday adventure!

Pinkalicious: Happy Birthday! is a Level One I Can Read, which means it’s perfect for children learning to sound out words and sentences. Whether shared at home or in a classroom, the short sentences, familiar words, and simple concepts of Level One books support success for children eager to start reading on their own.

Readers can watch Pinkalicious and Peter on the funtastic PBS Kids TV series Pinkalicious & Peterrific!

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Yes & No

Elisha Cooper

From Caldecott Honor author/illustrator Elisha Cooper comes Yes & No, a timeless tale of friendship, adjusting your perspective, and the joys (and trials) of siblinghood.

Good morning, good morning. It's time to wake up!

Join a cat and puppy pair through their day—the ups of being fed and romping through grass, and the downs of days that are too short and things that don't go as planned—as they realize that sometimes the very best thing that can happen is just being together.

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Bedtime for Bad Kitty

Nick Bruel

This new picture book in Nick Bruel's Bad Kitty bestselling series is sure to be a bedtime favorite, complete with a paper doll activity kit!

It's bedtime in the Bad Kitty household but Kitty does not want to go to bed.

She doesn't want to brush her teeth.
She doesn't want to put on her bunny pajamas.
She doesn't want to use the potty.

What she wants to do is:
SING SING SING SING SING
PLAY PLAY PLAY PLAY PLAY
RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN

Finally, when she runs out of ideas (and energy) and is promised a perfect bedtime story, Kitty gives in...but can she stay awake for the ending?

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Peppa Loves Yoga

Lauren Holowaty

It is a busy day at Peppa and George's playgroup, but they have a very special visitor coming in the afternoon. Miss Rabbit is going to teach the children how to calm down and relax with yoga.

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Boo! Baa, La La La!

Sandra Boynton

BOO! BAA, LA LA LA!

From the beloved and bestselling Sandra Boynton comes a terrific new Halloween board book. A long-lost cousin of her classic Moo, Baa, La La La!, this delightful little story begins:

On Halloween, the cow says BOO.
She likes that word. It’s something new.


The littlest book-lovers and their families will enjoy following the gentle cow as she ventures out into the moonlit night, trying to discover who it was that replied to her “BOO” with a “BAA.” The surprise ending is certain to delight everyone—young or old, feathered or furry. Told and illustrated with Sandra Boynton’s celebrated charm and pizzazz, Boo! Baa, La La La! is a wonderful, not-scary treat, with all the markings of a Halloween classic. BOO!

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Our Skin: a First Conversation about Race

Megan Madison

Based on the research that race, gender, consent, and body positivity should be discussed with toddlers on up, this read-aloud board book series offers adults the opportunity to begin important conversations with young children in an informed, safe, and supported way.

Developed by experts in the fields of early childhood and activism against injustice, this topic-driven board book offers clear, concrete language and beautiful imagery that young children can grasp and adults can leverage for further discussion.

While young children are avid observers and questioners of their world, adults often shut down or postpone conversations on complicated topics because it's hard to know where to begin. Research shows that talking about issues like race and gender from the age of two not only helps children understand what they see, but also increases self-awareness, self-esteem, and allows them to recognize and confront things that are unfair, like discrimination and prejudice.

This first book in the series begins the conversation on race, with a supportive approach that considers both the child and the adult. Stunning art accompanies the simple and interactive text, and the backmatter offers additional resources and ideas for extending this discussion.

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Blankie (a Narwhal and Jelly Board Book)

Ben Clanton

An original board book featuring the bestselling Narwhal and Jelly! Everyone's favorite underwater duo think of all the amazing things they can do with Narwhal's beloved blankie in this silly story perfect for the youngest readers and fans.

"Hilarious and charming. The most lovable duo since Frog and Toad." --NYT-bestselling creator of the Dog Man and Captain Underpants series, Dav Pilkey

Dive into a brand new Narwhal and Jelly story for the youngest readers! A big, yellow blankie is one of Narwhal's favorite things; not only because it keeps Narwhal warm and cozy, but also because it's not just a blankie. Narwhal can fold it into a hat, wear it as a cape (or a dress!) and even use it for a picnic with a best bud, like Jelly! This charming board book celebrates the power of imagination and reusability, and is perfect for both fans of the Narwhal and Jelly graphic novel series and readers new to the world wide waters.

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Open If You Dare

Dana Middleton

Like Birdie Adams didn’t have enough problems this summer. But Birdie’s Birdie. And if a long-buried box has "Open if you dare" written on its lid, then Birdie and her best friends, Ally and Rose, are going to open it.

And now, along with everything else that’s going on—Ally’s pitching slump, Rose’s banishment to Britain, and Birdie’s annoying younger sister being, you know, annoying—the best friends are caught up in solving a mystery planted by a dead girl forty years ago.

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Strike Zone

Mike Lupica

A timely and heartfelt follow-up to #1 New York Times bestseller Heat, about a young baseball prodigy and his immigrant family living in today's America.

Twelve-year-old star Little League pitcher Nick Garcia has a dream. Several in fact. He dreams he'll win this season's MVP and the chance to throw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium. He dreams he'll meet his hero, Yankee's pitcher Michael Arroyo. He dreams they'll find a cure for Lupus so he sister won't have to suffer. But mostly, he dreams one day his family can stop living in fear of the government. For one kid, it's almost too much to bear. Luckily, Nick has his two best friends Ben and Diego to keep him balanced. But when Nick notices a mysterious man lurking on his street corner, he senses a threat. Suddenly, his worst fears are realized, and just when it seems there's no one they can trust, an unexpected hero emerges and changes everything.

Praise for Strike Zone

*"Lupica skillfully addresses the timely and complicated topic of living as the child of undocumented immigrants and the uncertainty facing many American families....This exceptional baseball novel delivers both lively sports action and critical subject matter." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

--"Lupica's action sequences are thrilling and fast-paced....[a] solid purchase where Mike Lupica and the Yankees are popular." --School Library Journal

--"As he did in Heat, Lupica skillfully juggles the baseball drama with the larger social issues that swirl around it, vividly putting a human face on the immigration crisis." --Booklist

--"Strike Zone brings the game of baseball to life, but moreover, it addresses immigration, a current issue in U.S. culture and politics. Teens will choose to read Strike Zone as a "sports book" but will root for Nick both on and off the field. The Garcia family's desire to become legal U.S. citizens is well woven into this fast-paced story." --VOYA

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How to Find What You're Not Looking For

Veera Hiranandani

New historical fiction from a Newbery Honor-winning author about how middle schooler Ariel Goldberg's life changes when her big sister elopes following the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision, and she's forced to grapple with both her family's prejudice and the antisemitism she experiences, as she defines her own beliefs.

Twelve-year-old Ariel Goldberg's life feels like the moment after the final guest leaves the party. Her family's Jewish bakery runs into financial trouble, and her older sister has eloped with a young man from India following the Supreme Court decision that strikes down laws banning interracial marriage. As change becomes Ariel's only constant, she's left to hone something that will be with her always--her own voice.

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All Different Now

Angela Johnson

Experience the joy of Juneteenth in this celebration of freedom from the award-winning team of Angela Johnson and E.B. Lewis.

Through the eyes of one little girl, All Different Now tells the story of the first Juneteenth, the day freedom finally came to the last of the slaves in the South. Since then, the observance of June 19 as African American Emancipation Day has spread across the United States and beyond. This stunning picture book includes notes from the author and illustrator, a timeline of important dates, and a glossary of relevant terms.

Told in Angela Johnson’s signature melodic style and brought to life by E.B. Lewis’s striking paintings, All Different Now is a joyous portrait of the dawn breaking on the darkest time in our nation’s history.

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Kaleidoscope

Brian Selznick

An astounding new feat of storytelling from Brian Selznick, the award-winning creator of The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck.

 

A ship. A garden. A library. A key. In Kaleidoscope, the incomparable Brian Selznick presents the story of two people bound to each other through time and space, memory and dreams. At the center of their relationship is a mystery about the nature of grief and love which will look different to each reader. Kaleidoscope is a feat of storytelling that illuminates how even the wildest tales can help us in the hardest times.

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Why Longfellow Lied

Jeff Lantos

Paul Revere's daring midnight ride made him an instant celebrity, right? Wrong! At first, no one in Boston even wanted to mention it. Jeff Lantos pulls apart Longfellow's famous poem "Paul Revere's Ride" to unravel how and why he twisted historical facts.

Do you know how historically inaccurate "Paul Revere's Ride" is? And do you know why? Author Jeff Lantos pulls apart Longfellow's poem, tells the real story about Paul Revere's historic ride, and sets the record right. Not only that, he lays out when and why Longfellow wrote his poem and explains how without it, many of us wouldn't know much about Revere at all. This is Steve Sheinkin for the younger set, complete with an American mystery and a look at two important moments in the history of our country.

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Our Planet

Camilla de la Bedoyere

Earth is full of countless wonders. This high-interest volume takes a fun approach to answering some of the many questions that young creative thinkers have about our planet. Thought-provoking questions are paired with engaging answers that help to reinforce key concepts of elementary science curricula. Manageable sections of text correlate closely with delightful illustrations, helping readers of many ages and levels develop a deeper understanding of Earth. Inquisitive questions include "Why is the sea salty?" and "Why is snow white?"

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The Cat Encyclopedia for Kids

Merriam Garcia

This encyclopedia highlights more than 50 different cats. Alongside colorful photographs of both adult cats and kittens, readers learn about the history, appearance, and behavior of various breeds. Features include information about cat care, a glossary, additional resources, and an index. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Abdo Reference is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.

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How to Be an Art Rebel

Ben Street

Under the playful guidance of Leo, an art rebel cat with a cause, this book takes young readers on an alternative tour of an art museum to discover eight different types of art: portraits, surrealism, ancient sculpture, abstract art, naked people in art, still-life paintings, and contemporary art.

Instead of telling children what they ought to know, Leo equips his readers with enough knowledge to respond to art on their own terms. Knowing how symbols work, they'll decipher clues in Frida Kahlo's self-portrait. Understanding surrealism, they'll decide for themselves what Joan Miró's doodles are all about. And with some insight into the stories behind classical sculptures, they'll discover that antiquity wasn't as gray and boring as it might seem. Along the way, they'll learn about a diverse range of artists from around the world and art movements throughout history.

With its bold and irreverent approach, How to Be an Art Rebel is the perfect demonstration that art is way more fun than adults make it sound.

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French Exit

A wealthy New York City socialite is living a posh lifestyle using the inheritance from her deceased husband, but her money is about to run out. She decides to sell everything and raises enough cash to move to Paris with her son. There she takes up where she left off, foolishly living a lavish lifestyle she cannot afford for long. The woman and her son meet eccentric characters as they attempt to navigate a new life of scarce money. Servants who once took care of their every need are gone. Their welcome among the wealthy elite is about the explode.

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The Courier

The United States sits on a terrifying precipice, and one unlikely British man is charged with the task of pulling it back from the brink of destruction. Of course, nothing about this mission is easy. Along the way, he'll have to liaison with potentially dangerous Russian contacts with names like Ironbark. As the world stares down the barrel of what will eventually become the Cuban Missile Crisis, there has never been a better time to step up to the plate.

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Lady of the Manor

Lady of the Manor is an American comedy centering on Hannah, someone who doesn't have their life completely together. Considering herself a slacker by trade and spending her free time being stoned, Hannah is hired by the Wadsworth Estate as an actress portraying Lady Wadsworth, a Southern lady who lost her life in 1875. Hannah knows nothing about the woman she's portraying, improvising her performances until the ghost of the woman herself shows up. Lady Wadsworth demands that Hannah do better for herself, or else she will continue to haunt the girl until a positive change happens.

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The House of Fragile Things

James McAuley

A powerful history of Jewish art collectors in France, and how an embrace of art and beauty was met with hatred and destruction

In the dramatic years between 1870 and the end of World War II, a number of prominent French Jews—pillars of an embattled community—invested their fortunes in France’s cultural artifacts, sacrificed their sons to the country’s army, and were ultimately rewarded by seeing their collections plundered and their families deported to Nazi concentration camps.

In this rich, evocative account, James McAuley explores the central role that art and material culture played in the assimilation and identity of French Jews in the fin-de-siècle. Weaving together narratives of various figures, some familiar from the works of Marcel Proust and the diaries of Jules and Edmond Goncourt—the Camondos, the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis, the Cahens d'Anvers—McAuley shows how Jewish art collectors contended with a powerful strain of anti-Semitism: they were often accused of “invading” France’s cultural patrimony. The collections these families left behind—many ultimately donated to the French state—were their response, tragic attempts to celebrate a nation that later betrayed them.

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A Land As God Made It

James Horn

The definitive history of the Jamestown colony, the crucible of American history

Although it was the first permanent English settlement in North America, Jamestown is too often overlooked in the writing of American history. Founded thirteen years before the Mayflower sailed, Jamestown's courageous settlers have been overshadowed ever since by the pilgrims of Plymouth. But as historian James Horn demonstrates in this vivid and meticulously researched account, Jamestown-not Plymouth-was the true crucible of American history. Jamestown introduced slavery into English-speaking North America; it became the first of England's colonies to adopt a representative government; and it was the site of the first white-Indian clashes over territorial expansion. A Land As God Made It offers the definitive account of the colony that give rise to America.

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The American Story

David M. Rubenstein

Co-founder of The Carlyle Group and patriotic philanthropist David M. Rubenstein takes readers on a sweeping journey across the grand arc of the American story through revealing conversations with our greatest historians.

In these lively dialogues, the biggest names in American history explore the subjects they’ve come to so intimately know and understand.

David McCullough on John Adams
Jon Meacham on Thomas Jefferson
Ron Chernow on Alexander Hamilton
Walter Isaacson on Benjamin Franklin
Doris Kearns Goodwin on Abraham Lincoln
A. Scott Berg on Charles Lindbergh
Taylor Branch on Martin Luther King
Robert Caro on Lyndon B. Johnson
Bob Woodward on Richard Nixon
And many others, including a special conversation with Chief Justice John Roberts

Through his popular program The David Rubenstein Show, David Rubenstein has established himself as one of our most thoughtful interviewers. Now, in The American Story, David captures the brilliance of our most esteemed historians, as well as the souls of their subjects. The book features introductions by Rubenstein as well a foreword by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, the first woman and the first African American to lead our national library. Richly illustrated with archival images from the Library of Congress, the book is destined to become a classic for serious readers of American history.

Through these captivating exchanges, these bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning authors offer fresh insight on pivotal moments from the Founding Era to the late 20th century.

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Shadow Life

Hiromi Goto

Poet and novelist Hiromi Goto effortlessly blends wry, observational slice-of-life literary fiction with poetic magical realism in the tender and surprising graphic novel Shadow Life, with haunting art from debut artist Ann Xu.

When Kumiko’s well-meaning adult daughters place her in an assisted living home, the seventy-six-year-old widow gives it a try, but it’s not where she wants to be. She goes on the lam and finds a cozy bachelor apartment, keeping the location secret even while communicating online with her eldest daughter. Kumiko revels in the small, daily pleasures: decorating as she pleases, eating what she wants, and swimming in the community pool. But something has followed her from her former residence—Death’s shadow.

Kumiko’s sweet life is shattered when Death’s shadow swoops in to collect her. With her quick mind and sense of humor, Kumiko, with the help of friends new and old, is prepared for the fight of her life. But how long can an old woman thwart fate?

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The Way She Feels: My Life on the Borderline in Pictures and Pieces

Courtney Cook

Named a Debut Book to Look Forward to This Summer by Bustle

“Audaciously human and raw. The Way She Feels is a rainbow during the rain.” —Mara Altman

A witty and one-of-a-kind debut graphic memoir detailing and drawing the life of a girl with borderline personality disorder finding her way—and herself—one day at a time.

What does it feel like to fall in love too hard and too fast, to hate yourself in equal and opposite measure? To live in such fear of rejection that you drive friends and lovers away? Welcome to my world. I’m Courtney, and I have borderline personality disorder (BPD), along with over four million other people in the United States. Though I’ve shown every classic symptom of the disorder since childhood, I wasn’t properly diagnosed until nearly a decade later, because the prevailing theory is that most people simply “grow out of it.” Not me.

In my illustrated memoir, The Way She Feels: My Life on the Borderline in Pictures and Pieces, I share what it’s been like to live and love with this disorder. Not just the hospitalizations, treatments, and residential therapy, but the moments I found comfort in cereal, the color pink, or mini corndogs; the days I couldn’t style my hair because I thought the blow-dryer was going to hurt me; the peace I found when someone I love held me. This is a book about vulnerability, honesty, acceptance, and how to speak openly—not only with doctors, co-patients, friends, family, or partners, but also with ourselves.

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Menopause

M. K. Czerwiec

Like so many other issues surrounding women's reproductive health, menopause has often been treated as a cultural taboo. On the rare occasions that menopausal and perimenopausal women are depicted in popular culture, they are stereotypically cast as the butt of demeaning jokes that encourage us to laugh at their deteriorating bodies and emotional volatility. The result is that women facing menopause often feel isolated and ashamed. In a spirit of community and support, this collection of comics presents a different view of menopause that enables those experiencing it to be seen and to feel empowered.

 

Balancing levity with sincerity, these comics unapologetically depict menopause and all its attendant symptoms, from hot flashes and vaginal dryness to forgetfulness, social stigma, anxiety, and shame. Created from a variety of perspectives, they represent a range of life experiences, ages, gender identities, ethnicities, and health conditions. The common thread uniting these stories is the affirmation that, while we can and should laugh at ourselves, no one should be ashamed of menopause. The comics in this book encourage us to share our experiences and to support one another, and ourselves, through self-care and community.

 

Featuring works by a host of pioneering and up-and-coming comics artists, Menopause is a perfect foil to the simplistic, cheap-joke approach society at large has taken to this much-derided women's health issue. Readers will revel in the sly humor and universal truths found here.

 

The contributors include Lynda Barry, Maureen Burdock, Jennifer Camper, KC Councillor, MK Czerwiec, Leslie Ewing, Joyce Farmer, Ellen Forney, Ann M. Fox, Keet Geniza, Roberta Gregory, Teva Harrison, Rachael House, Leah Jones, Monica Lalanda, Cathy Leamy, Ajuan Mance, Jessica Moran, Mimi Pond, Sharon Rosenzweig, Joyce Schachter, Susan M. Squier, Emily Steinberg, Nicola Streeten, A.K. Summers, Kimiko Tobimatsu, Carol Tyler, Shelley Wall, and Dana Walrath.

 

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The End of Bias: A Beginning

Jessica Nordell

The End of Bias is a transformative, groundbreaking exploration into how we can eradicate unintentional bias and discrimination, the great challenge of our age.

Unconscious bias: persistent, unintentional prejudiced behavior that clashes with our consciously held beliefs. We know that it exists, to corrosive and even lethal effect. We see it in medicine, the workplace, education, policing, and beyond. But when it comes to uprooting our prejudices, we still have far to go.

With nuance, compassion, and ten years' immersion in the topic, Jessica Nordell weaves gripping stories with scientific research to reveal how minds, hearts, and behaviors change. She scrutinizes diversity training, deployed across the land as a corrective but with inconsistent results. She explores what works and why: the diagnostic checklist used by doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital that eliminated disparate treatment of men and women; the preschool in Sweden where teachers found ingenious ways to uproot gender stereotyping; the police unit in Oregon where the practice of mindfulness and specialized training has coincided with a startling drop in the use of force.

Captivating, direct, and transformative, The End of Bias: A Beginning brings good news. Biased behavior can change; the approaches outlined here show how we can begin to remake ourselves and our world.

Includes illustrated charts

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The Genome Defense

Jorge L. Contreras

In this riveting, behind-the-scenes courtroom drama, a brilliant legal team battles corporate greed and government overreach for our fundamental right to control our genes.

When attorney Chris Hansen learned that the U.S. government was issuing patents for human genes to biotech companies, his first thought was, How can a corporation own what makes us who we are? Then he discovered that women were being charged exorbitant fees to test for hereditary breast and ovarian cancers, tests they desperately needed—all because Myriad Genetics had patented the famous BRCA genes. So he sued them.

Jorge L. Contreras, one of the nation’s foremost authorities on human genetics law, has devoted years to investigating the groundbreaking civil rights case known as AMP v. Myriad. In The Genome Defense Contreras gives us the view from inside as Hansen and his team of ACLU lawyers, along with a committed group of activists, scientists, and physicians, take their one-in-a-million case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Contreras interviewed more than a hundred key players involved in all aspects of the case—from judges and policy makers to ethicists and genetic counselors, as well as cancer survivors and those whose lives would be impacted by the decision—expertly weaving together their stories into a fascinating narrative of this pivotal moment in history.
 
The Genome Defense
is a powerful and compelling story about how society must balance scientific discovery with corporate profits and the rights of all people.
 

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Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court

Linda Greenhouse

“This landmark new book gives us an invaluable perspective on the Supreme Court in democracy’s hour of maximum danger.”—Jon Meacham

The gripping story of the year that transformed the Supreme Court into the court of Donald Trump and Amy Coney Barrett, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning law columnist for The New York Times

At the end of the Supreme Court’s 2019–20 term, the center was holding. The predictions that the court would move irrevocably to the far right hadn’t come to pass, as the justices released surprisingly moderate opinions in cases involving abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, and how local governments could respond to the pandemic, all shepherded by Chief Justice John Roberts. By the end of the 2020–21 term, much about the nation’s highest court has changed. The right-wing supermajority had completed its first term on the bench, cementing Donald Trump’s legacy on American jurisprudence.

This is the story of that term. From the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the rise of Amy Coney Barrett, from the pandemic to the election, from the Trump campaign’s legal challenges to the ongoing debate about the role of religion in American life, the Supreme Court has been at the center of many of the biggest events of the year. Throughout Justice on the Brink, legendary journalist Linda Greenhouse, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her Supreme Court coverage, gives us unique insight into a court under stress, providing the context and brilliant analysis readers of her work in The New York Times have come to expect.

Ultimately, Greenhouse asks a fundamental question relevant to all Americans: Is this still John Roberts’s Supreme Court, or does it now belong to Donald Trump?

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How the Other Half Eats

Priya Fielding-Singh

A “deeply empathetic” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) and “eye-opening” (Kirkus Review ) look at dietary differences along class lines, revealing that lack of access to healthy food is far from the primary driver of nutritional inequality in America. 


Inequality in America manifests in many ways, but perhaps nowhere more than in how we eat. From her years of field research, sociologist and ethnographer Priya Fielding-Singh brings us into the kitchens of dozens of families from varied educational, economic, and ethnoracial backgrounds to explore how—and why—we eat the way we do. We get to know four families intimately: the Bakers, a Black family living below the federal poverty line; the Williamses, a working-class white family just above it; the Ortegas, a middle-class Latinx family; and the Cains, an affluent white family.


Whether it's worrying about how far pantry provisions can stretch or whether there's enough time to get dinner on the table before soccer practice, all families have unique experiences that reveal their particular dietary constraints and challenges. By diving into the nuances of these families’ lives, Fielding-Singh lays bare the limits of efforts narrowly focused on improving families’ food access. Instead, she reveals how being rich or poor in America impacts something even more fundamental than the food families can afford: these experiences impact the very meaning of food itself.

Packed with lyrical storytelling and groundbreaking research, as well as Fielding-Singh’s personal experiences with food as a biracial, South Asian American woman, How the Other Half Eats illuminates exactly how inequality starts on the dinner plate. Once you’ve taken a seat at tables across America, you’ll never think about class, food, and public health the same way again.

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Notes from the Burning Age

Claire North

"ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS I'VE READ IN RECENT YEARS. THOUGHT PROVOKING, IMAGINATIVE AND PACKS A HELL OF AN EMOTIONAL PUNCH." --Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of Children of Time



From one of the most imaginative writers of her generation comes an extraordinary vision of the future...



Ven was once a holy man, a keeper of ancient archives. It was his duty to interpret archaic texts, sorting useful knowledge from the heretical ideas of the Burning Age--a time of excess and climate disaster. For in Ven's world, such material must be closely guarded so that the ills that led to that cataclysmic era can never be repeated.



But when the revolutionary Brotherhood approaches Ven, pressuring him to translate stolen writings that threaten everything he once held dear, his life will be turned upside down. Torn between friendship and faith, Ven must decide how far he's willing to go to save this new world--and how much he is willing to lose.



"A riveting tale of subterfuge and deadly self-indulgence" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) from award-winning author Claire North, Notes from the Burning Age puts dystopian fiction in a whole new light.
 

Also by Claire North: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August Touch The Sudden Appearance of Hope The End of the Day 84K The Gameshouse The Pursuit of William Abbey

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The Ninth Metal

Benjamin Percy

"Take one part dystopia, one part sci-fi, two parts apocalypse, then ride them roughshod through a bleak and bloody western, and it still wouldn't get close to what Ben Percy does here, which is blow open the core of humanity's dark heart."
--Marlon James, Booker Prize award-winning author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf

"Whether you choose to think of him as the Elmore Leonard of rural Minnesota or the Stephen King of Science Fiction, Ben Percy--with his extraordinary and unrelenting eye--dishes up humanity like some kind of otherworldly blue plate special, at once deeply familiar and wildly new."
--Margaret Stohl, #1 New York Times best-selling author of the Caster Chronicles

"When Benjamin Percy publishes a novel, I have got to read that novel. The Ninth Metal continues his streak of thrilling, incisive genre bending goodness. It's a sci-fi novel, a crime novel and a super-hero novel, too. Audacious and intelligent and exactly what I was dying to read."
--Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling

IT BEGAN WITH A COMET...

At first, people gazed in wonder at the radiant tear in the sky. A year later, the celestial marvel became a planetary crisis when Earth spun through the comet's debris field and the sky rained fire.

The town of Northfall, Minnesota will never be the same. Meteors cratered hardwood forests and annihilated homes, and among the wreckage a new metal was discovered. This "omnimetal" has properties that make it world-changing as an energy source...and a weapon.

John Frontier--the troubled scion of an iron-ore dynasty in Northfall--returns for his sister's wedding to find his family embroiled in a cutthroat war to control mineral rights and mining operations. His father rightly suspects foreign leaders and competing corporations of sabotage, but the greatest threat to his legacy might be the US government. Physicist Victoria Lennon was recruited by the Department of Defense to research omnimetal, but she finds herself trapped in a laboratory of nightmares. And across town, a rookie cop is investigating a murder that puts her own life in the crosshairs. She will have to compromise her moral code to bring justice to this now lawless community.

In this gut-punch of a novel, the first in his Comet Cycle, Ben Percy lays bare how a modern-day goldrush has turned the middle of nowhere into the center of everything, and how one family--the Frontiers--hopes to control it all.

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Legacy of Light

Matthew Ward

Legacy of Light is the spectacular conclusion to Matthew Ward's acclaimed Legacy trilogy--an unmissable epic fantasy series of war and intrigue perfect for fans of George R. R. Martin, Brent Weeks, and Brandon Sanderson.



For the first time in many years, the Tressian Republic and the Hadari Empire are at peace. But darkness never sleeps.



In Tregard, Empress Melanna Saranal struggles to protect a throne won at great cost.



In Tressia, Lord Protector Viktor Droshna seeks to restore all he's lost through forbidden means.



And as the sins of the past are once more laid bare, every road will lead to war. The Legacy Trilogy Legacy of Ash Legacy of Steel Legacy of Light

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We're Going to Need More Wine

Gabrielle Union

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Root

Chosen by Emma Straub as a Best New Celebrity Memoir

“A book of essays as raw and honest as anyone has ever produced.” — Lena Dunham, Lenny Letter

In the spirit of Amy Poehler’s Yes Please, Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl, and Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist, a powerful collection of essays about gender, sexuality, race, beauty, Hollywood, and what it means to be a modern woman.

One month before the release of the highly anticipated film The Birth of a Nation, actress Gabrielle Union shook the world with a vulnerable and impassioned editorial in which she urged our society to have compassion for victims of sexual violence. In the wake of rape allegations made against director and actor Nate Parker, Union—a forty-four-year-old actress who launched her career with roles in iconic ’90s movies—instantly became the insightful, outspoken actress that Hollywood has been desperately awaiting. With honesty and heartbreaking wisdom, she revealed her own trauma as a victim of sexual assault: "It is for you that I am speaking. This is real. We are real."

In this moving collection of thought provoking essays infused with her unique wisdom and deep humor, Union uses that same fearlessness to tell astonishingly personal and true stories about power, color, gender, feminism, and fame. Union tackles a range of experiences, including bullying, beauty standards, and competition between women in Hollywood, growing up in white California suburbia and then spending summers with her black relatives in Nebraska, coping with crushes, puberty, and the divorce of her parents. Genuine and perceptive, Union bravely lays herself bare, uncovering a complex and courageous life of self-doubt and self-discovery with incredible poise and brutal honesty. Throughout, she compels us to be ethical and empathetic, and reminds us of the importance of confidence, self-awareness, and the power of sharing truth, laughter, and support.

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The Cost of Living

Deborah Levy

The bestselling exploration of the dimensions of love, marriage, mourning, and kinship from two-time Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy.

A New York Times Notable Book
A New York Public Library Best Nonfiction Book of 2018

What does it cost a woman to unsettle old boundaries and collapse the social hierarchies that make her a minor character in a world not arranged to her advantage?

This vibrant memoir, a portrait of contemporary womanhood in flux, is an urgent quest to find an unwritten major female character who can exist more easily in the world. Levy considers what it means to live with meaning, value, and pleasure, to seize the ultimate freedom of writing our own lives, and reflects on the work of such artists and thinkers as Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Elena Ferrante, Marguerite Duras, David Lynch, and Emily Dickinson.

The Cost of Living, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal in Nonfiction, is crucial testimony, as distinctive, witty, complex, and original as Levy's acclaimed novels.

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The Two Kinds of Decay

Sarah Manguso

A Spare and Unsparing Look at Affliction and Recovery that Heralds a Stunning New Voice

The events that began in 1995 might keep happening to me as long as things can happen to me. Think of deep space, through which heavenly bodies fly forever. They fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names.

There are names for things in spacetime that are nothing, for things that are less than nothing. White dwarfs, red giants, black holes, singularities.

But even then, in their less-than-nothing state, they keep happening.

At twenty-one, just starting to comprehend the puzzles of adulthood, Sarah Manguso was faced with another: a wildly unpredictable disease that appeared suddenly and tore through her twenties, vanishing and then returning, paralyzing her for weeks at a time, programming her first to expect nothing from life and then, furiously, to expect everything. In this captivating story, Manguso recalls her nine-year struggle: arduous blood cleansings, collapsed veins, multiple chest catheters, the deaths of friends and strangers, addiction, depression, and, worst of all for a writer, the trite metaphors that accompany prolonged illness.

A book of tremendous grace and self-awareness, The Two Kinds of Decay transcends the very notion of what an illness story can and should be.

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The Next Everest

Jim Davidson

A dramatic account of the deadly avalanche on Everest—and a return to reach the summit.

On April 25, 2015, Jim Davidson was climbing Mount Everest when a 7.8-magnitude earthquake released avalanches all around him and his team, destroying their only escape route and trapping them at nearly 20,000 feet. It was the largest earthquake in Nepal in eighty-one years and killed nearly 8,900 people. That day also became the deadliest in the history of Everest, with eighteen people losing their lives on the mountain.

After spending two unsettling days stranded on Everest, Davidson's team was rescued by helicopter. The experience left him shaken, and despite his thirty-three years of climbing and serving as an expedition leader, he wasn’t sure that he would ever go back. But in the face of risk and uncertainty, he returned in 2017 and finally achieved his dream of reaching the summit.

Suspenseful and engrossing, The Next Everest portrays the experience of living through the biggest disaster to ever hit the mountain. Davidson's background in geology and environmental science makes him uniquely qualified to explain why the seismic threats lurking beneath Nepal are even greater today. But this story is not about “conquering” the world’s highest peak. Instead, it reveals how embracing change, challenge, and uncertainty prepares anyone to face their next “Everest” in life.

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A Spectator Is an Artist Too

Johan Idema

Is there anything more entertaining, inspiring and instructive than observing art? Yes, it is watching the people interacting with this art. This book may forever change your approach to art as it urges you to always consider both the work and the response. Because ultimately artists create, but we - the audience - complete the picture.

A Spectator is an Artist Too is a visual essay about human behavior around art: what happens when we are confronted with something immensely beautiful, challenging, or puzzling? Art historians only study objects, but how these objects are received is also worthy of our attention.

The book also captures how art museums are changing, as they draw increasingly diverse audiences. The way the museum visitors responds to art is becoming more casual and creative - but also more swift or even banal. This shift is increased by a whole new breed of Instagram-friendly "museums" worldwide, attracting experience-hungry visitors with immersive exhibitions defined by their Instagrammability.

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Glory Days

L. Jon Wertheim

A rollicking guided tour of one extraordinary summer, when some of the most pivotal and freakishly coincidental stories all collided and changed the way we think about modern sports

The summer of 1984 was a watershed moment in the birth of modern sports when the nation watched Michael Jordan grow from college basketball player to professional athlete and star. That summer also saw ESPN's rise to media dominance as the country's premier sports network and the first modern, commercialized, profitable Olympics. Magic Johnson and Larry Bird's rivalry raged, Martina Navratilova and John McEnroe reigned in tennis, and Hulk Hogan and Vince McMahon made pro wrestling a business, while Donald Trump pierced the national consciousness as a pro football team owner. It was an awakening in the sports world, a moment when sports began to morph into the market-savvy, sensationalized, moneyed, controversial, and wildly popular arena we know today.

In the tradition of Bill Bryson's One Summer: America, 1927, L. Jon Wertheim captures these 90 seminal days against the backdrop of the nostalgia-soaked 1980s, to show that this was the year we collectively traded in our ratty Converses for a pair of sleek, heavily branded, ingeniously marketed Nikes. This was the year that sports went big-time.

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Flamin' Hot

Richard Montanez

"The unforgettable true story of how a janitor struggling to put food on the table invented Flamin' Hot Cheetos in a secret test kitchen, breaking barriers and becoming the first Latino executive at Frito-Lay. Richard Montañez wasn't supposed to have big dreams. Born to migrant farm workers and mired in grinding generational poverty, he left school in the sixth grade, eventually taking a job mopping floors at Frito Lay's California factory to support his young wife and family. Everything changed when one night, at 28, Montañez took his future in his hands: he used his wife's recipe for chili sauce to season a bag of plain Cheetos he'd snuck home. After an intense process of experimenting and testing, and an incredibly risky call to the company's CEO, breaking with protocol, Montañez launched Flamin' Hot Cheetos. He never expected the onslaught of discrimination, backstabbing, and attempted sabotage-or the chip's explosive success. Flamin' Hot shares the inside story of the world's hottest snack food. Montañez not only disrupted the food industry with some much-needed spice, but also shook up a corporate culture in which everyone stayed in their lane. When a top food scientist at Frito-Lay sent out a memo telling sales and marketing to kill the new product before it made it to the store shelves-jealous that someone with no formal education beyond the sixth grade could do his job-Montañez was forced to go rogue once again to save his idea. Through creative thinking, community building, and a few powerful mindset shifts, he outsmarted the naysayers who tried to get in his way. This is the inspiring story of a man who made a science out of walking through closed doors. It's also an empowerment manual for anyone stuck in a dead-end job or facing a system stacked against them. Flamin' Hot provides hope that your present circumstances don't have to dictate your future, carving a new path to the American Dream"--

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Let Them Lead

John Bacon

An uplifting leadership book about a coach who helped transform the nation's worst high school hockey team into one of the best. Bacon's strategy is straightforward: set high expectations, make them accountable to each other, and inspire them all to lead their team.

When John U. Bacon played for the Ann Arbor Huron High School River Rats, he never scored a goal. Yet somehow, years later he found himself leading his alma mater's downtrodden program. How bad? The team hadn't won a game in over a year, making them the nation's worst squad--a fact they celebrated. With almost everyone expecting more failure, Bacon made it special to play for Huron by making it hard, which inspired the players to excel. Then he defied conventional wisdom again by putting the players in charge of team discipline, goal-setting, and even decision-making - and it worked. In just three seasons the River Rats bypassed 95-percent of the nation's teams.

A true story filled with unforgettable characters, stories, and lessons that apply to organizations everywhere, Let Them Lead includes the leader's mistakes and the reactions of the players, who have since achieved great success as leaders themselves. Let Them Lead is a fast-paced, feel-good book that leaders of all kinds can embrace to motivate their teams to work harder, work together, and take responsibility for their own success.

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Go Where There Is No Path

Christopher Gray

For all who dare to go off the beaten track, this is the inspirational, power-packed playbook for transforming your life and your world--from a young, Black social entrepreneur whose dorm-room tech startup has helped millions pay for college and access unprecedented opportunity.

Gray, the son of a single working mother who had him at age fourteen, grew up in deep poverty in Birmingham, Alabama. An academic star, he had every qualification for attending a top college--except for the financial means. Desperate, Gray headed off the beaten path, searching online to apply for every scholarship he could find. His hustle resulted in awards of 1.3 million dollars and became his call to action to help other students win their own "schollys." It inspired him to start up Scholly, an app that matches college applicants with millions of dollars in outside scholarships that often go unclaimed.

When he was a senior at Drexel University, he appeared on Shark Tank as CEO of Scholly. In the most heated fight in the show's history, the sharks challenged Gray as to whether his app was a charity or a profitable business. Both, he insisted, proposing a new paradigm for social entrepreneurship and netting deals from Lori Grenier and Daymond John.
 

At the time Scholly's subscriber base was 90,000 users. Today the app has 4 million subscribers who have won scholarships totaling more than $100 million. Meanwhile, Gray--without help from the mostly all-white boy's club of Silicon Valley--has emerged as a tech startup superhero now tackling the crisis of student debt with innovative, unrivaled strategies.

Gray's premise is that when you lead with the good--confronting issues such as poverty and racism--the money will follow. His story is proof that when you develop a mindset for success, you turn disadvantages into gold. And when you create opportunities for others, you enrich the marketplace for yourself too.

Gray shows us, we can carve out new paths to better days and leave trails for others.

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Happy Not Perfect

Poppy Jamie

A clear path to overcoming uncertainty, perfectionism, and fears of rejection so you can finally find peace with the past and create a happier, healthier future

“Poppy’s powerful approach will help you take control of your thoughts so they don’t control you.”—Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone


Even before the pandemic brought on a crushing wave of stress, anxiety, isolation, life change, and financial struggle, there was already a growing mental health crisis. Due to a culture that encourages perfection, hustle, and fictional life/work balance, many are burning out. Behind her Instagram-projected image of “happy wellness founder,” Poppy Jamie was also struggling mightily with perfectionism and life purpose.

She began working with mental health experts and researchers to find practical tools to overcome her inner critic and rewire her mind. She discovered that it is possible to create new neural pathways in your brain to break patterns of avoidance, challenge fears of not being good enough, and turn failure around by stretching the mind with new, healthier thought habits. The old wiring (and habits) that you’ve been stuck with can be written-over. You can actually upgrade your headspace to make curiosity, vulnerability, compassion, and emotional flexibility your default settings.

In the emphatic and trusted voice of Bridget Jones meets neuroscience, Poppy shares her Flexy Thoughts approach for changing how you react to emotional triggers and think of yourself while improving your mental and physical health, relationships, and vision of the future.

Our emotional resilience may continue to be tested, but the new perspectives and strategies in Happy Not Perfect will help us bring confidence, adaptability, and acceptance to whatever comes next.

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The No-Nonsense Meditation Book

Steven Laureys


INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

As featured in New Scientist: 'Meditation could retune our brains and help us cope with the long-term effects of the pandemic'

'Readers in search of an introduction to mindfulness that's free of woo-woo promises should look no further.' Publishers Weekly

'For a boost to your wellbeing don't miss the brilliant The No-Nonsense Meditation Book, which unites brain science with practical tips' – Stylist

Rigorously researched and deeply illuminating, world-leading neurologist Dr Steven Laureys works with celebrated meditators to scientifically prove the positive impact meditation has on our brains.

Dr Steven Laureys has conducted ground-breaking research into human consciousness for more than 20 years.

For this bestselling book, translated into seven languages worldwide, Steven explores the effect of meditation on the brain, using hard science to explain the benefits of a practice that was once thought of as purely spiritual. The result is a highly accessible, scientifically questioning guide to meditation, designed to open the practice to a broader audience.

A mix of fascinating science, inspiring anecdote and practical exercises, this accessible book offers thoroughly researched evidence that meditation can have a positive impact on all our lives.

 

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The Extended Mind

Annie Murphy Paul

A bold new book reveals how we can tap the intelligence that exists beyond our brains--in our bodies, our surroundings, and our relationships

Use your head.

That's what we tell ourselves when facing a tricky problem or a difficult project. But a growing body of research indicates that we've got it exactly backwards. What we need to do, says acclaimed science writer Annie Murphy Paul, is think outside the brain. A host of "extra-neural" resources--the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of those around us-- can help us focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively.

The Extended Mind outlines the research behind this exciting new vision of human ability, exploring the findings of neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, psychologists, and examining the practices of educators, managers, and leaders who are already reaping the benefits of thinking outside the brain. She excavates the untold history of how artists, scientists, and authors--from Jackson Pollock to Jonas Salk to Robert Caro--have used mental extensions to solve problems, make discoveries, and create new works. In the tradition of Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind or Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, The Extended Mind offers a dramatic new view of how our minds work, full of practical advice on how we can all think better.

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Mental Floss: The Curious Reader

Erin McCarthy & the team at Mental Floss

"With sumptuous, visually stimulating spreads, this book delivers on its promise– to unearth strange stories, bizarre facts, or unexpected details about the books on our shelves. Good for curious readers, whether they want to delve into authors and books they love, feel competent faking knowledge about books everyone else seems to have read, or just dip into and out of literary worlds" – Library Journal Readers rejoice! From Mental Floss, an online destination for more than a billion curious minds since its founding in 2001, comes the ultimate book for lovers of literature. From Americanah to War and Peace, from Chinua Achebe and Jane Austen to Jesmyn Ward and George R.R. Martin, learn surprising facts about the world’s most famous novels and novelists. The Curious Reader will delight bookworms everywhere. This literary compendium from Mental Floss reveals fascinating facts about the world’s most famous authors and their literary works. Readers will learn about George Orwell’s near-death experience during the writing of 1984; meet the real man who may have inspired Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy; discover which famous author kept her husband’s heart after he passed away; and learn about the influence of psychedelics on Dune. The Curious Reader also contains the most-loved book-related articles from 20 years of Mental Floss, including “Cat-Loving Writers,” “Famous Authors’ Unfinished Manuscripts,” “Literary Characters Based on Real People,” and “Books You Didn’t Know Were Self-Published.” This literary miscellany is certain to inspire book lovers, aspiring writers, students, and teachers alike to discover a diverse selection of curated literary works—leading to an expansion of their library!

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What Just Happened

Charles Finch

With unwavering humanity and light-footed humor, this intimate account of the interminable year of 2020 offers commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic, protests for racial justice, the U.S. presidential election, and more, all with a miraculous dose of groundedness in head-spinning times. From the award-winning book critic and best-selling author.

This book is so funny and so true. Charles Finch unpacks a year of plague, fear, shameless venality, and dizzying stupidity with an irrepressible wit and surgically precise cultural observations. I didn't know how badly I needed exactly this. Maybe you do too?
--Joe Hill, author of Heart-Shaped Box

 

In March 2020, at the request of the Los Angeles Times, Charles Finch became a reluctant diarist: As California sheltered in place, he began to write daily notes about the odd ambient changes in his own life and in the lives around him. The result is What Just Happened.

In a warm, candid, welcoming voice, and in the tradition of Woolf and Orwell, Finch brings us into his own world: taking long evening walks near his home in L.A., listening to music, and keeping virtual connections with friends across the country as they each experience the crisis. And drawing on his remarkable acuity as a cultural critic, he chronicles one endless year with delightful commentary on current events, and the things that distract him from current events: Murakami's novels, reality television, the Beatles.

What Just Happened is a work of empathy and insight, at once of-the-moment and timeless--a gift from one of our culture's most original thinkers.

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Baggage

Alan Cumming

‘No one ever fully recovers from their past. There is no cure for it. You just learn to manage and prioritise it. I believe the second you feel you have triumphed or overcome something, anything – an abuse, an injury to the body or the mind, an addiction, a character flaw, a habit, a person – you have merely decided to stop being vigilant and embraced denial as your modus operandi. And that is what this book is about, and for: to remind you not to buy in to the Hollywood ending.’ Baggage chronicles the actor’s life in Hollywood and the ways in which work has repeatedly whisked him away from personal calamities to sets and stages around the world. Taking us through the highs and lows of his career, his struggle with mental health, each failed relationship or encounter with a legend (Liza! X-Men! Gore Vidal! Kubrick! Spice Girls!), every bad decision or moment of sensual joy, Cumming shows how every experience – good or bad – has shaped who he is today: a happy, flawed, vulnerable, fearless middle-aged man, with a lot of baggage. Startlingly honest, both poignant and joyous, Baggage shines a light on how to embrace the complicated messiness of life.

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These Precious Days

Ann Patchett

The beloved New York Times bestselling author reflects on home, family, friendships and writing in this deeply personal collection of essays.

 

"Any story that starts will also end." As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart.

 

At the center of These Precious Days is the title essay, a surprising and moving meditation on an unexpected friendship that explores "what it means to be seen, to find someone with whom you can be your best and most complete self." When Patchett chose an early galley of actor and producer Tom Hanks' short story collection to read one night before bed, she had no idea that this single choice would be life changing. It would introduce her to a remarkable woman--Tom's brilliant assistant Sooki--with whom she would form a profound bond that held monumental consequences for them both.

A literary alchemist, Patchett plumbs the depths of her experiences to create gold: engaging and moving pieces that are both self-portrait and landscape, each vibrant with emotion and rich in insight. Turning her writer's eye on her own experiences, she transforms the private into the universal, providing us all a way to look at our own worlds anew, and reminds how fleeting and enigmatic life can be.

From the enchantments of Kate DiCamillo's children's books (author of the upcoming The Beatryce Prophecy) to youthful memories of Paris; the cherished life gifts given by her three fathers to the unexpected influence of Charles Schultz's Snoopy; the expansive vision of Eudora Welty to the importance of knitting, Patchett connects life and art as she illuminates what matters most. Infused with the author's grace, wit, and warmth, the pieces in These Precious Days resonate deep in the soul, leaving an indelible mark--and demonstrate why Ann Patchett is one of the most celebrated writers of our time.

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Orwell's Roses

Rebecca Solnit

"A fresh take on George Orwell as a far more nature-loving figure than is often portrayed, and a dazzlingly rich meditation on roses, gardens, and the value and use of beauty and pleasure in the face of brutality and horror. "In the spring of 1936 a man planted roses." That man was George Orwell, shortly before he went off to fight against fascism in Spain. Today, those rosebushes are still thriving. This is the starting point for Rebecca Solnit's new book, which presents another side of Orwell, a neglected arcadian Orwell who took enormous pleasure in the natural world and found great meaning and value in it. Orwell's planting of the roses is an axle from which Solnit's chapters radiate out like spokes as she brilliantly explores its various contexts, perspectives, and meanings, following the contours of Orwell's life and tracking how deeply enmeshed the love of nature is in all his writing. Journeying to the cottage in Wallingford where Orwell lived in 1936, she examines his desire to be agrarian and settled, how gardening restored him, and how planting something can be an act of fidelity and faith. Probing at the beauty and meaning of roses, she draws in the revolutionary photography and politics of Tina Modotti and makes a clandestine visit to a Columbian rose factory, where 80% of America's roses for sale are grown. She tracks the history of gardening, showing how the desire to garden is culturally determined and often rooted in class, recounts the immense battles over breeding and genetics in Russia during Stalin's time, and probes into the colonialist roots of Orwell's forebears, who worked in opium production in India and profiteered from sugar and slavery in Jamaica. Solnit shows how these points of intersection illuminate Orwell's work, and how that illumination shines forth on larger questions about beauty, pleasure, meaning, relationship, and hope. Her book establishes that "Orwellian" could stand for something more than ominous, corrupt, and sinister"--

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How to Live. What to Do

Josh Cohen

A brilliant psychoanalyst and professor of literature invites us to contemplate profound questions about the human experience by focusing on some of the best-known characters in literature--from how Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway copes with the inexorability of midlife disappointment to Ruth's embodiment of adolescent rebellion in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.

"So beautiful ... a fantastic book." --Zadie Smith, best-selling author of White Teeth

In supple and elegant prose, and with all the expertise and insight of his dual professions, Josh Cohen explores a new way for us to understand ourselves. He helps us see what Lewis Carroll's Alice and Harper Lee's Scout Finch can teach us about childhood. He delineates the mysteries of education as depicted in Jane Eyre and as seen through the eyes of Sandy Stranger in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

He discusses the need for adolescent rebellion as embodied in John Grimes in James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain and in Ruth in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. He makes clear what Goethe's Young Werther and Sally Rooney's Frances have--and don't have--in common as they experience first love; how Middlemarch's Dorothea Brooke deals with the vicissitudes of marriage. Vis-a-vis old age and death, Cohen considers what wisdom we may glean from John Ames in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and from Don Fabrizio in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard.

Featuring:

- Alice--Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking Glass
- Scout Finch--Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
- Jane Eyre--Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
- John Grimes--James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain
- Ruth--Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
- Vladimir Petrovitch--Ivan Turgenev, First Love
- Frances--Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends
- Jay Gatsby--F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
- Esther Greenwood--Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
- Clarissa Dalloway--Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
- And more!

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Marvel Spider-Man: Miles Morales to the Rescue!

David Fentiman

Learn to read with Marvel's Spider-Man!

Miles Morales might seem like just a young kid from Brooklyn, but he has a few secrets. Firstly, he actually came from another Universe. Secondly - he is really Spider-Man!

Exciting images, simple vocabulary, and a fun quiz will engage young fans of Marvel Super Heroes and help them build confidence in reading.

© 2020 MARVEL

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You Can Be a Musician (Barbie)

Random House

Barbie learns all about being a musician in this all-new Step 2 Step into Reading leveled reader!

Barbie learns all about writing music, playing instruments, and singing in perfect harmony with her favorite pop star! The latest in the Barbie: I Can Be career series, Children ages 4 to 6 will love to read how Barbie can become a musician in this Step 2 Step into Reading leveled reader. Step 2 readers use basic vocabulary and short sentences to tell simple stories. For children who recognize familiar words and can sound out new words with help.

Since 1959, Barbie has shown girls that they can live their dreams. From an astronaut to a chef to a president, she knows that girls can do anything!

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The Fight for Kumandra (Disney Raya and the Last Dragon)

Random House Disney

This Step 3 Step into Reading leveled reader with more than 30 sparkling stickers is based on Disney's hit animated film Raya and the Last Dragon!

Experience the magic of the fantasy-action-adventure Raya and the Last Dragon, exploring themes of community and hope, and inspired by the beautiful and diverse cultures of Southeast Asia. Girls and boys ages 5 to 7 will love this Step 3 Step into Reading leveled reader based on Disney's upcoming animated film--with more than 30 sparkling stickers! Step 3 readers feature engaging characters in easy-to-follow plots about popular topics. For children who are ready to read on their own.

Walt Disney Animation Studios' Raya and the Last Dragon introduces Raya, a lone warrior from the fantasy kingdom of Kumandra who teams up with a crew of misfits in her quest to find the last dragon and bring light and unity back to their world. Awkwafina lends her voice to Sisu, the last dragon, who was left on Kumandra in case dark forces return to the world, and Kelly Marie Tran voices the lead character, Raya.

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Little Blue Truck

Alice Schertle

"Neigh!" said a horse.

 

"Quack!" said a duck.

 

"Beep!" said the friendly

 

Little Blue Truck.

 

 

Little Blue Truck is a joyful cacophony of animal and truck sounds that will have youngsters beeping and quacking—and begging for one more go-round! Along the way, readers see that it pays to be kind to our animal friends . . . if we show a friendly respect to others, we’re more likely to get help when we’re, say, stuck in the muck in a truck. Jill McElmurry’s gouache illustrations of wild-eyed farm animals and country roads are warm and wonderful, suiting the cheerfully rhyming text to a T. Beep!

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Llama Llama Meets the Babysitter

Anna Dewdney

 

A Netflix Original series


With over 30 million copies in print, Anna Dewdney's New York Times bestselling Llama Llama books have provided hours of comfort and fun-to-read-aloud rhyme.

 

I have something new to talk about . . . tonight I will be going out, Mama gently tells Llama Llama.
At first, Llama feels okay with this. After all, Mama has gone out before and Gram and Grandpa have stayed with him. But this time they can't. Someone new is coming over, and the more he thinks about it, the more he worries! He knows he will be miserable . . . and then the doorbell rings. It's Molly from the ice cream store. What is she doing here? And she has ice cream! Maybe having a new babysitter isn't nearly as bad as he thought!

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Something's Wrong!

Jory John

A hilarious picture book from #1 New York Times bestselling author Jory John, paired with new illustrator Erin Kraan, about a bear whose friends help him make it through a bad day!

Jeff the bear has definitely forgotten something. He ate his breakfast, he watered his plant, he combed his fur...what could it be? Why does he feel so oddly off? So he asks his friend Anders the rabbit what could possibly be wrong. It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that he's wearing underwear...over his fur...could it?

Something's Wrong! is another read-out-loud, laugh-out-loud picture book from bestselling and beloved author Jory John, about that horrible nagging feeling that it just might not be your day—but you know you have a friend to support you no matter what.

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Eric Carle's Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star and Other Nursery Rhymes

Eric Carle

Classic nursery rhymes with interactive elements makes this board book ideal for little hands!

With a lift-the-flap on every spread, this sturdy casebound board book is the perfect way to revisit five classic nursery rhymes: "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," "Old MacDonald Had a Farm," "Hickory Dickory Dock," "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider," and "The Wheels on the Bus."

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ABC Cats: An Alpha-Cat Book

Lesléa Newman

A beguiling array of felines from A to Z makes learning the alphabet the cat's pajamas.

Adorable cat with eyes of gold.
Baby cat just two weeks old.

From curious to elegant, grouchy to inquisitive, rowdy to tangled to . . . well, unusual (who says cats don't swim in the tub?), these twenty-six charming felines interact with oversize alphabet letters on rhyming spreads. Author Lesléa Newman and illustrator Isabella Kung offer a cat's-eye concept book that makes the ABCs go down easy--and is sure to inspire many a repeat viewing.

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Welcome To Shape School!

Chronicle Books

The perfect baby present and self-purchase for just the right moment in a baby and parent's life.

Introducing Beginning Baby, a new line of novelty board books and gifts from the Chronicle Children's group. Based on over 30 years of distinctive, innovative, bestselling, and award-winning children's publishing, Beginning Baby is the ultimate series for new parents and their children. We've taken our experience as creative professionals, moms, dads, aunts, uncles, siblings, and friends to create a line of books and gifts that we would want to share with the little ones in our lives. Every Beginning Baby book, toy, or game features simple icons to denote which developmental milestones it supports, along with the intended age range. With its distinctive yet accessible art, lovable characters, and educational concepts, Beginning Baby is designed to make growing and learning as easy as playing and dreaming—and will become the must-have gift or self-purchase for every baby's first library. Because a strong beginning sets the groundwork for a bright start!

In Welcome to Shape School!, readers join Gabriel Giraffe, Elijah Elephant, Riley Narwhal, Mia Monkey, Layla Llama, Paisley Octopus, and Mateo Red Panda as they tap, trace, and count the nine different shapes that they encounter during their day at school!

• DEVELOPMENTALLY APPROPRIATE: Every book is conceived and written to address milestones in a baby's life, from fine motor skills to shape recognition and emotional awareness.
• A CHARMING WAY TO LEARN TO COUNT: Like Counting Kisses, this counting book teaches very young children how to count to ten and express their affection in many delightful ways.
• CUTE CHARACTERS: Evoking Richard Scarry's classic characters but for much younger readers, these adorable characters—from an artistic llama to a musical elephant and gardener octopus—teach toddler concepts while promoting socialization and community.
• BEAUTIFULLY DESIGNED FOR DISCERNING EYES: Bright, peppy colors and patterns make this series of books attractive for both babies and adults!
• MORE TITLES COMING: Beginning Baby will launch with 3 titles and publish 2–3 titles per season through 2022.

Perfect for:

• Parents of babies and toddlers
• Grandparents
• Uncles and aunts
• Teachers and educators at daycare and early childhood centers

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Computer Coding Python Games for Kids

Carol Vorderman

Learn how to code in Python by building and playing your own computer games, from mind-bending brainteasers to crazy action games with explosive sound effects and 3D graphics. Whether you're a seasoned programmer or a beginner hoping to learn Python, you'll find Computer Coding Python Games for Kids fun to read and easy to follow. Each chapter shows how to construct a complete working game in simple numbered steps. Using freely available resources, such as PyGame Zero and Blender, you can add animations, music, scrolling backgrounds, 3D scenery, and other exciting professional touches. After building the game, find out how to adapt it to create your own personalised version with secret hacks and cheat codes!

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Flip! How the Frisbee Took Flight

Margaret Muirhead

This charming picture book biography about the inventor of the Frisbee follows the twists and turns of innovation and highlights the persistence it takes to succeed.

Fred Morrison is credited with inventing this classic toy, but for centuries folks have been flipping for flying discs. Ancient Greeks flicked discs, and beginning in the 1920s, college kids at Yale University were tossing pie tins.

Fred's invention quest began in 1932 after tossing a tin popcorn lid around the backyard. For more than twenty years, Fred and his wife, Lu, tried and failed to perfect a flying-disc concept. Eventually they created what we know today as the Frisbee.

Fun and fact-filled, this Frisbee origin story is sure to delight sports and STEM fans alike.

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The Ramble Shamble Children

Christina Soontornvat

New picture book by a two-time Newbery Honor-winning author!

The delightful story of an unconventional family of kids who learn the ups and downs of working together.


Merra, Locky, Roozle, Finn, and little Jory love their ramble shamble house. It's a lot of work taking care of the garden, the chickens, and themselves, but they all pitch in to make it easier--even Jory, who looks after the mud puddles. When they come across a picture of a "proper" house in a book, they start wondering if their own home is good enough. So they get to work "propering up" the garden, the chickens, and even the mud puddles. But the results aren't exactly what they expected, and when their now-proper household's youngest member goes missing, they realize that their ramble shamble home might be just right for their family, after all.

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The Last Bear

Hannah Gold

An instant classic with a bear-sized heart, Hannah Gold's debut novel is a touching story of kindness, adventure, and forging your own path--perfect for fans of Pax and A Wolf Called Wander.

There are no polar bears left on Bear Island. At least, that's what April's father tells her when his scientific research takes them to a faraway Arctic outpost.

But one night, April catches a glimpse of something distinctly bear shaped loping across the horizon. A polar bear who shouldn't be there--who is hungry, lonely and a long way from home.

An excellent choice for readers in grades 3 to 7, this fierce celebration of friendship includes full-page black-and-white illustrations throughout, as well as information about the real Bear Island and the plight of the polar bears.

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Vespertine

Margaret Rogerson

From the New York Times bestselling author of Sorcery of Thorns and An Enchantment of Ravens comes a thrilling new YA fantasy about a teen girl with mythic abilities who must defend her world against restless spirits of the dead.

The dead of Loraille do not rest.

Artemisia is training to be a Gray Sister, a nun who cleanses the bodies of the deceased so that their souls can pass on; otherwise, they will rise as spirits with a ravenous hunger for the living. She would rather deal with the dead than the living, who trade whispers about her scarred hands and troubled past.

When her convent is attacked by possessed soldiers, Artemisia defends it by awakening an ancient spirit bound to a saint’s relic. It is a revenant, a malevolent being that threatens to possess her the moment she drops her guard. Wielding its extraordinary power almost consumes her—but death has come to Loraille, and only a vespertine, a priestess trained to wield a high relic, has any chance of stopping it. With all knowledge of vespertines lost to time, Artemisia turns to the last remaining expert for help: the revenant itself.

As she unravels a sinister mystery of saints, secrets, and dark magic, her bond with the revenant grows. And when a hidden evil begins to surface, she discovers that facing this enemy might require her to betray everything she has been taught to believe—if the revenant doesn’t betray her first.

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Scary Creatures of the Wetlands

Penny Clarke

Anacondas, woolly rhinos, and hyenas, oh my! Beware the beasts you'll meet inside these thrilling books, with special "X-Ray" pages that let you peer clear through to the animal's skeleton, colourful "call-out" illustrations, and myth-busting "Did You Know" questions - everything you need to safely get to know some of the scariest creature that ever lived!

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Whatshisface

Gordon Korman

When 12-year-old Cooper Vega moves for the third time in five years, he receives a state-of-the-art smartphone to help him stay in touch with old friends. He's had phones before, but this one is buggy and unpredictable. When a boy named Roderick Northrop communicates with him through the phone, Cooper realizes the phone isn't buggy at all; the thing is haunted!

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The Deepest Breath

Meg Grehan

An accessible and beautifully written middle grade novel-in-verse by award-winning Irish author Meg Grehan about Stevie, a young girl reckoning with anxiety about the many things she has yet to understand—including her feelings about her friend Chloe. Perfect for fans of Ivy Aberdeen's Letter to the World, Star Crossed, and George.

11-year-old Stevie is an avid reader and she knows a lot of things about a lot of things. But these are the things she'd like to know the most:

1. The ocean and all the things that live there and why it's so scary
2. The stars and all the constellations
3. How phones work
4. What happened to Princess Anastasia
5. Knots

Knowing things makes Stevie feel safe, powerful, and in control should anything bad happen. And with the help of her mom, she is finding the tools to manage her anxiety.

But there’s one something Stevie doesn’t know, one thing she wants to understand above everything else, and one thing she isn't quite ready to share with her mom: the fizzy feeling she gets in her chest when she looks at her friend, Chloe. What does it mean and why isn't she ready to talk about it?

In this poetic exploration of identity and anxiety, Stevie must confront her fears to find inner freedom all while discovering it is our connections with others that make us stronger.

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The Sinner and the Saint

Kevin Birmingham

 

From the New York Times bestselling author of THE MOST DANGEROUS BOOK, the true story behind the creation of another masterpiece of world literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky's CRIME AND PUNISHMENT.

THE SINNER AND THE SAINT is the deeply researched and immersive tale of how Dostoevsky came to write this great murder story--and why it changed the world. As a young man, Dostoevsky was a celebrated writer, but his involvement with the radical politics of his day condemned him to a long Siberian exile. There, he spent years studying the criminals that were his companions. Upon his return to St. Petersburg in the 1860s, he fought his way through gambling addiction, debilitating debt, epilepsy, the deaths of those closest to him, and literary banishment to craft an enduring classic.

The germ of CRIME AND PUNISHMENT came from the sensational story of Pierre François Lacenaire, a notorious murderer who charmed and outraged Paris in the 1830s. Lacenaire was a glamorous egoist who embodied the instincts that lie beneath nihilism, a western-influenced philosophy inspiring a new generation of Russian revolutionaries. Dostoevsky began creating a Russian incarnation of Lacenaire, a character who could demonstrate the errors of radical politics and ideas. His name would be Raskolnikov.

Lacenaire shaped Raskolnikov in profound ways, but the deeper insight, as Birmingham shows, is that Raskolnikov began to merge with Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky was determined to tell a murder story from the murderer's perspective, but his character couldn't be a monster. No. The murderer would be chilling because he wants so desperately to be good.

The writing consumed Dostoevsky. As his debts and the predatory terms of his contract caught up with him, he hired a stenographer to dictate the final chapters in time. Anna Grigorievna became Dostoevsky's first reader and chief critic and changed the way he wrote forever. By the time Dostoevsky finished his great novel, he had fallen in love.

Dostoevsky's great subject was self-consciousness. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT advanced a revolution in artistic thinking and began the greatest phase of Dostoevsky's career. THE SINNER AND THE SAINT now gives us the thrilling and definitive story of that triumph.

 

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Graceland, at Last

Margaret Renkl

An Indie Next Selection for September 2021

From the author of the bestselling #ReadWithJenna/TODAY Show book club pick Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

For the past four years, Margaret Renkl's columns have offered readers of The New York Times a weekly dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville. Now more than sixty of those pieces have been brought together in this sparkling new collection.

"People have often asked me how it feels to be the 'voice of the South, '" writes Renkl in her introduction. "But I'm not the voice of the South, and no one else is, either." There are many Souths--red and blue, rural and urban, mountain and coast, Black and white and brown--and no one writer could possibly represent all of them. In Graceland, At Last, Renkl writes instead from her own experience about the complexities of her homeland, demonstrating along the way how much more there is to this tangled region than many people understand.

In a patchwork quilt of personal and reported essays, Renkl also highlights some other voices of the South, people who are fighting for a better future for the region. A group of teenagers who organized a youth march for Black Lives Matter. An urban shepherd whose sheep remove invasive vegetation. Church parishioners sheltering the homeless. Throughout, readers will find the generosity of spirit and deep attention to the world, human and nonhuman, that keep readers returning to her columns each Monday morning.

From a writer who "makes one of all the world's beings" (NPR), Graceland, At Last is a book full of gifts for Southerners and non-Southerners alike.

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A Forest on Many Stems

Laynie Browne

A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on the Poet's Novel provides a unique entrance to the rare prose of many remarkable modern and contemporary poets including Etel Adnan, Renee Gladman, Langston Hughes, Kevin Killian, Alice Notley, Fernando Pessoa, Rainer Maria Rilke, Leslie Scalapino, Jack Spicer, and Jean Toomer, whose approaches to the novel defy conventions of plot, character, setting, and action. Contributors Brian Blanchfield, Anne Boyer, John Keene, Mónica de la Torre, Cedar Sigo, and C. D. Wright bring a variety of insights, approaches, and writing styles to the subject with creative and often surprising results. Kazim Ali on Fanny Howe Dan Beachy-Quick on W.G. Sebald Edmund Berrigan on Ted Berrigan Brian Blanchfield on Aaron Kunin Rachel Blau DuPlessis on Gertrude Stein Julia Bloch on Gwendolyn Brooks Anne Boyer on Elizabeth Barrett Browning Traci Brimhall on Hilda Hilst Vincent Broqua on Stacy Doris Brandon Brown on Kevin Killian Lee Ann Brown on Carla Harryman Angela Carr on Nicole Brossard Julie Carr on Lyn Hejinian Norma Cole on Emmanuel Hocquard Brent Cunningham on Laura Moriarty Mónica de la Torre on Martín Adán Marcella Durand on Robert Creeley Patrick Durgin on Tan Lin & Pamela Lu Norman Fischer on Phillip Whalen C.S. Giscombe on Audre Lorde Judith Goldman on Leslie Scalapino Carla Harryman on Gail Scott Jeanne Heuving on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Laura Hinton on Alice Notley Daniel Katz on Jack Spicer John Keene on Fernando Pessoa Karla Kelsey on Barbara Guest Aaron Kunin on Lewis Carroll Sonnet L'Abbé on M. NourbeSe Philip Abigail Lang on Jacques Roubaud Kimberly Lyons on Mina Loy W. Jason Miller on Langston Hughes Mette Moestrup on Ingeborg Bachmann Laura Moriarty on Keith Waldrop Laura Mullen on Bhanu Kapil Denise Newman on Inger Christensen Aldon Lynn Nielsen on Amiri Baraka Geoffrey G. O'Brien on John Ashbery & James Schuyler Jena Osman on Thalia Field Julie Patton on Jean Toomer Elizabeth Robinson on Rosmarie Waldrop Jennifer Scappettone on H.D. Susan Scarlata on Forrest Gander Brandon Shimoda on Etel Adnan Cedar Sigo on Eileen Myles Sasha Steensen on Anne Carson Donna Stonecipher on Peter Waterhouse Brian Teare on Rainer Maria Rilke Tyrone Williams on Nathaniel Mackey C.D. Wright on Michael Ondaatje Lynn Xu on Ben Lerner Rachel Zolf on Juliana Spahr

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Cranial Fracking

Ian Frazier

Dispatches from the front lines of American culture by the great humorist

Ian Frazier, “America’s greatest essayist” (Los Angeles Times), has gathered his insights on the most urgent issues of today in Cranial Fracking. From climate change (what did Al Gore say at his colloquium on the rising temperatures in Hell?) to the state of culture (what do you do when you’re afflicted with Loss of Funding?) to Texas (what should we do with Texas?), he has all the answers. Or, at the very least, a lot of questions.

Frazier is endlessly curious and perpetually delighted, and seeing the absurdity of the world through his eyes is irresistible. Once more, the author of Hogs Wild and Travels in Siberia has struck oil.

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Forgiven

Karen Kingsbury

Book 2 in the 5-book Christian fiction series that has sold over 1.5 million copies

A story of God's divine leading and the realization that peace comes only after forgiveness, from Karen Kingsbury, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of "heart-tugging and emotional" (Romantic Times) life-changing fiction.

A Deadly Accident
The Christian Kids Theater group is devastated by a tragedy greater than any of them could've imagined. Now their director, Katy Hart, must find a way to walk the kids through their grief and give them a reason to believe again. But will hatred and revenge have the final word?

An Aching Emptiness
Dayne Matthews is working on what could be his best movie yet. Still, he feels empty and unfocused, aching for real love and the family he'll never know. Then a friend tells him about a teaching center and a way to become like God. Is this the answer Dayne's been searching for?

A Shocking Discovery
John Baxter reconnects with an old friend and shares a buried secret, one that he and his wife kept hidden all their married lives. Now--in his wife's honor--he decides to continue a very special search. But in the process he makes a critical mistake and one of his daughters stumbles onto a letter she was never supposed to see. For the Baxters, grace and redemption will play a greater role in this season than ever before.

The Firstborn series is the second installment in the continuing Baxter Family Drama from America's number one inspirational novelist, Karen Kingsbury. Revisit the Baxter family in all their life-changing events, or share the series with someone who hasn't discovered it yet.

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The Lincoln Highway

Amor Towles

The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America

In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett's future, one that will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction--to the City of New York.

Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles's third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.

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Harlem Shuffle

Colson Whitehead

From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, a gloriously entertaining novel of heists, shakedowns, and rip-offs set in Harlem in the 1960s.

"Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked..." To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver's Row don't approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it's still home. 

Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time. 

Cash is tight, especially with all those installment-plan sofas, so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace, Ray doesn't ask where it comes from. He knows a discreet jeweler downtown who doesn't ask questions, either. 

Then Freddie falls in with a crew who plan to rob the Hotel Theresa—the "Waldorf of Harlem"—and volunteers Ray's services as the fence. The heist doesn't go as planned; they rarely do. Now Ray has a new clientele, one made up of shady cops, vicious local gangsters, two-bit pornographers, and other assorted Harlem lowlifes. 

Thus begins the internal tussle between Ray the striver and Ray the crook. As Ray navigates this double life, he begins to see who actually pulls the strings in Harlem. Can Ray avoid getting killed, save his cousin, and grab his share of the big score, all while maintaining his reputation as the go-to source for all your quality home furniture needs? 

Harlem Shuffle's ingenious story plays out in a beautifully recreated New York City of the early 1960s. It's a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem. 

But mostly, it's a joy to read, another dazzling novel from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning Colson Whitehead.

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The Madness of Crowds

Louise Penny

Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller
AARP The Magazine – Recommended Summer Reading
CNN – A Most Anticipated Book of August
Bustle – A Most Anticipated Book of August
Amazon Book Review – An Editors’ Pick for August
CrimeReads – 5 Must-Read Psychological Thrillers
CrimeReads – Most Anticipated Crime Books of 2021

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache returns to Three Pines in #1 New York Times bestseller Louise Penny's latest spellbinding novel

You’re a coward.

Time and again, as the New Year approaches, that charge is leveled against Armand Gamache.

It starts innocently enough.

While the residents of the Québec village of Three Pines take advantage of the deep snow to ski and toboggan, to drink hot chocolate in the bistro and share meals together, the Chief Inspector finds his holiday with his family interrupted by a simple request.

He’s asked to provide security for what promises to be a non-event. A visiting Professor of Statistics will be giving a lecture at the nearby university.

While he is perplexed as to why the head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec would be assigned this task, it sounds easy enough. That is until Gamache starts looking into Professor Abigail Robinson and discovers an agenda so repulsive he begs the university to cancel the lecture.

They refuse, citing academic freedom, and accuse Gamache of censorship and intellectual cowardice. Before long, Professor Robinson’s views start seeping into conversations. Spreading and infecting. So that truth and fact, reality and delusion are so confused it’s near impossible to tell them apart.

Discussions become debates, debates become arguments, which turn into fights. As sides are declared, a madness takes hold.

Abigail Robinson promises that, if they follow her, ça va bien aller. All will be well. But not, Gamache and his team know, for everyone.

When a murder is committed it falls to Armand Gamache, his second-in-command Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and their team to investigate the crime as well as this extraordinary popular delusion.

And the madness of crowds.

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Matrix

Lauren Groff

 

“A relentless exhibition of Groff’s freakish talent. In just over 250 pages, she gives us a character study to rival Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell .” – USA Today

“An electric reimagining . . . feminist, sensual . . . unforgettable.” – O, The Oprah Magazine

“Thrilling and heartbreaking.” –Time Magazine

“[A] page-by-page pleasure as we soar with her.” –New York Times

One of our best American writers, Lauren Groff returns with her exhilarating first new novel since the groundbreaking Fates and Furies.

Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease.

At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. Marie, born the last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. But in a world that is shifting and corroding in frightening ways, one that can never reconcile itself with her existence, will the sheer force of Marie’s vision be bulwark enough?

Equally alive to the sacred and the profane, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in a mesmerizing portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith, and a woman that history moves both through and around. Lauren Groff’s new novel, her first since Fates and Furies, is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world.

 

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When You Wonder, You're Learning

Gregg Behr

Bringing the lessons of Mister Rogers into the digital age
 
Playful and practical, When You Wonder, You're Learning introduces a new generation of families to the lessons of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. By exploring the science behind the iconic television program, the book reveals what Fred Rogers called the “tools for learning”: skills and mindsets that scientists now consider essential. These tools—curiosity, creativity, collaboration, and more—have been shown to boost everything from academic learning to children’s well-being, and they benefit kids of every background and age. They cost next to nothing to develop, and they hinge on the very things that make life worthwhile: self-acceptance; close, loving relationships; and a deep regard for one’s neighbor.
 
When You Wonder, You're Learning shows parents and educators the many ways they might follow in Rogers’ footsteps, sharing his “tools for learning” with digital-age kids. With insights from thinkers, scientists, and teachers—many of whom worked with Rogers himself—the book is an essential exploration into how kids and their parents can excel at what Rogers taught best: being human.

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The Survival Guide for Kids with Autism Spectrum Disorders (And Their Parents)

Elizabeth Verdick

This positive, straightforward book offers kids with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) their own comprehensive resource for both understanding their condition and finding tools to cope with the challenges they face every day.

Some children with ASDs are gifted; others struggle academically. Some are more introverted, while others try to be social. Some get “stuck” on things, have limited interests, or experience repeated motor movements like flapping of pacing (”stims”). The Survival Guide for Kids with Autism Spectrum Disorders covers all of these areas, with an emphasis on helping children gain new self-understanding and self-acceptance.

Meant to be read with a parent, the book addresses questions (”What is ASD?” “Why me?”) and provides strategies for communicating, making and keeping friends, and succeeding in school. Body and brain basics highlight symptom management, exercise, diet, hygiene, relaxation, sleep, and toileting. Emphasis is placed on helping kids handle intense emotions and behaviors and get support from family and their team of helpers when needed. The book includes stories from real kids, fact boxes, helpful checklists, and resources. Sections for parents offer additional information.

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The Art of Preserving

Emma Macdonald

This sumptuous guide filled with beautiful photography and expert practical tips is guaranteed to be the only resource you will ever need to preserve fruit, vegetables, meat and fish.

Preserving food at home is vital to eating in a seasonal, sustainable, low-waste and, most importantly, utterly delicious way.
Everyone can master the art of preserving with this essential book on canning, which provides a one-stop resource. Whether you have foraged hedgerows, picked produce from your own vegetable garden or allotment, or searched out the best seasonal buys in the supermarket or market, this book contains more than 100 delicious recipes for preserving fruit and vegetables, meat or fish.
Emma Macdonald gives clear and comprehensive instructions for curing, drying, pickling, bottling/canning, crystalizing and jellying; as well as recipes for all kinds of jams, chutneys, cordials, fruit liqueurs, terrines, cheeses and butters. Every classic is covered, including: gravlax, confit chicken, candied peel, quince cheese, mint jelly, onion marmalade, mango chutney, sloe gin and piccalilli. There are many others, some of them centuries old, many of them with a modern twist, such as Banana and Date Chutney and Grapefruit and Elderflower Marmalade. Emma also includes expert tips on troubleshooting and information on all the equipment you will need. Pick up your cheesecloths and straining funnel and get preserving!

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At the Chinese Table

Carolyn Phillips

At the Chinese Table describes in vivid detail how, during the 1970s and '80s, celebrated cookbook writer and illustrator Carolyn Phillips crosses China's endless cultural and linguistic chasms and falls in love. During her second year in Taipei, she meets scholar and epicurean J. H. Huang, who nourishes her intellectually over luscious meals from every part of China. And then, before she knows it, Carolyn finds herself the unwelcome candidate for eldest daughter-in-law in a traditional Chinese family.

This warm, refreshingly candid memoir is a coming-of-age story set against a background of the Chinese diaspora and a family whose ancestry is intricately intertwined with that of their native land. Carolyn's reticent father-in-law--a World War II fighter pilot and hero--eventually embraces her presence by showing her how to re-create centuries-old Hakka dishes from family recipes. In the meantime, she brushes up on the classic cuisines of the North in an attempt to win over J. H.'s imperious mother, whose father had been a warlord's lieutenant. Fortunately for J. H. and Carolyn, the tense early days of their relationship blossom into another kind of cultural and historical education as Carolyn masters both the language and many of China's extraordinary cuisines.

With illustrations and twenty-two recipes, At the Chinese Table is a culinary adventure like no other that captures the diversity of China's cuisines, from the pen of a world-class scholar and gourmet.

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Seed to Dust

Marc Hamer

For readers of Late Migrations and Vesper Flights

A stunning meditation on gardening and the wisdom of plants, "that rare book that will appeal to nonfiction readers everywhere ... Candid, tender, thoughtful and absorbing." --Shelf Awareness (STARRED Review)

With "chapters... [that] shimmer like lantern slides, lit with luminous imagery ... Seed to Dust is an invitation to read this world as Mr. Hamer does--with a close eye to what changes, and what does not."--The Wall Street Journal

Marc Hamer has nurtured the same 12-acre garden in the Welsh countryside for over two decades. The garden is vast and intricate. It's rarely visited, and only Hamer knows of its secrets. But it's not his garden. It belongs to his wealthy and elegant employer, Miss Cashmere. But the garden does not really belong to her, either. As Hamer writes, "Like a book, a garden belongs to everyone who sees it."

In Seed to Dust, Marc Hamer paints a beautiful portrait of the garden that "belongs to everyone." He describes a year in his life as a country gardener, with each chapter named for the month he's in. As he works, he muses on the unusual folklores of his beloved plants. He observes the creatures who scurry and hide from his blade or rake. And he reflects on his own life: living homeless as a young man, his loving relationship with his wife and children, and--now--feeling the effects of old age on body and mind.

As the seasons change, Hamer also reflects on the changes he has observed in Miss Cashmere's life from afar: the death of her husband and the departure of her children from the stately home where she now lives alone. At the book's end, Hamer's connection to Miss Cashmere changes shape, and new insights into relationships and the beauty and brutality of nature emerge.

Just like all good books and gardens, Seed to Dust is filled with equal parts life and death, beauty and decay, and every reader will find something different to admire.

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The Ecological Gardener

Matt Rees-Warren

Design a garden for the future—because what we grow matters.

"Matt Rees-Warren explains why every square inch of Earth, including our gardens, has ecological significance... Excellent, timely, essential!" —Douglas W. Tallamy, author of Nature’s Best Hope

Transform your garden into a self-sustaining haven for nature and wildlife. Ecological garden designer Matt Rees-Warren shares inspirational design ideas and practical projects to help you create a garden that is both beautiful today and sustainable tomorrow.

The Ecological Gardener will give you the tools to create an abundant, healthy garden from the soil up—a garden that welcomes birds and bees and allows native planting and wild flowers to flourish, with minimal carbon impact or need for fresh water. This book can guide both novice and experienced gardeners alike in their journey to a more ecological approach, and is full of practical projects and information, including:

  • Finding the right design for your space
  • Creating a wildflower meadow
  • Building rainwater catchments and other tips for water conservation
  • Making compost from kitchen waste, leaf mold, compost tea and more
  • Creating a space for wildlife such as hedgehogs, bees and other pollinators
  • Finding beauty in your garden during the winter

Matt will show you how to re-imagine how you garden, working with nature instead of controlling it, to create a space that promotes both wildlife and beauty.

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Sitting in the Shade

Hugh Johnson

Foreword by Alan Titchmarsh

For more than 45 years Hugh Johnson has written Trad's Diary, delighting in recording his observations of his own garden, as well as many others, and of the wider natural world.

Free to turn his attention to whatever is happening in that season, or simply something that piques his interest, his subjects are as diverse as the sounds of water, forest walks, the names of roses, the taste for shade he shares with Handel, the colours of autumn, the smell of rain, the private garden discovered within Beijing's Forbidden City or the first crocuses of spring. Month by month, Hugh shares with the reader through his easy, evocative writing an eclectic mix of thoughtful, topical and whimsical insights that will delight not only gardeners but anyone with an interest in nature in all its costumes.

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Horse Girls

Halimah Marcus

A compelling and provocative essay collection that smashes stereotypes and redefines the meaning of the term "horse girl," broadening it for women of all cultural backgrounds.



As a child, horses consumed Halimah Marcus' imagination. When she wasn't around horses she was pretending to be one, cantering on two legs, hands poised to hold invisible reins. To her classmates, girls like Halimah were known as "horse girls," weird and overzealous, absent from the social worlds of their peers.

Decades later, when memes about "horse girl energy," began appearing across social media--Halimah reluctantly recognized herself. The jokes imagine girls as blinkered as carriage ponies, oblivious to the mockery behind their backs. The stereotypical horse girl is also white, thin, rich, and straight, a daughter of privilege. Yet so many riders don't fit this narrow, damaging ideal, and relate to horses in profound ways that include ambivalence and regret, as well as unbridled passion and devotion.

Featuring some of the most striking voices in contemporary literature--including Carmen Maria Machado, Pulitzer-prize winner Jane Smiley, T Kira Madden, Maggie Shipstead, and Courtney Maum--Horse Girls reframes the iconic bond between girls and horses with the complexity and nuance it deserves. And it showcases powerful emerging voices like Braudie Blais-Billie, on the connection between her Seminole and Quebecois heritage; Sarah Enelow-Snyder, on growing up as a Black barrel racer in central Texas; and Nur Nasreen Ibrahim, on the colonialist influence on horse culture in Pakistan.

By turns thought-provoking and personal, Horse Girls reclaims its titular stereotype to ask bold questions about autonomy and desire, privilege and ambition, identity and freedom, and the competing forces of domestication and wildness.

 

 

 

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The Ultimate Guide to Running with Your Dog

Bryan Barrera

Everything you need to know before you take your four-legged friend on a run.

When looking for a consistent running buddy, it's only natural that you look towards your dog.Who wouldn't want to share a workout with their loyal and energetic canine companion? Plus, there are numerous physical and mental benefits that both you and your four-legged friend can gain from running. But just like humans, dogs need to train properly and build up their fitness before tackling a longer run. Without physical cues to judge from, it can be hard to tell if your dog is ready for a run. Luckily, Bryan Barrera'sbook, The Ultimate Guide to Running with Your Dog contains all the information that you need to safely hit the pavement with your pet.

Founder and owner of one of the nation's first dog-running companies, DC Dog Runner, Barrera is an expert on running with dogs. Weaving in personal experiences, The Ultimate Guide to Running with Your Dog provides a comprehensive look at dog running, including topics such as:
 

  • Assessing your dog as a runner
  • Running in different types of weather
  • The best terrains to run on
  • Running with multiple dogs
  • The best collars and leashes for active dogs
  • What to do if your dog gets injured
  • How to hire a professional dog runner
  • And more!

 


So whether you and your canine are novice harriers or seasoned trail warriors, The Ultimate Guide to Running with Your Dog will help you make your future runs safer and more enjoyable.

 

 

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What Is a Dog?

Chloe Shaw

On the heels of her family’s beloved dog’s death, one woman returns to the canines of her past in order to imagine the human she hopes to become in the future in her memoir, What Is a Dog?

Chloe Shaw is in a dog house of her own choosing. A married mother with kids, the death of Booker, her children’s eldest family pet, has left her reeling and reckoning with her lifelong relationship with dogs. Unable to shake the feeling a year later, she asks her family for some time alone to be with nothing but her thoughts and remaining canines, Safari and Otter—only to find the dogs of her past pawing at her every memory and running, sticks in mouths, back into her life.

What follows is a meditation on one woman’s life through the dogs she's loved and lost. Since she was a child, Shaw had learned to escape the hardest parts of being human by immersing herself in the lives of her canine companions, an adaptive attachment that carried her to adulthood. Yet, in marriage and motherhood, Shaw finds herself facing her most human struggles yet. Her old ways of “being the dog” in the face of hardship prove destructive, and it’s not until she’s able to love herself and learn from the dogs of her past and present that can she truly thrive as a person, and show up for the family who needs her to be their person.

With artful prose and a philosophical touch, Shaw takes us on an emotional journey anyone who has ever loved and lost a dog will connect with—and discovers dogs do more than just make our lives better—they quietly (and sometimes loudly) pull us boldly toward the person we were always meant to be.

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Counting Down with You

Tashie Bhuiyan

"A witty, romantic, deeply insightful debut." —Emma Lord, author of Tweet Cute

In this sparkling and romantic YA debut, a reserved Bangladeshi teenager has twenty-eight days to make the biggest decision of her life after agreeing to fake date her school’s resident bad boy.

How do you make one month last a lifetime?

Karina Ahmed has a plan. Keep her head down, get through high school without a fuss, and follow her parents’ rules—even if it means sacrificing her dreams. When her parents go abroad to Bangladesh for four weeks, Karina expects some peace and quiet. Instead, one simple lie unravels everything.

Karina is my girlfriend.

Tutoring the school’s resident bad boy was already crossing a line. Pretending to date him? Out of the question. But Ace Clyde does everything right—he brings her coffee in the mornings, impresses her friends without trying, and even promises to buy her a dozen books (a week) if she goes along with his fake-dating facade. Though Karina agrees, she can’t help but start counting down the days until her parents come back.

T-minus twenty-eight days until everything returns to normal—but what if Karina no longer wants it to?

"I. Love. This. Book." —Mark Oshiro, award-winning author of Anger Is a Gift and Each of Us a Desert
"A must-have addition to any YA bookshelf." —Sabina Khan, author of Zara Hossain Is Here and The Love and Lies of Rukhsana Ali
"Hand to fans of Netflix hit Never Have I Ever." —Booklist

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We Have Always Been Here

Lena Nguyen

This psychological sci-fi thriller from a debut author follows one doctor who must discover the source of her crew's madness... or risk succumbing to it herself.

Misanthropic psychologist Dr. Grace Park is placed on the Deucalion, a survey ship headed to an icy planet in an unexplored galaxy. Her purpose is to observe the thirteen human crew members aboard the ship--all specialists in their own fields--as they assess the colonization potential of the planet, Eos. But frictions develop as Park befriends the androids of the ship, preferring their company over the baffling complexity of humans, while the rest of the crew treats them with suspicion and even outright hostility.

Shortly after landing, the crew finds themselves trapped on the ship by a radiation storm, with no means of communication or escape until it passes--and that's when things begin to fall apart. Park's patients are falling prey to waking nightmares of helpless, tongueless insanity. The androids are behaving strangely. There are no windows aboard the ship. Paranoia is closing in, and soon Park is forced to confront the fact that nothing--neither her crew, nor their mission, nor the mysterious Eos itself--is as it seems.

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Million Dollar Demon

Kim Harrison

To save the city, Rachel Morgan will need to show some teeth in the next Hollows novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Kim Harrison.

The new master vampire of Cincinnati has arrived . . . and she wants Rachel Morgan out. No matter where Rachel goes, Constance is there--threatening Rachel's allies, causing city-wide chaos, and, to add insult to injury, even forcing Rachel out of her current quarters. Ever since Rachel found a way to save the souls of vampires, the old undead's longtime ascendancy has been broken. Now Constance sees eliminating Rachel as the key to consolidating her own power.

Rachel has no desire to be enthralled or killed--and she's terrified of what may become of the city if Constance forces a return to the ancient ways. But even a witch-born demon can't stand against the old undead--at least, not alone. And if Rachel refuses to claim the role of Cincinnati's master demon, the city will tear itself apart, taking her and all those who stand beside her with it.

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Mean...moody...magnificent!

Christina Rice

"I never was a sex symbol. Not in my head I wasn't." -- Jane Russell

By the early 1950s, Jane Russell (1921--2011) should have been forgotten. Her career was launched on what is arguably the most notorious advertising campaign in cinema history when film goers were invited to watch The Outlaw (1943) and "tussle with Russell," or gawk at two of the reasons for her rise to stardom. Completed by mid-1941, the movie did not premiere until 1943, and its wide release was delayed, gradually rolling out between 1946 and 1950. Throughout the 1940s, Russell was nicknamed the "motionless picture actress" and would only have three films projected in theaters the entire decade. With such an inauspicious and prolonged start to a career, most aspiring actresses would have given up or faded away. But not Jane. Instead, she carved out a place for herself in Hollywood and became one of its most recognizable figures.

In Mean...Moody...Magnificent!: Jane Russell and the Marketing of a Hollywood Legend, author Christina Rice offers a fresh perspective on how Russell learned to embrace the blatant publicizing of her physical appearance. Looking beyond the signature image of Russell lounging on bales of hay while wielding a gun and her Playtex commercials, Rice details a not-so-charmed life impacted by abuse, abortion, infertility, divorce, adoption struggles, and death. While often overshadowed by Marilyn Monroe, her costar in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Russell led a life and career that was confident and unapologetic. Working alongside actors such as Robert Mitchum, Clark Gable, Vincent Price, and Bob Hope, she was more of a movie personality than a serious actress but could electrify a screen and was a true celebrity of the Golden Age. Despite a movie career that was stalled for nearly a decade, Russell's filmography was respectable, and she had the opportunity to work with some of Hollywood's most talented directors, including Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, Nicholas Ray, and Josef von Sternberg. From her attempt to launch a musical career to her devout faith and weekly Bible study for Hollywood stars to her work in creating the WAIF foundation in 1955, an organization to place children with adoptive families, Mean...Moody...Magnificent! reveals Russell's full and fascinating life.

In the aftermath of the #MeToo movement, Rice gives voice to Russell's empowered reactions to the controversies surrounding her films and her feelings about the marketing campaigns promoting her physical appearance. Mean... Moody...Magnificent! will be the first book-length work on this actress who brought a wry wit and intelligence to her characters with a unique take on the playful sex bomb. This work will appeal to film historians and buffs alike.

This project is under consideration for UPK's Screen Classics series.

Christina Rice is senior librarian and archivist at the Los Angeles Public Library. She is the author of Ann Dvorak: Hollywood's Forgotten Rebel (UPK).

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Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be

Nichole Perkins

"Hear the dark liquor of her laughter rippling behind her sentences" in this magnetic memoir as it explores a journalist's obsession with pop culture and the difficulty of navigating relationships as a Black woman through fanfiction, feminism, and Southern mores (Saeed Jones).



A Roxane Gay Audacious Bookclub November Pick

Named "Most Anticipated Books of 2021" by Buzzfeed and Lithub




Pop culture is the Pandora's Box of our lives. Racism, wealth, poverty, beauty, inclusion, exclusion, and hope -- all of these intractable and unavoidable features course through the media we consume. Examining pop culture's impact on her life, Nichole Perkins takes readers on a rollicking trip through the last twenty years of music, media and the internet from the perspective of one southern Black woman. She explores her experience with mental illness and how the TV series Frasier served as a crutch, how her role as mistress led her to certain internet message boards that prepared her for current day social media, and what it means to figure out desire and sexuality and Prince in a world where marriage is the only acceptable goal for women.



Combining her sharp wit, stellar pop culture sensibility, and trademark spirited storytelling, Nichole boldly tackles the damage done to women, especially Black women, by society's failure to confront the myths and misogyny at its heart, and her efforts to stop the various cycles that limit confidence within herself. By using her own life and loves as a unique vantage point, Nichole humorously and powerfully illuminates how to take the best pop culture has to offer and discard the harmful bits, offering a mirror into our own lives.

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Things I Learned From Falling

Claire Nelson

An inspirational and gripping first-person account of determination, adversity and survival against the odds.

'Uplifting and brave' - Stylist

'A riveting account of loneliness, anxiety and survival' - Cosmopolitan

'A vibrantly physical book' - the Guardian

'Claire Nelson relives a life-changing four days' - The Times

'What a story; never heard a story like that before' - Chris Evans


The must-read true story of 2020.

In 2018, Claire Nelson made international headlines. She was in her thirties and was beginning to burn out - her hectic London life of work and social activity and striving to do more and do better in the big city was frenetic and stressful. Although she was surrounded by people all of the time, she felt increasingly lonely.

When the anxiety she felt finally brought her to breaking point, Claire decided to take some time off and travelled to Joshua Tree Park in California to hike and clear her head. What happened next was something she could never have anticipated.

While hiking, Claire fell 25 feet, gravely injuring herself and she lay alone in the desert - mistakenly miles off any trail, without a cell phone signal, fighting for her life. She lay in the elements for four days until she was miraculously found - her rescuers had not expected to find her alive.

In THINGS I LEARNED FROM FALLING Claire tells her incredible story and what it taught her about loneliness, anxiety and transformation and how to survive it all.

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Inside Pee-Wee's Playhouse

Caseen Gaines

Between 1986 and 1991, nearly ten million people a week watched Pee-wee's Playhouse, the critically acclaimed and widely successful children's program broadcast on CBS. Now, on the 25th anniversary of the show, the complete behind-the-scenes story is being told for the first time by those who experienced it. Complete with an episode guide, biographical information about the cast and key members of the show's creative team, never-before-told anecdotes, and previously unpublished photos, Inside Pee-wee's Playhouse takes the first in-depth look behind the program TV Guide recently cited as one of the top ten cult classics of all time. Paul Reubens (as Pee-wee Herman) has been making a comeback since August 2010, appearing on Saturday Night Live, The View, The Jimmy Kimmel Show, Conan, and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. He starred in a successful stage revival of his live show in January and February of 2010, and it hit Broadway later that year. It's been turned into a special on HBO. His public Twitter and Facebook accounts boast over one million fans and followers. Inside Pee-wee's Playhouse is the first comprehensive look at this amazingly successful (and still revered) children's program. Pee-wee Herman fans have been energized recently by the character's re-emerging presence. From casual fans to devout followers, everyone will be interested in taking a look Inside Pee-wee's Playhouse.

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Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited

Clinton Heylin

In 1991 Clinton Heylin published what was considered the most definitive biography of Bob Dylan available. In 2001 he completely revised and reworked this hugely acclaimed book, adding new sections, substantially reworking text, and bringing the story up-to-date with Dylan's explosive career in 2000.

Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited follows the story of Dylan from his humble beginnings in Minnesota to his arrival in New York in 1961, his subsequent rise in the folk pantheon of Greenwich Village in the early '60s, and his cataclysmic folk-rock metamorphosis at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. In the succeeding eighteen months, Dylan released Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, and embarked on the legendary 1966 World Tour that culminated with an unforgettable concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Heylin details it all, along with the true story of Dylan's motorcycle accident, his remarkable reemergence in the mid-'70s, the only exacting account of his controversial conversion to born-again Christianity, the Neverending Tour, and yet another incredible Dylan resurgence with his 1997 Grammy Album of the Year Award-winning Time Out of Mind.

Deemed by The New Yorker as "the most readable and reliable" of all Dylan biographies, this book will give fans what they have always wanted -- a chance to get to know the man behind the shades.

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Boyz N the Void

G'Ra Asim

Writing to his brother, G'Ra Asim reflects on building his own identity while navigating Blackness, masculinity, and young adulthood--all through wry social commentary and music/pop culture critique

How does one approach Blackness, masculinity, otherness, and the perils of young adulthood? For G'Ra Asim, punk music offers an outlet to express himself freely. As his younger brother, Gyasi, grapples with finding his footing in the world, G'Ra gifts him with a survival guide for tackling the sometimes treacherous cultural terrain particular to being young, Black, brainy, and weird in the form of a mixtape.

Boyz n the Void: a mixtape to my brother blends music and cultural criticism and personal essay to explore race, gender, class, and sexuality as they pertain to punk rock and straight edge culture. Using totemic punk rock songs on a mixtape to anchor each chapter, the book documents an intergenerational conversation between a Millennial in his 30s and his zoomer teenage brother. Author, punk musician, and straight edge kid, G'Ra Asim weaves together memoir and cultural commentary, diving into the depths of everything from theory to comic strips, to poetry to pizza commercials to mapping the predicament of the Black creative intellectual.

With each chapter dedicated to a particular song and placed within the context of a fraternal bond, Asim presents his brother with a roadmap to self-actualization in the form of a Doc Martened foot to the behind and a sweaty, circle-pit-side-armed hug.


Listen to the author's playlist while you read! Access the playlist here: https://sptfy.com/a18b

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The Digital Darkroom

James Abbott

Post-production can make the difference between a good image and a great image, not to mention it's an essential process if you shoot in RAW to enjoy the most flexibility and control possible. This book will outline everything you need to know to gain a better understanding of how to apply darkroom style effects to your images using Adobe Photoshop and Affinity Photo.

Through detailed background knowledge designed to make you familiar with the software and to build your confidence, you'll learn a wide range of skills and techniques through step-by-step case studies that will make learning an active experience. Not only will this be a valuable reference resource, it will also be your very own personal tutor giving you everything you need to edit your images like a pro.

- Learn the essentials with a complete guide to every tool, filter and effect for both Adobe Photoshop and Affinity Photo
- Get the most out of your RAW files with detailed instructions on processing your digital image
- Master basic, intermediate, and advanced editing techniques with easy to follow step-by-step tutorials
- Get the best quality images for display with a complete guide to home printing

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Unraveled

Maxine Bedat

Longlisted for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award

A groundbreaking chronicle of the birth--and death--of a pair of jeans, that exposes the fractures in our global supply chains, and our relationships to each other, ourselves, and the planet


Take a look at your favorite pair of jeans. Maybe you bought them on Amazon or the Gap; maybe the tag says "Made in Bangladesh" or "Made in Sri Lanka." But do you know where they really came from, how many thousands of miles they crossed, or the number of hands who picked, spun, wove, dyed, packaged, shipped, and sold them to get to you? The fashion industry operates with radical opacity, and it's only getting worse to disguise countless environmental and labor abuses. It epitomizes the ravages inherent in the global economy, and all in the name of ensuring that we keep buying more while thinking less about its real cost.

In Unraveled, entrepreneur, researcher, and advocate Maxine Bédat follows the life of an American icon--a pair of jeans--to reveal what really happens to give us our clothes. We visit a Texas cotton farm figuring out how to thrive without relying on fertilizers that poison the earth. Inside dyeing and weaving factories in China, where chemicals that are banned in the West slosh on factory floors and drain into waterways used to irrigate local family farms. Sewing floors in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are crammed with women working for illegally low wages to produce garments as efficiently as machines. Back in America, our jeans get stowed, picked, and shipped out by Amazon warehouse workers pressed to be as quick as the robots primed to replace them. Finally, those jeans we had to have get sent to landfills--or, if they've been "donated," shipped back around the world to Africa, where they're sold for pennies in secondhand markets or buried and burned in mountains of garbage.

A sprawling, deeply researched, and provocative tour-de-force, Unraveled is not just the story of a pair of pants, but also the story of our global economy and our role in it. Told with piercing insight and unprecedented reporting, Unraveled challenges us to use our relationship with our jeans--and all that we wear--to reclaim our central role as citizens to refashion a society in which all people can thrive and preserve the planet for generations to come.

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