List

Category
Audience
Tags

Saving the Season

Kevin West

The ultimate canning guide for cooks--from the novice to the professional--and the only book you need to save (and savor) the season throughout the entire year

Gardening history, 18th-century American painters, poems, and practical information; it's a rich book. And unlike other books on preserving, West gives recipes that will goad you to make easy preserves." --The Atlantic

Strawberry jam. Pickled beets. Homegrown tomatoes. These are the tastes of Kevin West's Southern childhood, and they are the tastes that inspired him to "save the season," as he traveled from the citrus groves of Southern California to the cranberry bogs of Massachusetts and everywhere in between, chronicling America's rich preserving traditions.

Here, West presents his findings: 220 recipes for sweet and savory jams, pickles, cordials, cocktails, candies, and more--from Classic Apricot Jam to Green Tomato Chutney; from Pickled Asparagus with Tarragon and Green Garlic to Scotch Marmalade. Includes 300 full-color photographs.

View Details >>

Beyond Canning

Autumn Giles

"This is a book that caters to the real-life canner in all of us." - John Becker and Megan Scott, Joy of Cooking editorial team

If you're looking for Hot & Sour Cherry preserves, Old Bay Pickled Cauliflower, or Gochugaru Preserved Lemons, you've come to the right place! In Beyond Canning, Autumn Giles has packed the pages with creative preserved foods and preserving techniques. You'll use herb-infused vinegar to make a shrub, explore the science of maceration for the sake of better preserves, step up to the air-locked mason jar for worry-free ferments, master simple ratios for inventing your own small-batch creations, and much more. The 70 recipes feature flavors and textures that are equally inventive: Rangpur Lime Marmalade, Lavender Apple Butter, Raspberry-Rhubarb Sauce, Quick Peach-Bourbon Jam, Hibiscus Lime Jelly, Kombu Dashi Pickled Shitake Mushrooms, Curried Orange Pickle, Maple-Plum Mostarda, Pickled Figs with Port & Black Pepper, Raspberry & Burnt Honey Gastrique, Fermented Jalepeno Slices, Lemony Sprouts Kraut-Chi, and Radicchio & Sunchoke Kraut with Thyme are all inside.

View Details >>

Preserving

Pat Crocker

Preserve it!

A comprehensive guide to canning and freezing

Home canning and freezing are time-honored kitchen skills that are being rediscovered by a new generation of Americans—both for the pleasure of performing these simple activities and for their inherent economy. Now home cooks can take advantage of their local farmer's markets to buy fresh, inexpensive and seasonal produce to enjoy all year round. In Preserving, Pat Crocker offers practical, easy-to-follow information on home canning and freezing to get novices started and inspire experienced hands.

Relish it!

More than 200 recipes for pickles, chutneys, jams, sauces, curds, relishes and so much more

Organized by season and focused on simple but effective concepts, this practical guide offers thorough information on preserving a diverse range of foods for the pantry, from asparagus and blueberries to peaches and winter squash. Here are techniques on canning, jamming and freezing everything from the most basic hot-packed fruit recipes to gorgeous, internationally flavored chutneys and relishes. Filled with safe and detailed instructions, step-by-step photography and more than two hundred recipes, Preserving is a kitchen essential that is sure to become a classic.

View Details >>

Put 'em Up!

Sherri Brooks Vinton

PRESERVING IS BACK, AND IT'S BETTER THAN EVER. Flavors are brighter, batch sizes are more flexible, and modern methods make the process safer and easier. Eating locally is on everybodys mind, and nothing is more local than Heirloom Salsa made from vine-fresh tomatoes or a quick batch of Ice-Box Berry Jam saved from the seasons last berries. Even beginners who never made peach jam or dill pickles in their grandmothers kitchens are eager to pick up preserving skills as a way to save money, extend the local harvest, and control the quality of preserved ingredients.

The step-by-step instructions in Put 'em Up will have the most timid beginners filling their pantries and freezers with the preserved goodness of summer in no time. An extensive Techniques section includes complete how-to for every kind of preserving: refrigerating and freezing, air- and oven-drying, cold- and hot-pack canning, and pickling. And with recipe yields as small as a few pints or as large as several gallons, readers can easily choose recipes that work for the amount of produce and time at hand.

Real food advocate Sherri Brooks Vinton offers recipes with exciting flavor combinations to please contemporary palates and put preserved fruits and vegetables on dinner-party menus everywhere. Pickled Asparagus and Wasabi Beans are delicious additions to holiday relish trays; Sweet Pepper Marmalade perks up cool-weather roasts; and Berry Bourbon is an unexpected base for a warming cocktail.

The best versions of tried-and-true favorites are all here too. Bushels of fresh-picked apples are easily turned into applesauce, dried fruit rings, jelly, butter, or even brandy. Falling-off-the-vine tomatoes can be frozen whole, oven dried, canned, or made into a tangy marinara. Options for pickling cucumbers range from Bread and Butter Chips and Dill Spears to Asian Ice-Box Pickles. Something delicious for every pantry!

Recipes Include:

Pickled AsparagusÊ Wasabi BeansÊ Beet Relish
Berry BourbonÊ Grannys Chow-ChowÊ Agua FrescaÊ Cantaloupe RumÊ Asian Carrot SlawÊ Curried CauliflowerÊ Drunken CherriesÊ Cherry and Black Pepper PreservesÊ Pickled JalapenosÊ Three-Chili Hot SauceÊ Preserved LemonsÊ Candied Citrus RindÊ Oven-Dried Sweet CornÊ Bread and Butter ChipsÊ Pickled FennelÊ Figs in Honey SyrupÊ Roasted Garlic ButterÊ Grape LeatherÊ Dill Pesto with FetaÊ Martini OnionsÊ Ginger and Peach JamÊ Dried Pear ChipsÊ Sugar PlumsÊ Pickled RampsÊ Classic Strawberry JamÊ Sweet Pepper MarmaladeÊ Salsa VerdeÊ Oven-Dried TomatoesÊ Pickled Watermelon Rind

View Details >>

Ball Canning Back to Basics

Ball Home Canning Test Kitchen

Can it, pickle it, and store it with confidence. 

If you can boil water, you can make your own delectable jams and jellies, try your hand at fresh-pack pickling, and jar savory sauces. Ball Canning Back to Basics focuses on the building-block techniques and easy, classic recipes every canner should know. The book begins with in-depth information on water bath canning, the equipment you need, and food safety guidance. Each preserving method is thoroughly explained with beginner-friendly tutorials and step-by-step photographs highlighting key steps. Learn to capture the sweet, ripe flavors of your favorite fruits and vegetables with 100 approachable, versatile recipes for the modern pantry. Packed with simple variation ideas for low-sugar and flavor change-ups, and time-tested tips from the most trusted authority in home canning, this handy guide delivers everything you need to successfully master home canning safely and deliciously.

View Details >>

The All New Ball Book Of Canning And Preserving

Ball Home Canning Test Kitchen

From the experts at Jarden Home Brands, makers of Ball canning products, comes the first truly comprehensive canning guide created for today's home cooks. This modern handbook boasts more than 350 of the best recipes ranging from jams and jellies to jerkies, pickles, salsas, and more-including extender recipes to create brand new dishes using your freshly preserved farmer's market finds or vegetable garden bounty.

Organized by technique, The All New Ball Book of Canning and Preserving covers water bath and pressure canning, pickling, fermenting, freezing, dehydrating, and smoking. Straightforward instructions and step-by-step photos ensure success for beginners, while practiced home canners will find more advanced methods and inspiring ingredient twists.

Thoroughly tested for safety and quality by thermal process engineers at the Fresh Preserving Quality Assurance Lab, recipes range from much-loved classics — Tart Lemon Jelly, Tomato-Herb Jam, Ploughman's Pickles — to fresh flavors such as Asian Pear Kimchi, Smoked Maple-Juniper Bacon, and homemade Kombucha. Make the most of your preserves with delicious dishes including Crab Cakes garnished with Eastern Shore Corn Relish and traditional Strawberry-Rhubarb Hand Pies. Special sidebars highlight seasonal fruits and vegetables, while handy charts cover processing times, temperatures, and recipe formulas for fast preparation.

Lushly illustrated with color photographs, The All New Ball Book of Canning and Preserving is a classic in the making for a new generation of home cooks.

View Details >>

High School Debut, Vol. 13

Kazune Kawahara

Can a junior high jock turn high school sweetheart overnight?; When Haruna hits 9th grade suddenly boys seem much more interesting than softball!; Will Haruna’s high school debut end up in heartbreak hotel?

R to L (Japanese Style). Can a junior high jock turn high school sweetheart overnight?; When Haruna hits 9th grade suddenly boys seem much more interesting than softball!; Will Haruna’s high school debut end up in heartbreak hotel? Final Volume! Yoh faces a difficult choice: should he go to university all the way in Tokyo or stay near Haruna? Haruna wants to support Yoh's decision no matter what, but will her high school romance end with his graduation?

View Details >>

My Hero Academia, Vol. 19

Kohei Horikoshi

Midoriya inherits the superpower of the world’s greatest hero, but greatness won’t come easy.

What would the world be like if 80 percent of the population manifested superpowers called “Quirks”? Heroes and villains would be battling it out everywhere! Being a hero would mean learning to use your power, but where would you go to study? The Hero Academy of course! But what would you do if you were one of the 20 percent who were born Quirkless?

In the wake of tragedy, Class 1-A prepares for the upcoming culture festival. While the students are busy planning for success, other forces are at work with their own agendas, and Midoriya, amid the preparations, continues to train with All Might. But when he runs into the failed hero Gentle Criminal, what lesson will he learn?

View Details >>

The Problem with the Other Side

Kwame Ivery

 

A searing YA debut that follows the joys, complexities, and heartbreaks of an interracial romance between high school sophomores that blossoms during a volatile school election
Uly would rather watch old Westerns with his new girlfriend, Sallie, than get involved in his school's politics--why focus on the "bad" and "ugly" when his days with Sallie are so good? His older sister Regina feels differently. She is fed up with the way white school-body presidential candidate Leona Walls talks about Black students. Regina decides to run against Leona . . . and convinces Uly to be her campaign manager.

 

Sallie has no interest in managing her sister's campaign, but how could she say no? After their parents' death, Leona is practically her only family. Even after Leona is accused of running a racist campaign that targets the school's students of color--including Sallie's boyfriend, Uly--Sallie wants to give her sister the benefit of the doubt. But how long can she ignore the ugly truth behind Leona's actions?


Together and apart, Uly and Sallie must navigate sibling loyalty and romantic love as the campaign spirals toward a devastating conclusion.

CW: Acts of racism and bigotry, racist language, and gun violence are portrayed in this novel.

View Details >>

Katzenjammer

Francesca Zappia

American Horror Story meets the dark comedy of Kafka's The Metamorphosis as Cat searches for a way to escape her high school. A tale of family, love, tragedy, and masks--the ones others make for us, and the ones we make for ourselves. Katzenjammer will haunt fans of Chelsea Pitcher's This Lie Will Kill You and E. Lockhart's We Were Liars.

Cat lives in her high school. She never leaves, and for a long time her school has provided her with everything she needs. But now things are changing. The hallways contract and expand along with the school's breathing, and the showers in the bathroom run a bloody red. Cat's best friend is slowly turning into cardboard, and instead of a face, Cat has a cat mask made of her own hardened flesh.

Cat doesn't remember why she is trapped in her school or why half of them--Cat included--are slowly transforming. Escaping has always been the one impossibility in her school's upside-down world. But to save herself from the eventual self-destruction all the students face, Cat must find the way out. And to do that, she'll have to remember what put her there in the first place.

Using chapters alternating between the past and the present, acclaimed author Francesca Zappia weaves a spine-tingling, suspenseful, and haunting story about tragedy and the power of memories. Fans of Marieke Nijkamp's This Is Where It Ends and Karen McManus's One of Us Is Lying will lose themselves in the pages of this novel--or maybe in the treacherous hallways of the school.

Includes interior illustrations from the author.

View Details >>

The Resilient Teen

Sheela Raja

"Well researched and up to date, including the acknowledgement of teens' struggles with the Covid-19 pandemic.... Belongs on every young adult's bookshelf."

--Kirkus Reviews (starred)

10 powerful skills to help you manage stress, bounce back from difficult situations, and rewire your brain for happiness and success!

Being a teen today is stressful. That's why you need real tools to help you cope with all of life's challenges--from small stressors like homework, social media, and dating to serious trauma resulting from bullying, school shootings, violence, and now--pandemics. The key to dealing with all of these difficult events is resilience--the ability to recover from setbacks or trauma, and forge ahead with emotional strength. The best thing about resilience is that it can be learned. This book will help you learn how to be resilient, so you can weather life's storms and reach your goals.

In The Resilient Teen, psychologist, teen expert, and trauma specialist Sheela Raja offers ten skills grounded in key principles from psychology and neuroscience to help you manage difficult emotions, recover from difficult situations, and cultivate a sense of joy--even in the face of setbacks and modern-day stressors. You'll learn essential strategies for self-care, how to establish a healthy lifestyle, and how to set limits on technology. You'll also discover how mindfulness can help you deal with stress and challenging emotions in the moment, tips for building better relationships with family and friends, and tools for dealing with disappointment.

Most importantly, this book will show you how to increase your own sense of joy, purpose, and meaning--even when things seem less than awesome.

View Details >>

Dear Heartbreak

Heather Demetrios

In this powerful collection, well-known YA authors answer real letters from teens all over the world about the dark side of love: dating violence, break-ups, cheating, betrayals, and loneliness. This book contains a no-holds-barred, raw outpouring of the wisdom these authors have culled from mining their own hearts for the fiction they write. Their responses are autobiographical, unflinching, and filled with love and hope for the anonymous teen writers.

With contributors Becky Albertalli, Adi Alsaid, Libba Bray, Mike Curato, Heather Demetrios, Amy Ewing, Zach Fehst, Gayle Forman, Corey Ann Haydu, Varian Johnson, A.S. King, Nina LaCour, Kim Liggett, Kekla Magoon, Sarah McCarry, Sandhya Menon, Cristina Moracho, Jasmine Warga, and Ibi Zoboi.

View Details >>

Zen Teen

Tanya Carroll Richardson

A warm and relatable teen guide to reducing anxiety, depression, and panic while developing resilience and confidence with 40 tips and tricks that guide, support, and inspire teens to keep calm and stay mindful

In the last decade, studies have reported a drastic rise in teens who experience anxiety, panic, and an inability to cope with the pressures of daily life. As mental health challenges become less stigmatized, young people are more likely than ever before to know how to identify their feelings and ask for help. Even celebrity teen icons like Selena Gomez are "coming out" as anxiety sufferers.

Zen Teen addresses this epidemic with powerful coping mechanisms and creative tools-including two fun quizzes, tons of engaging exercises and a cool playlist-designed for the teenage mind. With topics like "The Unique Genius of You" and "Rock-Star Rituals," Tanya Carroll Richardson prompts teens to get calm by engaging in mindful tasks like identifying gurus, tapping into warrior energy, mastering meditation, practicing realistic optimism, becoming a self-awareness samurai, learning to surrender, finding a spirit animal, expressing challenging emotions, living with loving-kindness, protecting the planet, and making vision boards that embrace "the Tao of Cool."

Smart and fresh, Zen Teen helps teens thrive while navigating and managing the pressures of everyday life.
 

View Details >>

Chemistry For Dummies

John T. Moore

Chemistry For Dummies, 2nd Edition (9781118007303) is now being published as Chemistry For Dummies, 2nd Edition (9781119293460). While this version features an older Dummies cover and design, the content is the same as the new release and should not be considered a different product.
 

See how chemistry works in everything from soaps to medicines to petroleum

We're all natural born chemists. Every time we cook, clean, take a shower, drive a car, use a solvent (such as nail polish remover), or perform any of the countless everyday activities that involve complex chemical reactions we're doing chemistry! So why do so many of us desperately resist learning chemistry when we're young?

Now there's a fun, easy way to learn basic chemistry. Whether you're studying chemistry in school and you're looking for a little help making sense of what's being taught in class, or you're just into learning new things, Chemistry For Dummies gets you rolling with all the basics of matter and energy, atoms and molecules, acids and bases, and much more!

  • Tracks a typical chemistry course, giving you step-by-step lessons you can easily grasp
  • Packed with basic chemistry principles and time-saving tips from chemistry professors
  • Real-world examples provide everyday context for complicated topics

Full of modern, relevant examples and updated to mirror current teaching methods and classroom protocols, Chemistry For Dummies puts you on the fast-track to mastering the basics of chemistry.

View Details >>

How Philosophy Works

Marcus Weeks

What is the meaning of life? Are we truly free? How can we make ethical choices? Discover the answers to life's greatest questions.

Demystifying the key ideas of the world's greatest philosophers, and exploring all of the most important branches of philosophical thought in a uniquely visual way, this book is the perfect introduction to the history of philosophy.

How Philosophy Works combines bold infographics and jargon-free text to demystify fundamental concepts about the nature of reality. Covering everything from ethics to epistemology and phenomenology, the book presents the ideas and theories of key philosophical traditions and philosophers - from Plato and Socrates to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein via Kant - in a novel, easy-to-understand way.

Its infographics will help you to understand the elements of philosophy on a conceptual level and, by tackling life's "big questions", it will help you to look at the world in an entirely new way.

With its unique graphic approach and clear, authoritative text, How Philosophy Works is the perfect introduction to philosophy, and the ideal companion to DK's The Philosophy Book in the "Big Ideas" series.

View Details >>

Love, Dance & Egg Rolls

Jason Tanamor

Jamie Santiago is just an ordinary high school teenager--he has a huge crush on a girl from school, he watches a ton of sitcoms, and he is constantly trying to keep his dad from feeding egg rolls to his white friends. Not to mention he also aspires to be the next Tinikling folk dance master. Okay, maybe he's not so ordinary.

 

It's hard enough balancing the demands of high school, but when the last ever Asian Folk Festival falls on the same day as Homecoming, it feels like Jamie's world comes crashing down. He is forced to make an important decision between honoring his heritage and salvaging what's left of his social life. With a racist bully at school and rising protests in Portland, Jamie sometimes wonders if it would be easier to forget his Filipino side entirely instead of trying to embrace it.

 

[Play the catchy sitcom music]

 

[Cue the laugh track to numb the serious stuff]

 

If only life were so perfect.

 

Tensions will rise in Love, Dance & Egg Rolls as Jamie decides whether it's more important to remain hidden in plain sight or step directly into the spotlight. Jamie will not only come face-to-face with a bully, but also with this thing called cultural identity.

 

View Details >>

Speak for Yourself

Lana Wood Johnson

Girl meets boy. Girl likes boy.Girl gets friend to help win boy.Friend ends up with crush on boy...

 

Skylar's got ambitious #goals. And if she wants them to come true, she has to get to work now. (At least she thinks so...) Step one in her epic plan is showing everyone that her latest app is brilliant. To do that, she's going to use it to win State at the Scholastic Exposition, the nerdiest academic competition around.First, she'll need a team, and Skylar's not always so good with people. But she'll do whatever it takes to put one together ... even if it means playing Cupid for her teammates Joey and Zane, at Joey's request. When things get off to an awkward start for them, Skylar finds herself stepping in to help Joey. Anything to keep her on the team. Only, Skylar seems to be making everything more complicated. Especially when she realizes she might be falling for Zane, which was not a #goal. Can Skylar figure out her feelings, prove her app's potential to the world, and win State without losing her friends--or is her path to greatness over before it begins?

View Details >>

Don't Hate the Player

Alexis Nedd

"Refreshingly voice-y, wildly smart, and genuinely hilarious." - Casey McQuiston, New York Times bestselling author of Red, White & Royal Blue

From an exciting new voice comes a funny and heartfelt YA romance set in the world of competitive gaming, perfect for fans of Opposite of Always and Slay.

Emilia Romero is living a double life. By day, she's a field hockey star with a flawless report card. But by night, she's kicking virtual ass as the only female member of a highly competitive eSports team. Emilia has mastered the art of keeping her two worlds thriving, which hinges on them staying completely separate. That's in part to keep her real-life persona, but also for her own safety, since girl gamers are often threatened and harassed.

When a major eSports tournament comes to her city, Emilia is determined to prove herself to her team and the male-dominated gaming community. But her perfectly balanced life is thrown for a loop when a member of a rival team recognizes her . . .

Jake Hooper has had a crush on Emilia since he was ten years old. When his underdog eSports team makes it into the tournament, he's floored to discover she's been leading a double life. The fates bring Jake and Emilia together as they work to keep her secret, even as the pressures of the tournament and their non-gaming world threaten to pull everything apart.

Debut author Alexis Nedd has crafted a YA combo-punch of charming romance and virtual adventure that will win the hearts of gamers and non-gamers alike.

View Details >>

Pizza and Taco: Too Cool for School

Stephen Shaskan

New backpacks? Check! Besties Pizza and Taco are ready to head back to school, but are they ready to meet the cool new kid?

B.L.T. wears sunglasses--even in school! He's not even worried about being late to class. SO COOL! I mean, "whatever." Pizza and Taco quickly pick up on what's cool--and what's not--by watching B.L.T.'s every move. Will that spell t-r-o-u-b-l-e for Pizza and Taco with their teacher, Mr. Apple?

This hilarious young graphic novel--with chapters--will tickle the funny bones of kids ages 5-8 and bolster their reading confidence. Young graphic chapter books are a great step on the way to graphic novels and longer chapter books.

Readers will also love the first three books in the series:

Pizza and Taco: Who's the Best?
Pizza and Taco: Best Party Ever!
Pizza and Taco: Super-Awesome Comic!

View Details >>

The Real Riley Mayes

Rachel Elliott

Funny and full of heart, this debut graphic novel is a story about friendship, identity, and embracing all the parts of yourself that make you special.

Fifth grade is just not Riley's vibe. Everyone else is squaded up--except Riley. Her best friend moved away. All she wants to do is draw, and her grades show it.

One thing that makes her happy is her favorite comedian, Joy Powers. Riley loves to watch her old shows and has memorized her best jokes. So when the class is assigned to write letters to people they admire, of course Riley's picking Joy Powers!

Things start to look up when a classmate, Cate, offers to help Riley with the letter, and a new kid, Aaron, actually seems to get her weird sense of humor. But when mean girl Whitney spreads a rumor about her, things begin to click into place for Riley. Her curiosity about Aaron's two dads and her celebrity crush on Joy Powers suddenly make more sense.

Readers will respond to Riley's journey of self-discovery and will recognize themselves in this character who is less than perfect but trying her best. And creative kids will recognize themselves in her love of art and drawing.

While often funny and light, Riley's exploration of what it feels to be an outsider and how hard it can be to make a friend break your heart in the best way. And with all of Riley's hijinks and missteps, this story is laugh-out-loud funny from start to finish.

View Details >>

Middle School: Get Me Out of Here!

James Patterson

James Patterson's winning follow-up to the #1 New York Times bestseller Middle School, The Worst Years of My Life--which the LA Times called "a perfectly pitched novel"--is another riotous and heartwarming story about living large.
After sixth grade, the very worst year of his life, Rafe Khatchadorian thinks he has it made in seventh grade. He's been accepted to art school in the big city and imagines a math-and-history-free fun zone.Wrong! It's more competitive than Rafe ever expected, and to score big in class, he needs to find a way to turn his boring life into the inspiration for a work of art. His method? Operation: Get a Life! Anything he's never done before, he's going to do it, from learning to play poker to going to a modern art museum. But when his newest mission uncovers secrets about the family Rafe's never known, he has to decide if he's ready to have his world turned upside down. (Includes over 100 illustrations.)

View Details >>

School-Tripped

Jennifer L. Holm

Watch out, Big City! Babymouse is on a field trip without a chaperone in the third book in the Babymousetastic, highly illustrated Babymouse: Tales from the Locker series.

Babymouse's art class is headed to a museum in the Big City. And now that they're middle schoolers, she and her friends will be totally unsupervised! She can't wait to check out all the world-famous art...that is, until she overhears Felicia Furrypaws planning to ditch the museum and hit the town instead. Babymouse decides to test her freedom with an urban adventure of her own. Will she make it back to the museum before the bus leaves? Or will life in the Big City trip her up big-time?

View Details >>

More Than, Less Than

Joanne Mattern

This Math Concept Book Engages Young Readers Through Simple Text And Photos As They Learn About Comparing Things In A Group By More Than And Less Than.

View Details >>

Half Or Whole?

Susan Meredith

This Math Concept Book Engages Young Readers Through Simple Text And Photos As They Discover The Difference Between Half And Whole.

View Details >>

Max & Mo's 100th Day of School!

Patricia Lakin

Award-winning author Patricia Lakin is back with a Level 1 Ready-to-Read starring the adorable hamsters, Max and Mo. Join them as they celebrate the 100th day of school!

It’s the 100th day of school, and Max and Mo can’t wait to celebrate. The hamsters have so much fun making festive crowns and practicing their counting skills by making necklaces with 100 beads! Follow along with Max and Mo using simple instructions at the back of the book for kids to make a fun activity and play a game celebrating the 100th day of school!

View Details >>

The First Day of School

Margaret McNamara

It’s the Robin Hill first-graders’ first day of school in this Level 1 Ready-to-Read story, now in hardcover for the first time!

Charles is excited about his first day of first grade at Robin Hill School. He wants his puppy, Cookie, to come to school too. Then Charles finds out he has to leave Cookie at home. Will school still be fun without his best friend?

View Details >>

LMNO Peas

Keith Baker

From A to Z—and Acrobat Peas to Zoologist Peas—every letter is exciting in this Classic Board Book edition of LMNO Peas!

Get ready to roll through the alphabet with a jaunty cast of extremely cute and busy little peas in this Classic Board Book edition of Keith Baker’s hit concept book. This fresh and fun alphabet book features bright colors, bouncy rhyming text, and silly pea characters who highlight the wide variety of interests, hobbies, and careers that make the world such a colorful place!

View Details >>

Babylink: Colors in the Garden

Marcos Farina

Revel in the warm, inviting, retro-style illustrations from Argentinian creator, Marcos Farina, in these early concepts board books featuring Colors in the Garden and Animal Opposites

In the garden you will find…

Yellow dandelions

Green clovers

Pink cherry blossoms

Teach your child early concepts while they delight in the playful depictions of colors found in the garden! Featuring an eclectic collection of plants and animals, children will recognize their favorites and may learn about a new plant or two! Using whitespace and high contrast graphic illustrations, these books make the perfect first gift for baby and toddler development.

View Details >>

Hello Robots!

Joan Holub

New from beloved author Joan Holub, Hello Robots! is a fun, playful board book about robots and sequencing!

Hello Buzz.
Hello Beep.
Hello robots fast asleep.
Wake up! Get dressed, robots!

Perfect for reading out loud, Joan Holub’s hilarious text and Chris Dickason’s lively illustrations will have little ones learning and laughing as they try to help sleepy robots complete their morning routine in the correct order.

A clever, interactive approach to first concepts, the Hello board book series introduces important “next-step” concepts like sequencing in a hilariously engaging way.

View Details >>

All about Me

National Geographic Kids

Filled with gorgeous photographs inspired by National Geographic Little Kids magazine, curious children are introduced to physical diversity and cultural differences within families around the world.

View Details >>

Wait

Antoinette Portis

As a boy and his mother move quickly through the city, they're drawn to different things. The boy sees a dog, a butterfly, and a hungry duck while his mother rushes them toward the departing train. It's push and pull, but in the end, they both find something to stop for.

Acclaimed author/illustrator Antoinette Portis' signature style conveys feelings of warmth, curiosity, humor and tenderness in this simple, evocative story.

A Neal Porter Book

View Details >>

Left Or Right

Susan Merideth

This Math Concept Book Engages Young Readers Through Simple Text And Photos As They Discover The Difference Between Left And Right.

View Details >>

Yaks Yak

Linda Sue Park

At once funny and informative, Yaks Yak presents animals acting out the verbs made from their names. Illustrations rich in comic details show hogs hogging, slugs slugging, and other spirited creatures demonstrating homographs, words with different meanings that are spelled and pronounced the same. A chart listing the words, their meanings, and their history is included. Ideal for sharing, this book offers a sprightly and fanciful introduction to a fun form of wordplay.

View Details >>

Night Owl

Toni Yuly

Night Owl loves the nighttime! He can see everything, but when he doesn't see Mommy Owl, he starts to listen . . . .

With language that emphasizes sound words and listening skills, Toni Yuly's picture book is a reassuring bedtime story for little night owls everywhere.

View Details >>

I Play

David McPhail

Run, sing, dance, and hop—follow Bear on his energetic romp! From David McPhail comes a board book of early concept words. In I Play, a charming bear demonstrates children's favorite action verbs, allowing children to replicate Bear's movements and learn the words for the things they do every day. These new board books are not only handy, fun guides for early learning concepts, but also the youngest readers' introduction to the whimsical world of David McPhail.

View Details >>

In-Between Things

Priscilla Tey

Dive in between the covers of a whimsical, wonderful debut and discover that everything in the world is relative -- including you.

Look over there -- the cat is between a table and a chair with a tear. But now look again: the cat is on top of the dog, who's between the floor and the cat (and not too happy about that!). As you wander through the delightfully detailed illustrations, the more you look, the more you'll see -- including colors made from a mix of two others, hybrid implements such as a spork, warm nooks that are neither too cold nor too hot, even a cross of a zebra and cow that makes a . . . zebrow? In an engaging and utterly stylish debut, rising star Priscilla Tey leads readers on an addictive exploration of the in-between, a surprisingly far-reaching and everywhere concept.

View Details >>

Trucks on Trucks

Sorche Fairbank

What's better than a truck? A truck on top of another truck! Trucks on Trucks hits the highways and the byways while exploring basic concepts such as size, shape, color, numbers, and professions. A wonderful choice for children who love vehicles vehicles and books such as Donald Crews's Truck and Freight Train, and Alice Schertle and Jill McElmurry's Little Blue Truck.

Trucks on trucks on trucks! Large trucks, small trucks, red trucks, blue trucks . . . and don't forget about your truck.

Featuring Sorche Fairbank's lively, rhythmic text and illustrator Nik Henderson's bold and energetic art, this picture book stars page after page of trucks hauling trucks. Trucks on Trucks is custom-built for vehicle lovers and introduces young readers to basic preschool concepts such as size, colors, numbers, professions, and community. A fresh new take on the classic "things that go" theme.

 

View Details >>

Ready for School, Murphy?

Brendán Murphy

Murphy doesn't want to go to school. He has butterflies in his tummy and ants in his pants! But no amount of made-up excuses convince his dad to let him stay home. Just when Murphy has all but given up, his father brings him up-to-date-it's Saturday!

View Details >>

Time Flies

Tara Lazar

The team behind 7 Ate 9 and The Upper Case: Trouble in Capital City is back with another installment of their pun-filled detective noir Private I series. This time, Private I is in a race to find all the missing clocks in town!



In the colorful and letter-filled Capital City, there's never a moment's rest for Private I, the city's best investigator. Trouble seems to always have a way of finding him--trouble with a capital T. On this particular day, T tells Private I that his watch is missing. And T isn't alone--the citizens of Capital City have lost track of timepieces all over town! Can Private I catch the perp and make up for lost time before it's too late?

View Details >>

K Is for Kindness

Rina Horiuchi

Debut author/illustrator and sister duo have crafted a sweet ABC book that expresses how kindness can be found anywhere.

Ape picks an apple for Aardvark below.
Bat puts a bandage on Brown Bear's big toe.

From aardvark to zebra, this delightful cast of animal characters illustrates the many ways to show kindness to others, while teaching the youngest readers their ABCs.

Debut author/illustrator and sister duo Rina Horiuchi and Risa Horiuchi have crafted a warm and tender gift that affirms kindness can be found anywhere.

View Details >>

Daddy's Back-to-School Shopping Adventure

Alan Lawrence Sitomer

What do glow-in-the-dark glue sticks, an electronic garbage truck pencil sharpener, and neon paper clips have in common? Not one of them is on the list and yet they all end up in the back-to-school cart when Daddy, Jake, and Jenny pick out school supplies while Mommy's off shopping in another part of the store. In this heartwarming and hilarious tale, Jake and Jenny surprise Daddy with one more special item that most definitely isn't on the list.

View Details >>

Here Comes Ocean

Meg Fleming

Discover the wonder of a day at the beach in this exuberant, rhyming picture book from the author of I Heart You and Sometimes Rain.

Grab a big bucket, your best pup pal, and a whole lot of imagination, and get ready for a day at the beach! There’s endless fun to be had chasing the waves and countless treasures waiting to be discovered—first a sand dollar, then a sandpiper feather, even a sneaky little crab. What surprises will the ocean reveal next? This sandy, salty, seek-and-find picture book is perfect for families who love the water, kids who love collecting, and ocean enthusiasts of all ages.

View Details >>

My Family and Other Animals

Gerald Durrell

The first book Gerald Durrell's Corfu Trilogy: a bewitching account of a rare and magical childhood on the island of Corfu, now the inspiration for The Durrells in Corfu on Masterpiece PBS
When the unconventional Durrell family can no longer endure the damp, gray English climate, they do what any sensible family would do: sell their house and relocate to the sunny Greek isle of Corfu. My Family and Other Animals was intended to embrace the natural history of the island but ended up as a delightful account of Durrell’s family’s experiences, from the many eccentric hangers-on to the ceaseless procession of puppies, toads, scorpions, geckoes, ladybugs, glowworms, octopuses, bats, and butterflies into their home.

 

View Details >>

Death on the Nile

Agatha Christie

The tranquillity of a cruise along the Nile was shattered by the discovery that Linnet Ridgeway had been shot through the head. She was young, stylish, and beautiful. A girl who had everything . . . until she lost her life.

Hercule Poirot recalled an earlier outburst by a fellow passenger: "I'd like to put my dear little pistol against her head and just press the trigger." Yet in this exotic setting nothing is ever quite what it seems.

View Details >>

The Luminaries

Eleanor Catton

The bestselling, Man Booker Prize-winning novel hailed as "a true achievement. Catton has built a lively parody of a 19th-century novel, and in so doing created a novel for the 21st, something utterly new. The pages fly."--New York Times Book Review

It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to stake his claim in New Zealand's booming gold rush. On the stormy night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of 12 local men who have met in secret to discuss a series of unexplained events: a wealthy man has vanished, a prostitute has tried to end her life, and an enormous cache of gold has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely ornate as the night sky.

Richly evoking a mid-nineteenth-century world of shipping, banking, and gold rush boom and bust, THE LUMINARIES is at once a fiendishly clever ghost story, a gripping page-turner, and a thrilling novelistic achievement. It richly confirms that Eleanor Catton is one of the brightest stars in the international literary firmament.

View Details >>

Paris Is Always a Good Idea

Jenn McKinlay

A thirty-year-old woman retraces her gap year through Ireland, France, and Italy to find love--and herself--in this hilarious and heartfelt novel.

It's been seven years since Chelsea Martin embarked on her yearlong postcollege European adventure. Since then, she's lost her mother to cancer and watched her sister marry twice, while Chelsea's thrown herself into work, becoming one of the most talented fundraisers for the American Cancer Coalition, and with the exception of one annoyingly competent coworker, Jason Knightley, her status as most successful moneymaker is unquestioned.

When her introverted mathematician father announces he's getting remarried, Chelsea is forced to acknowledge that her life stopped after her mother died and that the last time she can remember being happy, in love, or enjoying her life was on her year abroad. Inspired to retrace her steps--to find Colin in Ireland, Jean Claude in France, and Marcelino in Italy--Chelsea hopes that one of these three men who stole her heart so many years ago can help her find it again.

From the start of her journey nothing goes as planned, but as Chelsea reconnects with her old self, she also finds love in the very last place she expected.

View Details >>

The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

View Details >>

The Martian

Andy Weir

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "Brilliant . . . a celebration of human ingenuity [and] the purest example of real-science sci-fi for many years . . . utterly compelling."--The Wall Street Journal

The inspiration for the major motion picture

Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars.

Now, he's sure he'll be the first person to die there.

After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he's alive--and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive.

Chances are, though, he won't have time to starve to death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment, or plain-old "human error" are much more likely to kill him first.

But Mark isn't ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills--and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit--he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?

NAMED ONE OF PASTE'S BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE

"A hugely entertaining novel [that] reads like a rocket ship afire . . . Weir has fashioned in Mark Watney one of the most appealing, funny, and resourceful characters in recent fiction."--Chicago Tribune

"As gripping as they come . . . You'll be rooting for Watney the whole way, groaning at every setback and laughing at his pitchblack humor. Utterly nail-biting and memorable."--Financial Times

View Details >>

Travels with George

Nathaniel Philbrick

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Travels with George . . . is quintessential Philbrick—a lively, courageous, and masterful achievement.” The Boston Globe

 
Does George Washington still matter? Bestselling author Nathaniel Philbrick argues for Washington’s unique contribution to the forging of America by retracing his journey as a new president through all thirteen former colonies, which were now an unsure nation. Travels with George marks a new first-person voice for Philbrick, weaving history and personal reflection into a single narrative.


When George Washington became president in 1789, the United States of America was still a loose and quarrelsome confederation and a tentative political experiment. Washington undertook a tour of the ex-colonies to talk to ordinary citizens about his new government, and to imbue in them the idea of being one thing—Americans.

In the fall of 2018, Nathaniel Philbrick embarked on his own journey into what Washington called “the infant woody country” to see for himself what America had become in the 229 years since. Writing in a thoughtful first person about his own adventures with his wife, Melissa, and their dog, Dora, Philbrick follows Washington’s presidential excursions: from Mount Vernon to the new capital in New York; a monthlong tour of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island; a venture onto Long Island and eventually across Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. The narrative moves smoothly between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries as we see the country through both Washington’s and Philbrick’s eyes.

Written at a moment when America’s founding figures are under increasing scrutiny, Travels with George grapples bluntly and honestly with Washington’s legacy as a man of the people, a reluctant president, and a plantation owner who held people in slavery. At historic houses and landmarks, Philbrick reports on the reinterpretations at work as he meets reenactors, tour guides, and other keepers of history’s flame. He paints a picture of eighteenth-century America as divided and fraught as it is today, and he comes to understand how Washington compelled, enticed, stood up to, and listened to the many different people he met along the way—and how his all-consuming belief in the union helped to forge a nation.

View Details >>

In Pursuit of Jefferson

Derek Baxter

A debut that combines historical nonfiction with travel books, for fans of Bill Bryson and Tony Horwitz, In Pursuit of Jefferson is the story of an American on a journey through Europe, following the epic trail of Thomas Jefferson.

A controversial founding father. A man ready for a change. And a completely unique trip through Europe.

In 1784, Thomas Jefferson was a broken man. Reeling from the loss of his wife and stung from a political scandal during the Revolutionary war, he needed to remake himself. To do that, he traveled. Wandering through Europe, Jefferson saw and learned as much as he could, ultimately bringing his knowledge home to a young America. There, he would rise to power and shape a nation.

More than two hundred years later, Derek Baxter, a devotee of American history, stumbles on an obscure travel guide written by Jefferson--Hints for Americans Traveling Through Europe--as he's going through his own personal crisis. Who better to offer advice than a founding father himself? Using Hints as his roadmap, Baxter follows Jefferson through six countries and countless lessons. But what Baxter learns isn't always what Jefferson had in mind, and as he comes to understand Jefferson better, he doesn't always like what he finds.

In Pursuit of Jefferson is at once the story of a life-changing trip through Europe, an unflinching look at a founding father, and a moving personal journey. With rich historical detail, a sense of humor, and boundless heart, Baxter explores how we can be better moving forward only by first looking back.

View Details >>

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.

View Details >>

The Collector's Daughter

Gill Paul

Bestselling author Gill Paul returns with a brilliant novel about Lady Evelyn Herbert, the woman who took the very first step into the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun, and who lived in the real Downton Abbey, Highclere Castle, and the long after-effects of the Curse of Pharaohs.

 

 

Lady Evelyn Herbert was the daughter of the Earl of Carnarvon, brought up in stunning Highclere Castle. Popular and pretty, she seemed destined for a prestigious marriage, but she had other ideas. Instead, she left behind the world of society balls and chaperones to travel to the Egyptian desert, where she hoped to become a lady archaeologist, working alongside her father and Howard Carter in the hunt for an undisturbed tomb.

 

 

In November 1922, their dreams came true when they discovered the burial place of Tutankhamun, packed full of gold and unimaginable riches, and she was the first person to crawl inside for three thousand years. She called it the "greatest moment" of her life--but soon afterwards everything changed, with a string of tragedies that left her world a darker, sadder place.

Newspapers claimed it was "the curse of Tutankhamun," but Howard Carter said no rational person would entertain such nonsense. Yet fifty years later, when an Egyptian academic came asking questions about what really happened in the tomb, it unleashed a new chain of events that seemed to threaten the happiness Eve had finally found.

View Details >>

Bicycling with Butterflies

Sara Dykman

“What a wonderful idea for an adventure! Absolutely inspired, timely, and important.” —Alistair Humphreys, National Geographic Adventurer of the Year and author of The Doorstep Mile and Around the World by Bike

Outdoor educator and field researcher Sara Dykman made history when she became the first person to bicycle along­side monarch butterflies on their storied annual migration—a round-trip adventure that included three countries and more than 10,000 miles. Equally remarkable, she did it solo, on a bike cobbled together from used parts. Her panniers were recycled buckets.
 
In Bicycling with Butterflies, Dykman recounts her incredible journey and the dramatic ups and downs of the nearly nine-month odyssey. We’re beside her as she nav­igates unmapped roads in foreign countries, checks roadside milkweed for monarch eggs, and shares her passion with eager schoolchil­dren, skeptical bar patrons, and unimpressed border officials. We also meet some of the ardent monarch stewards who supported her efforts, from citizen scientists and research­ers to farmers and high-rise city dwellers.
 
With both humor and humility, Dykman offers a compelling story, confirming the urgency of saving the threatened monarch migration—and the other threatened systems of nature that affect the survival of us all.

 

View Details >>

Lost in the Valley of Death

Harley Rustad

"By patient accumulation of anecdote and detail, Rustad evolves Shetler's story into something much more human, and humanly tragic, into a layered inquisition and a reportorial force....suffice it to say Rustad has done what the best storytellers do: tried to track the story to its last twig and then stepped aside." --New York Times Book Review

In the vein of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, a riveting work of narrative nonfiction centering on the unsolved disappearance of an American backpacker in India--one of at least two dozen tourists who have met a similar fate in the remote and storied Parvati Valley.

For centuries, India has enthralled westerners looking for an exotic getaway, a brief immersion in yoga and meditation, or in rare cases, a true pilgrimage to find spiritual revelation. Justin Alexander Shetler, an inveterate traveler trained in wilderness survival, was one such seeker.

In his early thirties Justin Alexander Shetler, quit his job at a tech startup and set out on a global journey: across the United States by motorcycle, then down to South America, and on to the Philippines, Thailand, and Nepal, in search of authentic experiences and meaningful encounters, while also documenting his travels on Instagram. His enigmatic character and magnetic personality gained him a devoted following who lived vicariously through his adventures. But the ever restless explorer was driven to pursue ever greater challenges, and greater risks, in what had become a personal quest--his own hero's journey.

In 2016, he made his way to the Parvati Valley, a remote and rugged corner of the Indian Himalayas steeped in mystical tradition yet shrouded in darkness and danger. There, he spent weeks studying under the guidance of a sadhu, an Indian holy man, living and meditating in a cave. At the end of August, accompanied by the sadhu, he set off on a "spiritual journey" to a holy lake--a journey from which he would never return.

Lost in the Valley of Death is about one man's search to find himself, in a country where for many westerners the path to spiritual enlightenment can prove fraught, even treacherous. But it is also a story about all of us and the ways, sometimes extreme, we seek fulfillment in life.

Lost in the Valley of Death includes 16 pages of color photographs.

View Details >>

South to America

Imani Perry

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"An elegant meditation on the complexities of the American South--and thus of America--by an esteemed daughter of the South and one of the great intellectuals of our time. An inspiration." --Isabel Wilkerson

An essential, surprising journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South--and a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand America

We all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived there can rattle off a list of signifiers: the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, the Ku Klux Klan, plantations, football, Jim Crow, slavery. But the idiosyncrasies, dispositions, and habits of the region are stranger and more complex than much of the country tends to acknowledge. In South to America, Imani Perry shows that the meaning of American is inextricably linked with the South, and that our understanding of its history and culture is the key to understanding the nation as a whole.

This is the story of a Black woman and native Alabaman returning to the region she has always called home and considering it with fresh eyes. Her journey is full of detours, deep dives, and surprising encounters with places and people. She renders Southerners from all walks of life with sensitivity and honesty, sharing her thoughts about a troubling history and the ritual humiliations and joys that characterize so much of Southern life.

Weaving together stories of immigrant communities, contemporary artists, exploitative opportunists, enslaved peoples, unsung heroes, her own ancestors, and her lived experiences, Imani Perry crafts a tapestry unlike any other. With uncommon insight and breathtaking clarity, South to America offers an assertion that if we want to build a more humane future for the United States, we must center our concern below the Mason-Dixon Line.

A Recommended Read from: The New York Times - TIME - Oprah Daily - USA Today - Vulture - Essence - Esquire - W Magazine - Atlanta Journal-Constitution - PopSugar - Book Riot - Chicago Review of Books - Electric Literature - Lit Hub

View Details >>

Around the World in 80 Books

David Damrosch

A transporting and illuminating voyage around the globe, through classic and modern literary works that are in conversation with one another and with the world around them
*Featured in the Chicago Tribune's Great 2021 Fall Book Preview * One of Smithsonian Magazine's Ten Best Books About Travel of 2021*

Inspired by Jules Verne’s hero Phileas Fogg, David Damrosch, chair of Harvard University’s department of comparative literature and founder of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature, set out to counter a pandemic’s restrictions on travel by exploring eighty exceptional books from around the globe. Following a literary itinerary from London to Venice, Tehran and points beyond, and via authors from Woolf and Dante to Nobel Prize–winners Orhan Pamuk, Wole Soyinka, Mo Yan, and Olga Tokarczuk, he explores how these works have shaped our idea of the world, and the ways in which the world bleeds into literature.
 
To chart the expansive landscape of world literature today, Damrosch explores how writers live in two very different worlds: the world of their personal experience and the world of books that have enabled great writers to give shape and meaning to their lives. In his literary cartography, Damrosch includes compelling contemporary works as well as perennial classics, hard-bitten crime fiction as well as haunting works of fantasy, and the formative tales that introduce us as children to the world we’re entering. Taken together, these eighty titles offer us fresh perspective on enduring problems, from the social consequences of epidemics to the rising inequality that Thomas More designed Utopia to combat, as well as the patriarchal structures within and against which many of these books’ heroines have to struggle—from the work of Murasaki Shikibu a millennium ago to Margaret Atwood today.
 
Around the World in 80 Books is a global invitation to look beyond ourselves and our surroundings, and to see our world and its literature in new ways.

 

View Details >>

Nowhere for Very Long

Brianna Madia

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER - USA TODAY! BESTSELLER

In this beautifully written, vividly detailed memoir, a young woman chronicles her adventures traveling across the deserts of the American West in an orange van named Bertha and reflects on an unconventional approach to life.

A woman defined by motion, Brianna Madia bought a beat-up bright orange van, filled it with her two dogs Bucket and Dagwood, and headed into the canyons of Utah with her husband. Nowhere for Very Long is her deeply felt, immaculately told story of exploration--of the world outside and the spirit within.

However, pursuing a life of intention isn't always what it seems. In fact, at times it was downright boring, exhausting, and even desperate--when Bertha overheated and she was forced to pull over on a lonely stretch of South Dakota highway; when the weather was bitterly cold and her water jugs froze beneath her as she slept in the parking lot of her office; when she worried about money, her marriage, and the looming question mark of her future. But Brianna was committed to living a life true to herself, come what may, and that made all the difference.

Nowhere for Very Long is the true story of a woman learning and unlearning, from backroads to breakdowns, from married to solo, and finally, from lost to found to lost again . . . this time, on purpose.

View Details >>

Rules for Visiting

Jessica Francis Kane

A beautifully observed and deeply funny novel of May Attaway, a university gardener who sets out on an odyssey to reconnect with four old friends over the course of a year.

At forty, May Attaway is more at home with plants than people. Over the years, she's turned inward, finding pleasure in language, her work as a gardener, and keeping her neighbors at arm's length while keenly observing them. But when she is unexpectedly granted some leave from her job, May is inspired to reconnect with four once close friends. She knows they will never have a proper reunion, so she goes, one-by-one, to each of them. A student of the classics, May considers her journey a female Odyssey. What might the world have had if, instead of waiting, Penelope had set out on an adventure of her own?

RULES FOR VISITING is a woman's exploration of friendship in the digital age. Deeply alert to the nobility and the ridiculousness of ordinary people, May savors the pleasures along the way--afternoon ice cream with a long-lost friend, surprise postcards from an unexpected crush, and a moving encounter with ancient beauty. Though she gets a taste of viral online fame, May chooses to bypass her friends' perfectly cultivated online lives to instead meet them in their messy analog ones.

Ultimately, May learns that a best friend is someone who knows your story--and she inspires us all to master the art of visiting.

View Details >>

Less (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize)

Andrew Sean Greer

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
National Bestseller
A New York Times Notable Book of 2017

A Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2017
A San Francisco Chronicle Top Ten Book of 2017
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Lambda Award, and the California Book Award

Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes--it would be too awkward--and you can't say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world.

QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town?

ANSWER: You accept them all.

What would possibly go wrong? Arthur Less will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Saharan sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and encounter, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to face. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. Through it all, there is his first love. And there is his last.

Because, despite all these mishaps, missteps, misunderstandings and mistakes, Less is, above all, a love story.

A scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, a bittersweet romance of chances lost, by an author The New York Times has hailed as "inspired, lyrical," "elegiac," "ingenious," as well as "too sappy by half," Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.

"I could not love LESS more."--Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"Andrew Sean Greer's Less is excellent company. It's no less than bedazzling, bewitching and be-wonderful."--Christopher Buckley, The New York Times Book Review
 

View Details >>

The Jetsetters

Amanda Eyre Ward

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY ESQUIRE

 

When seventy-year-old Charlotte Perkins submits a sexy essay to the Become a Jetsetter contest, she dreams of reuniting her estranged children: Lee, an almost-famous actress; Cord, a handsome Manhattan venture capitalist who can't seem to find a partner; and Regan, a harried mother who took it all wrong when Charlotte bought her a Weight Watchers gift certificate for her birthday. Charlotte yearns for the years when her children were young, when she was a single mother who meant everything to them.

When she wins the contest, the family packs their baggage--both literal and figurative--and spends ten days traveling from sun-drenched Athens through glorious Rome to tapas-laden Barcelona on an over-the-top cruise ship, the Splendido Marveloso. As lovers new and old join the adventure, long-buried secrets are revealed and old wounds are reopened, forcing the Perkins family to confront the forces that drove them apart and the defining choices of their lives.

Can four lost adults find the peace they've been seeking by reconciling their childhood aches and coming back together? In the vein of The Nest and The Vacationers, The Jetsetters is a delicious and intelligent novel about the courage it takes to reveal our true selves, the pleasures and perils of family, and how we navigate the seas of adulthood.

View Details >>

Disappointment River

Brian Castner

In 1789, Alexander Mackenzie traveled 1200 miles on the immense river in Canada that now bears his name, in search of the fabled Northwest Passage that had eluded mariners for hundreds of years. In 2016, the acclaimed memoirist Brian Castner retraced Mackenzie's route by canoe in a grueling journey -- and discovered the Passage he could not find.

Disappointment River is a dual historical narrative and travel memoir that at once transports readers back to the heroic age of North American exploration and places them in a still rugged but increasingly fragile Arctic wilderness in the process of profound alteration by the dual forces of globalization and climate change. Fourteen years before Lewis and Clark, Mackenzie set off to cross the continent of North America with a team of voyageurs and Chipewyan guides, to find a trade route to the riches of the East. What he found was a river that he named "Disappointment." Mackenzie died thinking he had failed. He was wrong.

In this book, Brian Castner not only retells the story of Mackenzie's epic voyages in vivid prose, he personally retraces his travels, battling exhaustion, exposure, mosquitoes, white water rapids and the threat of bears. He transports readers to a world rarely glimpsed in the media, of tar sands, thawing permafrost, remote indigenous villages and, at the end, a wide open Arctic Ocean that could become a far-northern Mississippi of barges and pipelines and oil money.

View Details >>

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Paul Theroux

Thirty years after the epic journey chronicled in his classic work The Great Railway Bazaar, the world's most acclaimed travel writer re-creates his 25,000-mile journey through eastern Europe, central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, China, Japan, and Siberia.

Half a lifetime ago, Paul Theroux virtually invented the modern travel narrative by recounting his grand tour by train through Asia. In the three decades since, the world he recorded in that book has undergone phenomenal change. The Soviet Union has collapsed and China has risen; India booms while Burma smothers under dictatorship; Vietnam flourishes in the aftermath of the havoc America was unleashing on it the last time Theroux passed through. And no one is better able to capture the texture, sights, smells, and sounds of that changing landscape than Theroux.
Theroux's odyssey takes him from eastern Europe, still hung-over from communism, through tense but thriving Turkey into the Caucasus, where Georgia limps back toward feudalism while its neighbor Azerbaijan revels in oil-fueled capitalism. Theroux is firsthand witness to it all, traveling as the locals do?by stifling train, rattletrap bus, illicit taxi, and mud-caked foot?encountering adventures only he could have: from the literary (sparring with the incisive Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk) to the dissolute (surviving a week-long bender on the Trans-Siberian Railroad). And wherever he goes, his omnivorous curiosity and unerring eye for detail never fail to inspire, enlighten, inform, and entertain.

PAUL THEROUX was born in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1941 and published his first novel, Waldo, in 1967. His fiction includes The Mosquito Coast, My Secret History, My Other Life, Kowloon Tong, Blinding Light, and most recently, The Elephanta Suite. His highly acclaimed travel books include Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, Fresh Air Fiend, and Dark Star Safari. He has been the guest editor of The Best American Travel Writing and is a frequent contributor to various magazines, including The New Yorker. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

View Details >>

Lands of Lost Borders

Kate Harris

"Lands of Lost Borders is illuminating, heart-warming, and hopeful in its suggestion that we will explore not to conquer but to connect."—Booklist (starred review)

"Lands of Lost Borders carried me up into a state of openness and excitement I haven’t felt for years. It’s a modern classic."—Pico Iyer

A brilliant, fierce writer makes her debut with this enthralling travelogue and memoir of her journey by bicycle along the Silk Road—an illuminating and thought-provoking fusion of The Places in Between, Lab Girl, and Wild that dares us to challenge the limits we place on ourselves and the natural world.

As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she craved—to be an explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and metaphysician—had gone extinct. From what she could tell of the world from small-town Ontario, the likes of Marco Polo and Magellan had mapped the whole earth; there was nothing left to be discovered. Looking beyond this planet, she decided to become a scientist and go to Mars.

In between studying at Oxford and MIT, Harris set off by bicycle down the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel. Pedaling mile upon mile in some of the remotest places on earth, she realized that an explorer, in any day and age, is the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. Forget charting maps, naming peaks: what she yearned for was the feeling of soaring completely out of bounds. The farther she traveled, the closer she came to a world as wild as she felt within.

Lands of Lost Borders, winner of the 2018 Banff Adventure Travel Award, is the chronicle of Harris’s odyssey and an exploration of the importance of breaking the boundaries we set ourselves; an examination of the stories borders tell, and the restrictions they place on nature and humanity; and a meditation on the existential need to explore—the essential longing to discover what in the universe we are doing here.

Like Rebecca Solnit and Pico Iyer, Kate Harris offers a travel account at once exuberant and reflective, wry and rapturous. Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of the self that can never fully be mapped. Weaving adventure and philosophy with the history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders celebrates our connection as humans to the natural world, and ultimately to each other—a belonging that transcends any fences or stories that may divide us.

View Details >>

The Tenth Island

Diana Marcum

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer comes an exuberant memoir of personal loss and longing, and finding connection on the remote Azorean Islands of the Atlantic Ocean.

Reporter Diana Marcum is in crisis. A long-buried personal sadness is enfolding her--and her career is stalled--when she stumbles upon an unusual group of immigrants living in rural California. She follows them on their annual return to the remote Azorean Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, where bulls run down village streets, volcanoes are active, and the people celebrate festas to ease their saudade, a longing so deep that the Portuguese word for it can't be fully translated.

Years later, California is in a terrible drought, the wildfires seem to never end, and Diana finds herself still dreaming of those islands and the chuva--a rain so soft you don't notice when it begins or ends.

With her troublesome Labrador retriever, Murphy, in tow, Diana returns to the islands of her dreams only to discover that there are still things she longs for--and one of them may be a most unexpected love.

An Amazon Charts Most Read book.

View Details >>

A Pilgrimage to Eternity

Timothy Egan

From "the world's greatest tour guide," a deeply-researched, captivating journey through the rich history of Christianity and the winding paths of the French and Italian countryside that will feed mind, body, and soul (New York Times).

"What a wondrous work! This beautifully written and totally clear-eyed account of his pilgrimage will have you wondering whether we should all embark on such a journey, either of the body, the soul or, as in Egan's case, both." --Cokie Roberts

"Egan draws us in, making us feel frozen in the snow-covered Alps, joyful in valleys of trees with low-hanging fruit, skeptical of the relics of embalmed saints and hopeful for the healing of his encrusted toes, so worn and weathered from their walk."--The Washington Post


Moved by his mother's death and his Irish Catholic family's complicated history with the church, Timothy Egan decided to follow in the footsteps of centuries of seekers to force a reckoning with his own beliefs. He embarked on a thousand-mile pilgrimage through the theological cradle of Christianity to explore the religion in the world that it created. Egan sets out along the Via Francigena, once the major medieval trail leading the devout to Rome, and travels overland via the alpine peaks and small mountain towns of France, Switzerland and Italy, accompanied by a quirky cast of fellow pilgrims and by some of the towering figures of the faith--Joan of Arc, Henry VIII, Martin Luther. The goal: walking to St. Peter's Square, in hopes of meeting the galvanizing pope who is struggling to hold together the church through the worst crisis in half a millennium.

A thrilling journey, a family story, and a revealing history, A Pilgrimage to Eternity looks for our future in its search for God.

View Details >>

Travel Light, Move Fast

Alexandra Fuller

From bestselling author Alexandra Fuller, the utterly original story of her father, Tim Fuller, and a deeply felt tribute to a life well lived
Six months before he died in Budapest, Tim Fuller turned to his daughter: "Let me tell you the secret to life right now, in case I suddenly give up the ghost. Then he lit his pipe and stroked his dog Harry's head. Harry put his paw on Dad's lap and they sat there, the two of them, one man and his dog, keepers to the secret of life. "Well?" she said. "Nothing comes to mind, quite honestly, Bobo," he said, with some surprise. "Now that I think about it, maybe there isn't a secret to life. It's just what it is, right under your nose. What do you think, Harry?" Harry gave Dad a look of utter agreement. He was a very superior dog. "Well, there you have it," Dad said.

 

After her father's sudden death, Alexandra Fuller realizes that if she is going to weather his loss, she will need to become the parts of him she misses most. So begins Travel Light, Move Fast, the unforgettable story of Tim Fuller, a self-exiled black sheep who moved to Africa to fight in the Rhodesian Bush War before settling as a banana farmer in Zambia. A man who preferred chaos to predictability, to revel in promise rather than wallow in regret, and who was more afraid of becoming bored than of getting lost, he taught his daughters to live as if everything needed to happen all together, all at once--or not at all. Now, in the wake of his death, Fuller internalizes his lessons with clear eyes and celebrates a man who swallowed life whole.

A master of time and memory, Fuller moves seamlessly between the days and months following her father's death, as she and her mother return to his farm with his ashes and contend with his overwhelming absence, and her childhood spent running after him in southern and central Africa. Writing with reverent irreverence of the rollicking grand misadventures of her mother and father, bursting with pandemonium and tragedy, Fuller takes their insatiable appetite for life to heart. Here, in Fuller's Africa, is a story of joy, resilience, and vitality, from one of our finest writers.

View Details >>

Alone Time

Stephanie Rosenbloom

"In Paris (or anywhere else, really) a table for one can be a most delightful place." --Alone Time, as seen in The New York Times

A wise, passionate account of the pleasures of traveling solo

In our increasingly frantic daily lives, many people are genuinely fearful of the prospect of solitude, but time alone can be both rich and restorative, especially when travelling. Through on-the-ground reporting and recounting the experiences of artists, writers, and innovators who cherished solitude, Stephanie Rosenbloom considers how being alone as a traveller--and even in one's own city--is conducive to becoming acutely aware of the sensual details of the world--patterns, textures, colors, tastes, sounds--in ways that are difficult to do in the company of others.

Alone Time is divided into four parts, each set in a different city, in a different season, in a single year. The destinations--Paris, Istanbul, Florence, New York--are all pedestrian-friendly, allowing travelers to slow down and appreciate casual pleasures instead of hurtling through museums and posting photos to Instagram. Each section spotlights a different theme associated with the joys and benefits of time alone and how it can enable people to enrich their lives--facilitating creativity, learning, self-reliance, as well as the ability to experiment and change. Rosenbloom incorporates insights from psychologists and sociologists who have studied solitude and happiness, and explores such topics as dining alone, learning to savor, discovering interests and passions, and finding or creating silent spaces. Her engaging and elegant prose makes Alone Time as warmly intimate an account as the details of a trip shared by a beloved friend--and will have its many readers eager to set off on their own solo adventures.

View Details >>

Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party's Promise to the People

Kekla Magoon

A National Book Award Finalist
A Coretta Scott King Author Award Honor Book
A Michael L. Printz Honor Book
A Walter Dean Myers Honor Book


With passion and precision, Kekla Magoon relays an essential account of the Black Panthers--as militant revolutionaries and as human rights advocates working to defend and protect their community.

 

In this comprehensive, inspiring, and all-too-relevant history of the Black Panther Party, Kekla Magoon introduces readers to the Panthers' community activism, grounded in the concept of self-defense, which taught Black Americans how to protect and support themselves in a country that treated them like second-class citizens. For too long the Panthers' story has been a footnote to the civil rights movement rather than what it was: a revolutionary socialist movement that drew thousands of members--mostly women--and became the target of one of the most sustained repression efforts ever made by the U.S. government against its own citizens.

Revolution in Our Time puts the Panthers in the proper context of Black American history, from the first arrival of enslaved people to the Black Lives Matter movement of today. Kekla Magoon's eye-opening work invites a new generation of readers grappling with injustices in the United States to learn from the Panthers' history and courage, inspiring them to take their own place in the ongoing fight for justice.

View Details >>

The Only Black Girls in Town

Brandy Colbert

Award-winning YA author Brandy Colbert's debut middle-grade novel about the only two black girls in town who discover a collection of hidden journals revealing shocking secrets of the past. Beach-loving surfer Alberta has been the only black girl in town for years. Alberta's best friend, Laramie, is the closest thing she has to a sister, but there are some things even Laramie can't understand. When the bed and breakfast across the street finds new owners, Alberta is ecstatic to learn the family is black-and they have a 12-year-old daughter just like her.

Alberta is positive she and the new girl, Edie, will be fast friends. But while Alberta loves being a California girl, Edie misses her native Brooklyn and finds it hard to adapt to small-town living.

When the girls discover a box of old journals in Edie's attic, they team up to figure out exactly who's behind them and why they got left behind. Soon they discover shocking and painful secrets of the past and learn that nothing is quite what it seems.

 

 

View Details >>

Speak Up

Miranda Paul

When something really matters, one voice can make a difference. This spirited, vibrant picture book celebrates diversity and encourages kids to speak up, unite with others, and take action when they see something that needs to be fixed.

Join a diverse group of kids on a busy school day as they discover so many different ways to speak up and make their voices heard! From shouting out gratitude for a special treat to challenging a rule that isn't fair, these young students show that simple, everyday actions can help people and make the world a better place.

View Details >>

An Abolitionist's Handbook

Patrisse Cullors

In AN ABOLITIONIST’S HANDBOOK, Cullors charts a framework for how everyday activists can effectively fight for an abolitionist present and future.

Filled with relatable pedagogy on the history of abolition, a reimagining of what reparations look like for Black lives and real-life anecdotes from Cullors AN ABOLITIONIST’S HANDBOOK offers a bold, innovative, and humanistic approach to how to be a modern-day abolitionist. Cullors asks us to lead with love, fierce compassion, and precision.

In AN ABOLITIONIST’S HANDBOOK readers will learn how to:

- have courageous conversations
- move away from reaction and towards response
- take care of oneself while fighting for others
- turn inter-community conflict into a transformative action
- expand one’s imagination, think creatively, and find the courage to experiment
- make justice joyful
- practice active forgiveness
- make space for difficult feelings and honor mental health
- practice non-harm and cultivate compassion
- organize local and national governments to work towards abolition
- move away from cancel culture

AN ABOLITIONIST’S HANDBOOK is for those who are looking to reimagine a world where communities are treated with dignity, care and respect. It gives us permission to move away from cancel culture and into visioning change and healing.

View Details >>

The Sweetness of Water

Nathan Harris

An Instant New York Times bestseller / An Oprah's Book Club Pick

In the spirit of The Known World and The Underground Railroad, an award-winning "miraculous debut" (Washington Post) about the unlikely bond between two freedmen who are brothers and the Georgia farmer whose alliance will alter their lives, and his, forever

In the waning days of the Civil War, brothers Prentiss and Landry--freed by the Emancipation Proclamation--seek refuge on the homestead of George Walker and his wife, Isabelle. The Walkers, wracked by the loss of their only son to the war, hire the brothers to work their farm, hoping through an unexpected friendship to stanch their grief. Prentiss and Landry, meanwhile, plan to save money for the journey north and a chance to reunite with their mother, who was sold away when they were boys.

Parallel to their story runs a forbidden romance between two Confederate soldiers. The young men, recently returned from the war to the town of Old Ox, hold their trysts in the woods. But when their secret is discovered, the resulting chaos, including a murder, unleashes convulsive repercussions on the entire community. In the aftermath of so much turmoil, it is Isabelle who emerges as an unlikely leader, proffering a healing vision for the land and for the newly free citizens of Old Ox.

With candor and sympathy, debut novelist Nathan Harris creates an unforgettable cast of characters, depicting Georgia in the violent crucible of Reconstruction. Equal parts beauty and terror, as gripping as it is moving, The Sweetness of Water is an epic whose grandeur locates humanity and love amid the most harrowing circumstances.

One of President Obama's Favorite Books of 2021

Winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence

Winner of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize

Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize

Shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award

Longlisted for the 2022 Carnegie Medal for Excellence

Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

A Best Book of the Year: Oprah Daily, NPR, Washington Post, Time, Boston Globe, Smithsonian, Chicago Public Library, BookBrowse, and the Oregonian

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

A July 2021 Indie Next Pick

View Details >>

Felon

Reginald Dwayne Betts

Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems--canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace--and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of postincarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person's life.

The poems move between traditional and newfound forms with power and agility--from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume's radiant conclusion. Drawing inspiration from lawsuits filed on behalf of the incarcerated, the redaction poems focus on the ways we exploit and erase the poor and imprisoned from public consciousness. Traditionally, redaction erases what is top secret; in Felon, Betts redacts what is superfluous, bringing into focus the profound failures of the criminal justice system and the inadequacy of the labels it generates.

Challenging the complexities of language, Betts animates what it means to be a "felon."

View Details >>

1919, Poems

Eve L. Ewing

NPR Best Books of 2019
Chicago Tribune Best Books of 2019
Chicago Review of Books Best Poetry Book of 2019
O Magazine Best Books by Women of Summer 2019
The Millions Must-Read Poetry of June 2019
LitHub Most Anticipated Reads of Summer 2019

The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots comprising the nation's Red Summer, has shaped the last century but is not widely discussed. In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event--which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries--through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history, and illuminates the thin line between the past and the present.

View Details >>

Don't Call Us Dead

Danez Smith

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection

“[Smith's] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy.”—
The New Yorker

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality—the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood—and a diagnosis of HIV positive. “Some of us are killed / in pieces,” Smith writes, “some of us all at once.” Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America—“Dear White America”—where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.

View Details >>

Magical Negro

Morgan Parker

Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification, while exploring and troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics--of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience. In Magical Negro, Parker creates a space of witness, of airing grievances, of pointing out patterns. In these poems are living documents, pleas, latent traumas, inside jokes, and unspoken anxieties situated as firmly in the past as in the present--timeless black melancholies and triumphs.

View Details >>

White Blood

Kiki Petrosino

In her fourth full-length book, White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, Kiki Petrosino turns her gaze to Virginia, where she digs into her genealogical and intellectual roots, while contemplating the knotty legacies of slavery and discrimination in the Upper South. From a stunning double crown sonnet, to erasure poetry contained within DNA testing results, the poems in this collection are as wide-ranging in form as they are bountiful in wordplay and truth. In her poem 'The Shop at Monticello, ' she writes: 'I'm a black body in this Commonwealth, which turned black bodies/ into money. Now, I have money to spend on little trinkets to remind me/ of this fact. I'm a money machine & my body constitutes the common wealth.' Speaking to history, loss, and injustice with wisdom, innovation, and a scientific determination to find the poetic truth, White Blood plants Petrosino's name ever more firmly in the contemporary canon.

View Details >>

Selected Poems of Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes

With the publication of his first book of poems,The Weary Blues, in 1926, Langston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in black writing in America.  The poems Hughes wrote celebrated the experience of invisible men and women: of slaves who "rushed the boots of Washington"; of musicians on Lenox Avenue; of the poor and the lovesick; of losers in "the raffle of night."  They conveyed that experience in a voice that blended the spoken with the sung, that turned poetic lines into the phrases of jazz and blues, and that ripped through the curtain separating high from popular culture.  They spanned the range from the lyric to the polemic, ringing out "wonder and pain and terror-- and the marrow of the bone of life."

The poems in this collection were chosen by Hughes himself shortly before his death in 1967 and represent work from his entire career, including "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "The Weary Blues," "Still Here," "Song for a Dark Girl," "Montage of a Dream Deferred," and "Refugee in America."  It gives us a poet of extraordinary range, directness, and stylistic virtuosity.

View Details >>

Indecency

Justin Phillip Reed

Winner of the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry

Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful--the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.

View Details >>

The Taking of Jake Livingston

Ryan Douglass

An Instant New York Times Bestseller!

Get Out meets Holly Jackson in this YA social thriller where survival is not a guarantee.

Sixteen-year-old Jake Livingston sees dead people everywhere. But he can't decide what's worse: being a medium forced to watch the dead play out their last moments on a loop or being at the mercy of racist teachers as one of the few Black students at St. Clair Prep. Both are a living nightmare he wishes he could wake up from. But things at St. Clair start looking up with the arrival of another Black student--the handsome Allister--and for the first time, romance is on the horizon for Jake.

Unfortunately, life as a medium is getting worse. Though most ghosts are harmless and Jake is always happy to help them move on to the next place, Sawyer Doon wants much more from Jake. In life, Sawyer was a troubled teen who shot and killed six kids at a local high school before taking his own life. Now he's a powerful, vengeful ghost and he has plans for Jake. Suddenly, everything Jake knows about dead world goes out the window as Sawyer begins to haunt him. High school soon becomes a different kind of survival game--one Jake is not sure he can win.

View Details >>

The Hate U Give

Angie Thomas

8 starred reviews ∙ Goodreads Choice Awards Best of the Best  ∙  William C. Morris Award Winner ∙ National Book Award Longlist ∙ Printz Honor Book ∙ Coretta Scott King Honor Book ∙ #1 New York Times Bestseller!

Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed.

Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil’s name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr.

But what Starr does—or does not—say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life.

And don't miss On the Come Up, Angie Thomas's powerful follow-up to The Hate U Give.

View Details >>

Ace of Spades

Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé

Gossip Girl meets Get Out in Ace of Spades, a YA contemporary thriller by debut author Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé about two students, Devon & Chiamaka, and their struggles against an anonymous bully.

All you need to know is . . . I’m here to divide and conquer. Like all great tyrants do. —Aces

When two Niveus Private Academy students, Devon Richards and Chiamaka Adebayo, are selected to be part of the elite school’s senior class prefects, it looks like their year is off to an amazing start. After all, not only does it look great on college applications, but it officially puts each of them in the running for valedictorian, too.

Shortly after the announcement is made, though, someone who goes by Aces begins using anonymous text messages to reveal secrets about the two of them that turn their lives upside down and threaten every aspect of their carefully planned futures.

As Aces shows no sign of stopping, what seemed like a sick prank quickly turns into a dangerous game, with all the cards stacked against them. Can Devon and Chiamaka stop Aces before things become incredibly deadly?

With heart-pounding suspense and relevant social commentary comes a high-octane thriller from debut author Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé.

View Details >>

This Book Is Anti-Racist

Tiffany Jewell

Who are you? What is racism? Where does it come from? Why does it exist? What can you do to disrupt it? Learn about social identities, the history of racism and resistance against it, and how you can use your anti-racist lens and voice to move the world toward equity and liberation.

“In a racist society, it’s not enough to be non-racist—we must be ANTI-RACIST.” —Angela Davis

Gain a deeper understanding of your anti-racist self as you progress through 20 chapters that spark introspection, reveal the origins of racism that we are still experiencing, and give you the courage and power to undo it. Each chapter builds on the previous one as you learn more about yourself and racial oppression. Exercise prompts get you thinking and help you grow with the knowledge.

Author Tiffany Jewell, an anti-bias, anti-racist educator and activist, builds solidarity beginning with the language she chooses—using gender neutral words to honor everyone who reads the book. Illustrator Aurélia Durand brings the stories and characters to life with kaleidoscopic vibrancy.

After examining the concepts of social identity, race, ethnicity, and racism, learn about some of the ways people of different races have been oppressed, from indigenous Americans and Australians being sent to boarding school to be “civilized” to a generation of Caribbean immigrants once welcomed to the UK being threatened with deportation by strict immigration laws.

Find hope in stories of strength, love, joy, and revolution that are part of our history, too, with such figures as the former slave Toussaint Louverture, who led a rebellion against white planters that eventually led to Haiti’s independence, and Yuri Kochiyama, who, after spending time in an internment camp for Japanese Americans during WWII, dedicated her life to supporting political prisoners and advocating reparations for those wrongfully interned.

This book is written for EVERYONE who lives in this racialized society—including the young person who doesn’t know how to speak up to the racist adults in their life, the kid who has lost themself at times trying to fit into the dominant culture, the children who have been harmed (physically and emotionally) because no one stood up for them or they couldn’t stand up for themselves, and also for their families, teachers, and administrators.

With this book, be empowered to actively defy racism to create a community (large and small) that truly honors everyone.

View Details >>

Stamped (for Kids)

Jason Reynolds

THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

This chapter book edition of the groundbreaking #1 bestseller by luminaries Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds is an essential introduction to the history of racism and antiracism in America

RACE. Uh-oh. The R-word.
But actually talking about race is one of the most important things to learn how to do.

Adapted from the award-winning, bestselling Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, this book takes readers on a journey from present to past and back again. Kids will discover where racist ideas came from, identify how they impact America today, and meet those who have fought racism with antiracism. Along the way, they'll learn how to identify and stamp out racist thoughts in their own lives.

Ibram X. Kendi's research, Jason Reynolds's and Sonja Cherry-Paul's writing, and Rachelle Baker's art come together in this vital read, enhanced with a glossary, timeline, and more.

View Details >>

Unspeakable

Carole Boston Weatherford

Winner of the Coretta Scott King Book Awards for Author and Illustrator

A Caldecott Honor Book

A Sibert Honor Book

Longlisted for the National Book Award

A Kirkus Prize Finalist

A Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book

"A must-have"--Booklist (starred review)

Celebrated author Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrator Floyd Cooper provide a powerful look at the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the worst incidents of racial violence in our nation's history. The book traces the history of African Americans in Tulsa's Greenwood district and chronicles the devastation that occurred in 1921 when a white mob attacked the Black community.

News of what happened was largely suppressed, and no official investigation occurred for seventy-five years. This picture book sensitively introduces young readers to this tragedy and concludes with a call for a better future.

Download the free educator guide here: https://lernerbooks.com/download/unspeakableteachingguide

View Details >>

Change Sings

Amanda Gorman

A lyrical picture book debut from #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman and #1 New York Times bestselling illustrator Loren Long

"I can hear change humming
In its loudest, proudest song.
I don't fear change coming,
And so I sing along."

In this stirring, much-anticipated picture book by presidential inaugural poet and activist Amanda Gorman, anything is possible when our voices join together. As a young girl leads a cast of characters on a musical journey, they learn that they have the power to make changes--big or small--in the world, in their communities, and in most importantly, in themselves.

With lyrical text and rhythmic illustrations that build to a dazzling crescendo by #1 New York Times bestselling illustrator Loren Long, Change Sings is a triumphant call to action for everyone to use their abilities to make a difference.

View Details >>

Wade in the Water

Tracy K. Smith

Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize
Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection

The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United States

Even the men in black armor, the ones
Jangling handcuffs and keys, what else

Are they so buffered against, if not love’s blade
Sizing up the heart’s familiar meat?

We watch and grieve. We sleep, stir, eat.
Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean.

Love: naked almost in the everlasting street,
Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze.

—from “Unrest in Baton Rouge”

In Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America’s contemporary moment both to our nation’s fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy. Smith’s signature voice—inquisitive, lyrical, and wry—turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men, and violence. Here, private utterance becomes part of a larger choral arrangement as the collection widens to include erasures of The Declaration of Independence and the correspondence between slave owners, a found poem comprised of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, a sequence of letters written by African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and the survivors’ reports of recent immigrants and refugees. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America’s essential poets.

View Details >>

Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry

Nikky Finney

Finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry

Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry is a twenty-first-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of black American life. National Book Award winner Nikky Finney's fifth collection contains lighthouse poems, narrative hotbeds, and treasured artifacts--copper coins struck from a new matrix for poetry, one that testifies from the witness stand and punctuates the occasional lyric within a new language of "docu-poetry."

The ancestors arise and fly, and the black female body is the "insurgent sensualist," hunted but fighting to live and love in the ways it wants and knows best: "I loved being / a black girl but had not yet learned / to play dead . . ."

The tenderness of a father's handwritten notes shadows the collection like a ghost, while the treasured, not-for-sale interiority of a black girl's fountainhead takes over every page. "One yellaw gal with an all-black tongue has gone missing." Finney has composed a new black spiritual, and one of the great voices of our time again stamps her singular sound into the new day.

View Details >>

Light for the World to See

Kwame Alexander

A collection of three powerful poems that take on racism and Black resistance in America by New York Times best-selling author Kwame Alexander. Includes an introduction by the author.

View Details >>

If Beale Street Could Talk

James Baldwin

A stunning love story about a young Black woman whose life is torn apart when her lover is wrongly accused of a crime--a moving, painful story, so vividly human and so obviously based on reality that it strikes us as timeless (The New York Times Book Review)

One of the best books Baldwin has ever written-perhaps the best of all. --The Philadelphia Inquirer

Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin's story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions--affection, despair, and hope. In a love story that evokes the blues, where passion and sadness are inevitably intertwined, Baldwin has created two characters so alive and profoundly realized that they are unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche.

 

View Details >>

The Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead

#1 New York Times Bestseller - Winner of the Pulitzer Prize - Winner of the National Book Award - Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction - Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize

Cora is a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood--where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him. In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman's will to escape the horrors of bondage--and a powerful meditation on the history we all share.

View Details >>

How to Be an Antiracist

Ibram X. Kendi

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—The New York Times Book Review, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Shelf Awareness, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews

Antiracism is a transformative concept that reorients and reenergizes the conversation about racism—and, even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. At its core, racism is a powerful system that creates false hierarchies of human value; its warped logic extends beyond race, from the way we regard people of different ethnicities or skin colors to the way we treat people of different sexes, gender identities, and body types. Racism intersects with class and culture and geography and even changes the way we see and value ourselves. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas—from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilities—that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their poisonous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves.

Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science with his own personal story of awakening to antiracism. This is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a just and equitable society.

View Details >>

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates

NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN • NAMED ONE OF PASTES BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • People • Entertainment Weekly • Vogue • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • New York • Newsday • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly  

In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?

Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

View Details >>

Buddha in Your Backpack

Franz Metcalf

Learn to navigate those trying teen years with greater ease using simple, effective teachings, meditations and mindfulness exercises from Buddhism

A guide for navigating the teen years, Buddha in Your Backpack is for young people who want to learn more about Buddhism or for those who simply want to understand what’s going on inside themselves and in the world around them.

This ispirational guide tells Buddha’s life story in a fashion teens will relate to, describing Buddha as a young rebel not satisfied with the answers of his elders. It then introduces Buddha’s core teachings with chapters like “All About Me” and “Been There, Why’d I Do That?”

Celebrated, bestselling author, Franz Metcalf, presents thoughtful and spiritual insights on school, dating, hanging out, jobs, and other issues of special interest to teens — inviting readers to look inside themselves for answers.

View Details >>

Breathe Out

Author TBC

Life can often feel overwhelming and with pressure from school, relationships and social media it can be hard to remember to take a bit of time for ourselves - to take care of what's going on for us on the inside.

Breathe Out has been written specifically for young minds and the unique challenges that teenagers face today, it is filled with exercises, techniques and tips specially designed to help you to take a step back and take a moment for yourself.

With a variety of exercises that encourage you to be present, to be a better listener, articulate your feelings and get a handle on your screen time among many others, this is a hands-on journal that will allow you to track your moods and feel more in control when things can be a bit overwhelming. There are also mindfulness and breathing techniques to allow you to keep on top of your emotions wherever you are.

By unlocking your creativity - whether that's using colour, list making, noting your thoughts and experiences - you'll explore what makes you you, build new inner strengths and discover how to prioritize your wellbeing every day. The result? A happier, more fulfilled you.

View Details >>

Stuff That Sucks

Ben Sedley

Sometimes everything sucks. This unique, illustrated guide will help you move past negative thoughts and feelings and discover what truly matters to you.

If you struggle with negative thoughts and emotions, you should know that your pain is real. No one should try to diminish it. Sometimes stuff really does suck and we have to acknowledge it. Worry, sadness, loneliness, anger, and shame are big and important, but they can also get in the way of what really matters. What if, instead of fighting your pain, you realized what really matters to you--and put those things first in life? If you did that, maybe your pain wouldn't feel so big anymore. Isn't it worth a try?

Stuff That Sucks offers a compassionate and validating guide to accepting emotions, rather than struggling against them. With this book as your guide, you'll learn to prioritize your thoughts, feelings, and values. You'll figure out what you care about the most, and then start caring some more! The skills you'll learn are based on acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). Yes, there are a few written exercises, but this isn't a workbook. It's a journey into the stuff that sucks, what makes that sucky stuff suck even more, and how just a few moments each day with the stuff that matters will ultimately transform the stuff that sucks into stuff that is just stuff. Make sense?

Maybe you want to be more creative? Or maybe you simply want to do better in school or be a better friend? This book will show you how to focus on what you really care about, so that all that other sucky stuff doesn't seem so, well, sucky anymore.

 

View Details >>

Mindfulness for Teens in 10 Minutes a Day

Jennie Marie Battistin

Stop stressing and start being your best self--master mindfulness for teens in no time.

Homework, relationships, social media, life planning...you've got a lot going on, but you don't have to feel overwhelmed by it. In fact, you could actually enjoy life more while getting more done. Mindfulness for Teens in 10 Minutes a Day shows you how to take control of stress and become the boss of your feelings--and boost your focus while you're at it.

Start feeling better with mindfulness, the practice of being fully present and cultivating calm, one moment at a time. Mindfulness for Teens in 10 Minutes a Day features simple and effective exercises--that fit perfectly into your daily routine--making it easy to keep yourself in the here and now, tackle challenges one at a time, and make the most of every minute.

Mindfulness for Teens in 10 Minutes a Day includes:

  • Practice peace--Learn to manage whatever life throws at you and bring focus, calm, and joy back to your day with mindfulness for teens.
  • 60 guided exercises--Practice helpful exercises and develop essential mindfulness strategies sure to help you through high school and beyond.
  • Mindfulness now--Discover how you can rock your homework, connect to others, chill out, and sleep better using mindfulness--it only takes 10 minutes a day.

Less stress and more focus--Mindfulness for Teens in 10 Minutes a Day makes it easy.

View Details >>