Russia's attack on the 2016 election was novel in its scope and its methods, but the underlying principles were old, writes David Shimer in an important new history.
(Image credit: Knopf)
Portis, who died in February, occupied a unique place in American letters. His novels, written in the vernacular of his native Arkansas, beg to be read aloud.
“Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.” spotlights a well-heeled white family and their ugly predilections after a tragic loss.
In Sam Lansky’s “Broken People,” the narrator tries to cure self-doubt through hallucinogens.
Doug J. Swanson’s “Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers” recounts tales of lynchings, massacres and ruthless white supremacy.
In her new memoir, “All the Way to the Tigers,” Mary Morris, acting on dreams she’s had since she was a child, travels to India to come eye to eye with a big cat.
In “Disposable City,” Mario Alejandro Ariza reckons with what climate change has in store for the spicy city on the Atlantic.
More work by Hervé Guibert, who died at 36 in 1991, is being made available in English, including his great AIDS novel “To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life.”
Susan Howe’s new book, “Concordance,” pastes together collages of word and thought from old letters, manuscripts and (yes) concordances.
A young woman’s reaction on social media to a terrorist act seals her fate in “A Burning,” by Megha Majumdar, a novel set in Kolkata that examines the effects of power on the powerless.
In Lauren Wolk’s “Echo Mountain,” 12-year-old Ellie experiences both the horrors and the healing powers of nature when hard times force her family to return to the land.
In Rob Harrell’s “Wink,” middle school social drama and an eyesight-threatening cancer are a lot for one kid to handle. Humor helps.
Author: Thomas, Elisabeth, author.
Published: 2020
Call Number: LP F THOMAS
Format: Large print
Summary: Catherine House is a school of higher learning like no other. Hidden deep in the woods of rural Pennsylvania, this crucible of reformist liberal arts study with its experimental curriculum, wildly selective admissions policy, and formidable endowment, has produced some of the world's best minds: prize-winning authors, artists, inventors, Supreme Court justices, presidents. For those lucky few selected, tuition, room, and board are free. But acceptance comes with a price. Students are required to give the House three years--summers included--completely removed from the outside world. Family, friends, television, music, even their clothing must be left behind. In return, the school promises a future of sublime power and prestige, and that its graduates can become anything or anyone they desire. Among this year's incoming class is Ines Murillo, who expects to trade blurry nights of parties, cruel friends, and dangerous men for rigorous intellectual discipline--only to discover an environment of sanctioned revelry. Even the school's enigmatic director, Viktória, encourages the students to explore, to expand their minds, to find themselves within the formidable iron gates of Catherine. For Ines, it is the closest thing to a home she's ever had. But the House's strange protocols soon make this refuge, with its worn velvet and weathered leather, feel increasingly like a gilded prison. And when tragedy strikes, Ines begins to suspect that the school--in all its shabby splendor, hallowed history, advanced theories, and controlled decadence--might be hiding a dangerous agenda within the secretive, tightly knit group of students selected to study its most promising and mysterious curriculum.
Author: Del Rosario, Juleah, author.
Published: 2020
Call Number: Y DELROSAR
Format: Books
Summary: Told in two voices, sisters Row and Ariana are frozen by grief over their mother's death, years before, until Ariana leaves for reasons Row does not understand. After her mother died a few years ago, Rowena and her sister, Ariana, drifted into their own corners of the world, each figuring out in their own separate ways how to exist in a world in which their mother is no longer alive. When Ariana disappears-- at night, in the middle of a snowstorm-- Row is left to piece together the mystery behind where Ariana went and why. And she comes to realize that she might be part of the reason Ariana is gone. -- adapted from jacket
Author: Hankin, Laura, author.
Published: 2020
Call Number: F HANKIN
Format: Books
Summary: "A dark, witty page-turner set around a group of wealthy mothers and the young musician who takes a job singing to their babies and finds herself pulled into their glamorous lives and dangerous secrets.... After her former band shot to superstardom without her, Claire reluctantly agrees to a gig as a playgroup musician for overprivileged infants on New York's Park Avenue. Claire is surprised to discover that she is smitten with her new employers, a welcoming clique of wellness addicts with impossibly shiny hair, who whirl from juice cleanse to overpriced miracle vitamins to spin class with limitless energy. There is perfect hostess Whitney who is on the brink of social-media stardom and just needs to find a way to keep her perfect life from falling apart. Caustically funny, recent stay-at-home mom Amara who is struggling to embrace her new identity. And old money, veteran mom Gwen who never misses an opportunity to dole out parenting advice. But as Claire grows closer to the cool women who pay her bills, she uncovers secrets and betrayals that no amount of activated charcoal can fix. Filled with humor and shocking twists, Happy and You Know It is a brilliant take on motherhood--exposing it as yet another way for society to pass judgment on women--while also exploring the baffling magnetism of curated social-media lives that are designed to make us feel unworthy. But, ultimately, this dazzling novel celebrates the unlikely bonds that form, and the power that can be unlocked, when a group of very different women is thrown together when each is at her most vulnerable"--
Author: Zambreno, Kate, author.
Published: 2020
Call Number: F ZAMBRENO
Format: Books
Summary: "At work on a novel that is overdue to her publisher, spending long days alone with her restless terrier, corresponding ardently with fellow writers, the novel's narrator grows obsessed with the challenge of writing the present tense, of capturing time itself. Entranced by the work of Rilke, Durer, Chantal Akerman, and others, she photographs the residents and strays of her neighborhood, haunts bookstores and galleries, and records her thoughts in a yellow notebook that soon subsumes her work on the novel. As winter closes in, a series of disturbances--the appearances and disappearances of enigmatic figures, the burglary of her apartment--leaves her distracted and uncertain . . . until an intense and tender disruption changes everything."--
Author: Weir, Alison, 1951- author.
Published: 2020
Call Number: F WEIR
Format: Books
Summary: "Bestselling author and acclaimed historian Alison Weir tells the tragic story of Henry VIII's fifth wife, a nineteen-year-old beauty with a hidden past, in this fifth novel in the sweeping Six Tudor Queens series. In the spring of 1540, Henry VIII, desperate to be rid of his queen, Anna of Kleve, first sets eyes on the enchanting Katheryn Howard. Although the king is now an ailing forty-nine-year-old measuring fifty-four inches around his waist, his amorous gaze lights upon the pretty teenager. Seated near him intentionally by her ambitious Catholic family, Katheryn readily succumbs to the courtship. Henry is besotted with his bride. He tells the world she is a rose without a thorn, and extols her beauty and her virtue. Katherine delights in the pleasures of being queen and the power she has to do good to others. She comes to love the ailing, obese king and tolerate his nightly attentions. If she can bear him a son, her triumph will be complete. But Katheryn has a past of which Henry knows nothing, and which comes back increasingly to haunt her--even as she courts danger yet again" -- Provided by publisher.
Author: Kamp, David, author. Questlove, author of foreword.
Published: 2020
Call Number: 791.45
Format: Books
Summary: "In 1970, in soundstage on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a group of men and women of various ages and races met to finish the first season of a children's TV program. They had identified a social problem: poor children were entering kindergarten without the learning skills of their middle-class counterparts. They hoped, too, that they had identified a solution: to use television to better prepare these disadvantaged kids for school. No one knew then, but this children's TV program would go on to start a cultural revolution. It was called Sesame Street. Sesame Street was part of a larger movement that saw media professionals and thought leaders leveraging their influence to help children learn. A year and a half earlier, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood premiered. Fast on its heels came Schoolhouse Rock!, a video series dreamed up by Madison Avenue admen to teach kids times tables, civics, and grammatical rules, and Free to Be... You and Me, the TV star Marlo Thomas's audacious multi-pronged campaign (it was first a record album, and then a book and a television special) to instill the concept of gender equality in young minds. There was more: programs such as The Electric Company, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, ZOOM, and others followed, and captivated young viewers. In Sunny Days, bestselling author David Kamp takes readers behind the scenes to show how these programs made it on air. He draws on hundreds of hours of interviews from the creators and participants of these programs-among them Joan Ganz Cooney, Lloyd Morrisett, Newton Minow, Sonia Manzano, Loretta Long, Bob McGrath, Marlo Thomas, and Rita Moreno-as well as archival research. Kamp explains how these like-minded individuals found their way into television, not as fame- or money-hungry would-be auteurs and stars, but as people who wanted to use TV to help children. This is both a fun and fascinating story, and a masterful work of cultural history. Sunny Days captures a period in children's television where enlightened progressivism prevailed, and shows how this period changed the lives of millions. Nothing had ever happened like this before, Kamp forcefully and eloquently argues, and nothing has ever happened like it since"--
Author: Hammes, Brady, author.
Published: 2020
Call Number: F HAMMES
Format: Books
Summary: "After an injury cripples her dance career in the US, Sam is scouted by a wealthy Russian investor seeking ballerinas for his Versailles-esque campus in rural Russia. Not only is she geographically cut-off from the rest of the world, Sam isolates herself from friends and family as her heroin addiction takes control. Similarly alone, Jonah, her brother, is monitoring elephants in the thick of Gabon. An unfortunate crossing with a poacher soon pulls Jonah into the orbit of ivory traffickers whose connection he cannot sever until he has carried out exactly what they have asked of him. And then there's the third and oldest of the siblings whose life, by his own reckoning, has gone most awry. Gavin, in the midst of a quarter-life crisis, has just been written off his fledgling TV show, newly-dumped, and ruined his chances with a regional production (and an engaged regional director). All three siblings reunite in their home of Chicago to confront their past and prove that the bond between siblings is unshakeable... even in the throes of an unfathomable, and foreign, danger."--Provided by publisher.
Author: Fossey, Brooke, author.
Published: 2020
Call Number: LP F FOSSEY
Format: Large print
Summary: "For Duffy Sinclair life boils down to one simple thing: maintaining his residence at the idyllic Centennial Assisted Living. Without it, he's destined for the roach-infested nursing home down the road--and after wasting the first eighty-eight years of his life, he refuses to waste away for the rest. So, he keeps his shenanigans to the bare minimum with the help of his best friend and roommate, Carl Upton. Then Carl's granddaughter Josie climbs through their bedroom window with booze on her breath and a black eye. Thanks to an unlikely friendship that becomes fast family, his life doesn't boil down the same anymore. Not when he finally has a chance to leave a legacy"--Back cover.
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