Popular Fiction - National Library Week
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The Boxcar Librarian
When Works Progress Administration (WPA) editor Millie Lang finds herself on the wrong end of a potential political scandal, she's shipped off to Montana to work on the state's American Guide Series - travel books intended to put the nation's destitute writers to work.
Millie arrives to an eclectic staff claiming their missed deadlines are due to sabotage, possibly from the state's powerful Copper Kings who don't want their long and bloody history with union organizers aired for the rest of the country to read. But Millie begins to suspect that the answer might instead lie with the town's mysterious librarian, Alice Monroe.
More than a decade earlier, Alice Monroe created the Boxcar Library in order to deliver books to isolated mining towns where men longed for entertainment and connection. Alice thought she found the perfect librarian to staff the train car in Colette Durand, a miner's daughter with a shotgun and too many secrets behind her eyes.
Now, no one in Missoula will tell Millie why both Alice and Colette went out on the inaugural journey of the Boxcar Library, but only Alice returned.
The three women's stories dramatically converge in the search to uncover what someone is so desperately trying to hide: what happened to Colette Durand.
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The Little Lost Library
When an elderly Miracle Springs resident, Lucille Wynter, arranges for Nora to deliver an order of books to her creepy, crumbling Southern Gothic mansion on the outskirts of town, Nora doesn’t expect to be invited in. An agoraphobe, Lucille doesn’t leave Wynter House. But when Lucille doesn’t come to the door to collect her books, Nora begins to worry.
Forcing her way into Lucille’s dilapidated home, Nora is shocked to find rooms bursting with books and a lifeless Lucille at the foot of her stairs. After reading a note left behind by Lucille, Nora wonders if her death was an accident. Did she fall or was she pushed by someone seeking a valuable item hidden within Wynter House? Lucille’s children are clearly confident the house contains something of value, because they hire Nora to sift through the piles of books.
Nora’s obsession with Lucille’s collection becomes cause for concern among her friends in the Secret, Book, and Scone Society - she’s even neglecting her bookshop! But Nora does find something valuable deep inside Wynter House - a revelation about Lucille’s terrible past . . . and a secret worth a small fortune. But there’s someone who’d do anything to keep the truth buried amid the moldering tomes, and it’s up to Nora and her friends to track down a murderer before Wynter House’s lost library claims another victim . . .
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Booked on Murder
Carrie Singleton is ready to kiss the single life goodbye. Her wedding to Dylan Avery is just a few weeks away, and a happy ending is about to be hers. But when a body is found on the lawn of their wedding venue, happily-ever-after is looking deadlier than ever.
The victim turns out to be Billy Carpenter, a young man recently released from prison after serving time for a bank robbery. The stolen money he’d buried is gone and Carrie and the police suspect Billy’s two alleged co-conspirators, his friends Luke Rizzo and Tino Valdez. But then Luke is murdered and Tino is nowhere to be found.
With no leads and only a week to go before her big day, Carrie is on the hunt for clues. She hopes to wrap up this investigation with a neat bow before she and Dylan tie the knot. Carrie has something old, something new, and something borrowed ready for her walk down the aisle. Now she needs to find the killer without becoming the ‘something blue.’
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Murder at the College Library
An invitation from a prestigious liberal arts college to buy their mystery-novel collection comes as a welcome surprise for Raymond Ambler, crime-fiction curator at New York City's prestigious 42nd Street Library. But his pleasure quickly turns sour when the collection's curator - Ambler's friend Sam Abernathy - tells him he plans to fight the acquisition tooth and nail.
The collection would make a fine addition to his holdings, but Ambler's not looking for drama. It's a shame, then, that drama's looking for him. Just a couple of weeks later, one of Abernathy's colleagues is shot dead from the library's roof, and all signs point to the crime-loving professor as the perpetrator of the violent act.
Why would Abernathy kill - and was it for his collection, for college politics, or for some dark secret yet to be revealed? Ambler's not sure his old friend's a killer, but he is sure he wants justice - for both the living and the dead.
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The Wren in the Holly Library
Some things aren’t supposed to exist outside of our imagination.
Thirteen years ago, monsters emerged from the shadows and plunged Kierse’s world into a cataclysmic war of near-total destruction. The New York City she knew so well collapsed practically overnight. In the wake of that carnage, the Monster Treaty was created. A truce...of sorts.
But tonight, Kierse—a gifted and fearless thief—will break that treaty. She’ll enter the Holly Library...not knowing it’s the home of a monster. He’s charming. Quietly alluring. Terrifying. But he knows talent when he sees it; it’s just a matter of finding her price.
Now she’s locked into a dangerous bargain with a creature unlike any other. She’ll sacrifice her freedom. She’ll offer her skills. Together, they’ll put their own futures at risk. But he’s been playing a game across centuries—and once she joins in, there will be
no escape... -
That Night in the Library
On the night before graduation, seven students gather in the basement of their university's rare books library. They're not allowed in the library after closing time, but it's the perfect place for the ritual they want to perform - one borrowed from the Greeks, said to free those who take part in it from the fear of death. And what better time to seek the wisdom of ancient gods than in the hours before they'll scatter in different directions to start their real lives?
But just a few minutes into their celebration, the lights go out - and one of them drops dead. As the body count rises, with nothing but the books to protect them, the group must figure out how to survive the night while trapped with a murderer.
One night locked in the library. What could go wrong?
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The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society
Librarian Sherry Pinkwhistle keeps finding bodies—and solving murders. But she's concerned by just how many killers she's had to track down in her quaint village. None of her neighbors seem surprised by the rising body count...but Sherry is becoming convinced that whatever has been causing these deaths is unnatural.
When someone close to Sherry ends up dead, and her cat, Lord Thomas Crowell, becomes possessed by what seems to be an ancient demon, Sherry begins to think she’s going to need to become an exorcist as well as an amateur sleuth. With the help of her town's new priest, and an assortment of friends who dub themselves the "Demon-Hunting Society," Sherry will have to solve the murder and get rid of a demon.
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What You Are Looking for Is in the Library
What are you looking for? So asks Tokyo's most enigmatic librarian. For Sayuri Komachi is able to sense exactly what each visitor to her library is searching for and provide just the book recommendation to help them find it.
A restless retail assistant looks to gain new skills, a mother tries to overcome demotion at work after maternity leave, a conscientious accountant yearns to open an antique store, a recently retired salaryman searches for newfound purpose.
In Komachi's unique book recommendations they will find just what they need to achieve their dreams. What You Are Looking For Is in the Library is about the magic of libraries and the discovery of connection. This inspirational tale shows how, by listening to our hearts, seizing opportunity and reaching out, we too can fulfill our lifelong dreams. Which book will you recommend?
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The Book That Wouldn't Burn
A boy has lived his whole life trapped within a vast library, older than empires and larger than cities.
A girl has spent hers in a tiny settlement out on the Dust where nightmares stalk and no one goes.
The world has never even noticed them. That's about to change.
Their stories spiral around each other, across worlds and time. This is a tale of truth and lies and hearts, and the blurring of one into another. A journey on which knowledge erodes certainty, and on which, though the pen may be mightier than the sword, blood will be spilled and cities burned.
This is the first volume of "The Library" trilogy.
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How Can I Help You
No one knows Margo’s real name. Her colleagues and patrons at a small-town public library know only her middle-aged normalcy, congeniality, and charm. They have no reason to suspect that she is, in fact, a former nurse with a trail of premature deaths in her wake. She has turned a new page, so to speak, and the library is her sanctuary, a place to quell old urges.
That is, at least, until Patricia, a recent graduate and failed novelist, joins the library staff. Patricia quickly notices Margo’s subtly sinister edge, and watches her carefully. When a tragic incident in the library bathroom gives her a hint of Margo’s mysterious past, Patricia can’t resist digging deeper - even as her new fixation becomes all-consuming and sends both women hurtling toward disaster.
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The Woman in the Library
The ornate reading room at the Boston Public Library is quiet, until the tranquility is shattered by a woman's terrified scream. Security guards take charge immediately, instructing everyone inside to stay put until the threat is identified and contained. While they wait for the all-clear, four strangers, who'd happened to sit at the same table, pass the time in conversation and friendships are struck. Each has his or her own reasons for being in the reading room that morning - it just happens that one is a murderer.
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The Littlest Library
Jess Metcalf is perfectly content with her quiet, predictable life. But when her beloved grandmother passes away and she loses her job at the local library, Jess' life is turned upside down.
Determined to pick up the pieces, Jess decides it's time for a new beginning. Unable to part with her grandmother's cherished books, she packs them all up and moves to a tiny cottage in the English countryside. To her surprise, Jess discovers that she's now the owner of an old red phone box that was left on the property. Missing her job at the local library, Jess decides to give back to her new community - using her grandmother's collection to turn the ordinary phone box into the littlest library in England.
It's not long before the books are borrowed and begin to work their literary magic - bringing the villagers together... and managing to draw Jess' grumpy but handsome neighbor out of his shell.
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The Librarian Spy
Ava thought her job as a librarian at the Library of Congress would mean a quiet, routine existence. But an unexpected offer from the US military has brought her to Lisbon with a new mission: posing as a librarian while working undercover as a spy gathering intelligence.
Meanwhile, in occupied France, Elaine has begun an apprenticeship at a printing press run by members of the Resistance. It's a job usually reserved for men, but in the war, those rules have been forgotten. Yet she knows that the Nazis are searching for the press and its printer in order to silence them.
As the battle in Europe rages, Ava and Elaine find themselves connecting through coded messages and discovering hope in the face of war.
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The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections
Liesl Weiss long ago learned to be content working behind the scenes in the distinguished rare books department of a large university, managing details and working behind the scenes to make the head of the department look good. But when her boss has a stroke and she's left to run things, she discovers that the library's most prized manuscript is missing.
Liesl tries to sound the alarm and inform the police about the missing priceless book, but is told repeatedly to keep quiet, to keep the doors open and the donors happy. But then a librarian unexpectedly stops showing up to work. Liesl must investigate both disappearances, unspooling her colleagues' pasts like the threads of a rare book binding as it becomes clear that someone in the department must be responsible for the theft. What Liesl discovers about the dusty manuscripts she has worked among for so long - and about the people who care for and revere them - shakes the very foundation on which she has built her life.
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The Personal Librarian
In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J. P. Morgan to curate a collection of rare manuscripts, books, and artwork for his newly built Pierpont Morgan Library. Belle becomes a fixture in New York City society and one of the most powerful people in the art and book world, known for her impeccable taste and shrewd negotiating for critical works as she helps create a world-class collection.
But Belle has a secret, one she must protect at all costs. She was born not Belle da Costa Greene but Belle Marion Greener. She is the daughter of Richard Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard and a well-known advocate for equality. Belle’s complexion isn’t dark because of her alleged Portuguese heritage that lets her pass as white - her complexion is dark because she is African American.
Popular Nonfiction - National Poetry Month
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We the Gathered Heat
A beautiful anthology featuring some of the brightest voices in contemporary American poetry who challenge, expand, and illuminate the meaning of the label "Asian American and Pacific Islander" in today's world.
In this thoughtfully curated, intergenerational collection, poets of multiple languages, lands, and waters write against and through the contested terrain of AAPI identity. Too often, Pacific Islanders and Asian Americans are squeezed into the same story. The poets gathered here, and the lineages they represent, exceed this sameness. May this anthology uplift complexities and incite transformation and joy.
Contributors include Marilyn Chin, Joshua Nguyen, Teresia Teaiwa, Haunani-Kay Trask, and many more writers, both established and emerging.
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Spectral Evidence
Elegant, profound, and intoxicating—Spectral Evidence, Gregory Pardlo’s first major collection of poetry after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Digest, moves fluidly among considerations of the pro-wrestler Owen Hart; Tituba, the only Black woman to be accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials; MOVE, the movement and militant separatist group famous for its violent stand-offs with the Philadelphia Police Department (“flames rose like orchids . . . / blocks lay open like egg cartons”); and more.
At times cerebral and at other times warm, inviting and deeply personal, Spectral Evidence compels us to consider how we think about devotion, beauty and art; about the criminalization and death of Black bodies; about justice—and about how these have been inscribed into our present, our history, and the Western canon: “If I could be / the forensic dreamer / . . . / . . . my art would be a mortician’s / paints.”
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The Invention of the Darling
"The poet of rapture and tenderness" (Major Jackson, American Poets), Li-Young Lee speaks these poems with the intimacy and primacy of a whisper, as if from a lover to a beloved, or a believer to God. Each poem in The Invention of the Darling is a mysterious conjunction of spirit and matter, movement and stillness, the divine and the mundane, the sacred and the forbidden. They yearn for holistic union with The Beloved, every sentence another name for The Beloved, every poem another way to say "I love you." Forged in awe of life and love, these poems emerge from the unlit depths of our earthly, material desires and our deepest fears of mortality.
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Sturge Town
The site of the ruined ancestral home of Kwame Dawes's family, in one of the earliest post-slavery free villages in Jamaica, Sturge Town is at once a place of myth and, for Dawes, a metaphor of the journeying that has taken him from Ghana, through Jamaica, and to the United States. The poet ranges through time, pursued by a keen sense of mortality, and engages in an intimate dialogue with the reader--serious, confessional, alarmed, and sometimes teasing. Metrically careful and sonorous, these poems engage in a personal dialogue with the reader, serious, confessional, alarmed and sometimes teasing. They create highly visualized spaces, observed, remembered, imagined, the scenes of both outward and inner journeys. Whether finding beauty in the quotidian or taking astonishing imaginative leaps, these poems speak movingly of self-reflection, family crises, loss, transcendence, the shattering realities of political engagement, and an unremitting investment in the vivid indeterminacy of poetry.
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Poemhood: Our Black Revival
Come, claim your wings.
Lift your life above the earth,
return to the land of your father's birth.
What exactly is it to be Black in America?
Well, for some, it's learning how to morph the hatred placed by others into love for oneself; for others, it's unearthing the strength it takes to continue to hold one's swagger when multitudinous factors work to make Black lives crumble. For some, it's gathering around the kitchen table as Grandma tells the story of Anansi the spider, while for others it's grinning from ear to ear while eating auntie's spectacular 7Up cake. Black experiences and traditions are complex, striking, and vast - they stretch longer than the Nile and are four times as deep - and carry more than just unimaginable pain - there is also joy.
Featuring an all-star group of thirty-seven powerful poetic voices, including such luminaries as Kwame Alexander, James Baldwin, Ibi Zoboi, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Gwendolyn Brooks, this riveting anthology depicts the diversity of the Black experience by fostering a conversation about race, faith, heritage, and resilience between fresh poets and the literary ancestors that came before them.
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Grand Tour
Grand Tour, the debut collection of poetry by Elisa Gonzalez, dramatizes the mind in motion as it grapples with something more than an event: she writes of a whole life, to transcendent effect. By the end, we feel we have been witness to a poet remaking herself.
Gonzalez’s poetry depicts the fullness of living. There are the small moments: “white wine greening in a glass,” trumpet blossoms “panicking across the garden.” Some poems adopt the oracular quality of a parable but invariably refuse a clear moral. The poet moves through elegy, romantic and sexual encounters, family history, and place - Cyprus, Puerto Rico, Poland, Ohio - all constellated in “a chaos of faraway.” The collection is held together less by answers than by a persistent question: How do you reconcile a hatred for the world’s pain with a love for that same world, which is indivisible from its worst aspects?
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Ukraine at War
War came to Ukraine in February 2022; it was uninvited - although not entirely unexpected given Russia’s steady, massive troop build-up on Ukraine’s eastern border over the winter. When war exploded, millions of people around the world watched it compulsively on TV.
Daoud Sarhandi-Williams - author of the internationally–acclaimed Bosnian War Posters - traveled to Ukraine in the summer of 2022 to photograph street art. He gathered a lot more images besides - as well as a trove of extraordinary war poetry by Ukrainian citizens, shared internationally here for the first time. The author brings all these elements together in an original, multi-layered visual book that is moving, profound, and painfully beautiful.
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Spoken Word
In 2009, when he was twenty years old, Joshua Bennett was invited to perform a spoken word poem for Barack and Michelle Obama, at the same White House "Poetry Jam" where Lin-Manuel Miranda declaimed the opening bars of a work-in-progress that would soon revolutionize American theater. That meeting is but one among many in the trajectory of Bennett's young life, as he rode the cresting wave of spoken word through the 2010s.
In this book, he goes back to its roots, considering the Black Arts movement and the prominence of poetry and song in Black education; the origins of the famed Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the Lower East Side living room of the visionary Miguel Algarín, who hosted verse gatherings with legendary figures like Ntozake Shange and Miguel Piñero; the rapid growth of the "slam" format that was pioneered at the Get Me High Lounge in Chicago; the perfect storm of spoken word's rise during the explosion of social media; and Bennett's own journey alongside his older sister, whose work to promote the form helped shape spaces online and elsewhere dedicated to literature and the pursuit of human freedom.
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The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes on
Many have called our time dystopian. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples.
With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time - from Korean comfort women during World War II, to the precipice of climate crisis, to children wandering a museum in the future. These poems explore narrative distances and queer linearity, investigating on microscopic scales before soaring towards the universal. As she wrestles with the daily griefs and distances of this apocalyptic world, Choi also imagines what togetherness - between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest - could look like. Bringing together Choi's signature speculative imagination with even greater musicality than her previous work, this volume ultimately charts new paths toward hope in the aftermaths, and visions for our collective survival.
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Blood Snow
Here, in a true Inupiaq voice, dg okpik's relationship to language is an access point for understanding larger kinships between animals, peoples, traditions, histories, ancestries, and identities. Through an animist process of transfiguration into a Shaman's omniscient voice, we are greeted with a destabilizing grammar of selfhood. Okpik's poems have a fraught relationship to her former home in Anchorage, Alaska, a place of unparalleled natural beauty and a traumatic site of devastation for Alaskan native nations and landscapes alike. In this way, okpik's poetry speaks to the dualistic nature of reality and how one's existence in the world simultaneously shapes and is shaped by its environs.
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I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times
I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times takes its inspiration and concept from the cult classic film The Wiz to explore a Black woman’s journey out of the South Side of Chicago and into adulthood. The narrative arc of The Wiz - a tumultuous departure from home, trials designed to reveal new things about the self, and the eventual return home - serves as a loose trajectory for this collection, pulling readers through an abandoned barn, a Wendy's drive-thru, a Beyoncé video, Grandma's house, Sunday service, and the corner store. At every stop, the speaker is made to confront her womanhood, her sexuality, the visibility of her body, alcoholism in her family, and various ways in which narratives are imposed on her.
Subverting monolithic ideas about the South Side of Chicago, and re-casting the city as a living, breathing entity, this volume spans sestinas, sonnets, free-verse, and erasures, all to reimagine the concept of home. Chicago isn’t just a city, but a teacher, a lingering shadow, a way of seeing the world.
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Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light
Over a long, influential career in poetry, Joy Harjo has been praised for her “warm, oracular voice” (John Freeman, Boston Globe) that speaks “from a deep and timeless source of compassion for all” (Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR). Her poems are musical, intimate, political, and wise, intertwining ancestral memory and tribal histories with resilience and love.
In this gemlike volume, Harjo selects her best poems from across fifty years, beginning with her early discoveries of her own voice and ending with moving reflections on our contemporary moment. Generous notes on each poem offer insight into Harjo’s inimitable poetics as she takes inspiration from Navajo horse songs and jazz, reckons with home and loss, and listens to the natural messengers of the earth. As evidenced in this transcendent collection, Joy Harjo’s “poetry is light and elixir, the very best prescription for us in wounded times” (Sandra Cisneros, Millions).
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Dearly
In Dearly, Margaret Atwood addresses themes such as love, loss, the passage of time, the nature of nature and - zombies. Her new poetry is introspective and personal in tone, but wide-ranging in topic. In poem after poem, she casts her unique imagination and unyielding, observant eye over the landscape of a life carefully and intuitively lived.
While many are familiar with Margaret Atwood's fiction--including her groundbreaking and bestselling novels The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments, Oryx and Crake, among others--she has, from the beginning of her career, been one of our most significant contemporary poets. And she is one of the very few writers equally accomplished in fiction and poetry. This collection is a stunning achievement that will be appreciated by fans of her novels and poetry readers alike.
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Home Body
rupi kaur constantly embraces growth, and in home body, she walks readers through a reflective and intimate journey visiting the past, the present, and the potential of the self. home body is a collection of raw, honest conversations with oneself - reminding readers to fill up on love, acceptance, community, family, and embrace change. illustrated by the author, themes of nature and nurture, light and dark, rest here.
i dive into the well of my body
and end up in another world
everything i need
already exists in me
there's no need
to look anywhere else
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Finalists
What will we call the last generation before the looming end times? With Finalists Rae Armantrout suggests one option. Brilliant and irascible, playful and intense, Armantrout nails the current moment's debris fields and super computers, its sizzling malaise and confusion, with an exemplary immensity of heart and a boundless capacity for humor. The poems in this book find (and create) beauty in midst of the ongoing crisis.