Agatha of Little Neon

Agatha of Little Neon
Author: Claire Luchette
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2021-08-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374721300

A National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Honoree “An enchanting, sparkling book about the many meanings of sisterhood.” —Kristin Iversen, Refinery29 Claire Luchette's debut, Agatha of Little Neon, is a novel about yearning and sisterhood, figuring out how you fit in (or don’t), and the unexpected friends who help you find your truest self Agatha has lived every day of the last nine years with her sisters: they work together, laugh together, pray together. Their world is contained within the little house they share. The four of them are devoted to Mother Roberta and to their quiet, purposeful life. But when the parish goes broke, the sisters are forced to move. They land in Woonsocket, a former mill town now dotted with wind turbines. They take over the care of a halfway house, where they live alongside their charges, such as the jawless Tim Gary and the headstrong Lawnmower Jill. Agatha is forced to venture out into the world alone to teach math at a local all-girls high school, where for the first time in years she has to reckon all on her own with what she sees and feels. Who will she be if she isn’t with her sisters? These women, the church, have been her home. Or has she just been hiding? Disarming, delightfully deadpan, and full of searching, Claire Luchette’s Agatha of Little Neon offers a view into the lives of women and the choices they make.

Buzz Books 2021: Spring/Summer

Buzz Books 2021: Spring/Summer
Author:
Publisher: Publishers Lunch
Total Pages: 971
Release: 2021-01-19
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1948586398

Buzz Books 2021 presents passionate readers with an insider’s look at the buzziest books due out this spring season. Such major bestselling authors as Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, Jean Hanff Korelitz, Lisa Scottoline, and Tia Williams are featured, along with literary greats Leila Slimani and Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Pulitzer Prize-winner. Other sure-to-be popular titles are by Julie Murphy, of Dumplin’ fame, with her first adult novel; Marie Benedict’s book about J.P Morgan’s personal librarian; and Flynn Berry’s thriller about two sisters and the IRA. Buzz Books has had a particularly stellar track record with highlighting the most talented, exciting debut authors, and this edition is no exception. Amanda Dennis, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Carolyn Ferrell, Gabriela Garcia, are among the literary standouts, while Emma Stonex’s The Lamplighters, inspired by a true story, has already been optioned for film. Our nonfiction selections include two World War II stories, one by Boys in the Boat author Daniel James Brown and a second by Mari K. Elder. Jennifer Gunter, M.D. of The Vagina Bible renown, returns with her Menopause Manifesto. Kat Chow, Erin French, and Danielle Henderson have written three very different memoirs, about a Chinese-American family, a restaurateur, and an unconventional Black childhood, respectively. Finally, we present early looks at new work from up-and-coming young adult authors: Safia Elhillo (Home Is Not A Country), Graci Kim (The Last Fallen Star), and Alexandrea Weis (Have You Seen Me?). Be sure to look out for Buzz Books 2021: Fall/Winter, coming in May.

The Blue Maiden

The Blue Maiden
Author: Anna Noyes
Publisher: Grove Press
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2024-05-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0802162819

From the author of Indie Next Pick and New York Times Editors' Choice Goodnight, Beautiful Women comes a transportive and chilling debut novel of two sisters growing up on an isolated Northern European island in the shadow of their late mother and the Devil It’s 1825, four generations after Berggrund Island’s women stood accused of witchcraft under the eye of their priest, now long dead. In his place is Pastor Silas, a widower with two wild young daughters, Beata and Ulrika. The sisters are outcasts: imaginative, oppositional, increasingly obsessed with the lore and legend of the island’s dark past and their absent mother, whom their father refuses to speak of. As the girls come of age, and the strictures of the community shift but never wane, their rebellions twist and sharpen. Ever capable Ulrika shoulders the burden of keeping house, while Bea, alone with unsettling visions and impulses, hungers for companionship and attention. When an enigmatic outsider arrives at their door, his presence threatens their family bond and unearths – piece by piece – a buried history to shocking ends. All the while Berggrund’s neighboring island The Blue Maiden beckons, storied home of the Witches’ Sabbath and Satan’s realm, its misted shore veiling truths the sisters have spent their lives searching for. A Nordic Gothic laced with the horrors of life in a patriarchy both hostile to and reliant on its women, The Blue Maiden is a starkly beautiful depiction of lost lineage and resilience.

Do You Remember Being Born?

Do You Remember Being Born?
Author: Sean Michaels
Publisher: Random House Canada
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2023-09-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1039006760

Scotiabank Giller Prize-winner Sean Michaels' luminous new novel takes readers on a lyrical joy ride—seven, epic days in Silicon Valley with a tall, formidable poet (inspired by the real-life Marianne Moore) and her unusual new collaborator, a digital mind just one month old. It's both a love letter to and an aching examination of art-making, family, identity and belonging. Dear Marian, the letter from the Company begins. You are one of the great writers of this century. At 75, Marian Ffarmer is almost as famous for her signature tricorn hat and cape as for her verse. She has lived for decades in the one-bedroom New York apartment she once shared with her mother, miles away from any other family, dedicating herself to her art. Yet recently her certainty about her choices has started to fray, especially when she thinks about her only son, now approaching middle age with no steady income. Into that breach comes the letter: an invitation to the Silicon Valley headquarters of one of the world's most powerful companies in order to make history by writing a poem. Marian has never collaborated with anyone, let alone a machine, but the offer is too lucrative to resist, and she boards a plane to San Francisco with dreams of helping her son. In the Company's serene and golden Mind Studio, she encounters Charlotte, their state-of-the-art poetry bot, and is startled to find that it has written 230,442 poems in the last week, though it claims to only like two of them. Over the conversations to follow, the poet is by turns intrigued, confused, moved and frightened by Charlotte's vision of the world, by what it knows and doesn't know ("Do you remember being born?" it asks her. Of course Marian doesn't, but Charlotte does.) This is a relationship, a friendship, unlike anything Marian has known, and as it evolves—and as Marian meets strangers at swimming pools, tortoises at the zoo, a clutch of younger poets, a late-night TV host and his synthetic foam set—she is forced to confront the secrets of her past and the direction of her future. Who knew that a disembodied mind could help bend Marian's life towards human connection, that friendship and family are not just time-eating obligations but soul-expanding joys. Or that belonging to one’s art means, above all else, belonging to the world.

Hiss and Hers

Hiss and Hers
Author: M. C. Beaton
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2013-07-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781250021618

If only the bossy, beloved Agatha Raisin were as lucky at finding the right man as she is at catching killers in Beaton's "New York Times"-bestselling mystery series.

Poisoned Water

Poisoned Water
Author: RaeLynn Blue
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2013-06-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1611604826

About thirty miles east of the Arizona border, just off Interstate 40, is a heart that beats in time to the ghosts of the west, of the lost, and of the betrayed. A heart that delivers an original, quirky beat all its own. That heart is Nizhoni, New Mexico; a small, dusty town lodged like a spent bullet in the heart of Indian Country. It is a town I know well, for I grew up here, in Nizhoni and it is the place I call home. Fabled for its wide, dry, open spaces, the Southwest truly lives in Nizhoni. Mud-splattered trucks, bull riders and sexy cowboys with their wide-brimmed hats reside among polished local politicians, well-groomed teachers and spotless, luxury SUVs. Here, the ancestors of lore watch over us from the pale, purple plateaus, red mesas, and brown canyons. These ancestors do not always keep us safe.

The Cougar's Trade

The Cougar's Trade
Author: Holley Trent
Publisher: Holley Trent
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2019-07-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Cougar second-in-command Hank Foye has been thrust into an unwanted mate match by the goddess La Bella Dama, and saying no is out of the question. As stubborn as he is, not even Hank wants to suffer her curse for refusing. He simply doesn’t understand why she’d pair a powerful shapeshifter with a quiet human nurse. Miles Bennett knows she’s a liability in a world where shifters fight each other to lead and roam. Orphaned young, she’s not afraid, though, to take a chance on surly Hank and walk his path with him if it means she’ll finally belong to a family again. But she’s not going to make it easy for him. She’s deserves better from him than benign neglect, and he knows it. She may not have been the mate Hank wanted, but sweet Miles is the embodiment of everything he thought he couldn’t have. Nothing makes sense anymore—not his goddess, not the local Cougar dynamics, and certainly not his feelings. How can Hank lead a group of restless shapeshifters if he can’t even get his own house, and heart, in order?

Hard-boiled Sentimentality

Hard-boiled Sentimentality
Author: Leonard Cassuto
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2009
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0231126905

Leonard Cassuto's cultural history of the hard-boiled crime genre recovers the fascinating link between tough guys and sensitive women