Nothing too exciting for me this week, but maybe one of these new books will speak to you!
NEW RELEASES IN HARDCOVER
THE FIRST BAD MAN by Miranda July Cheryl is haunted by a baby boy she met when she was six, who sometimes recurs as other people’s babies. She is also obsessed with Phillip, a philandering board member at the women’s self-defense nonprofit where she works. She believes they’ve been making love for many lifetimes, though they have yet to consummate in this one. When Cheryl’s bosses ask if their 21-year-old daughter, Clee, can move into her house for a little while, Cheryl’s eccentrically ordered world explodes. Fiction
THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN by Paula Hawkins
Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck. She’s even started to feel like she knows them. Their life --- as she sees it --- is perfect. Not unlike the life she recently lost. And then she sees something shocking. It’s only a minute until the train moves on, but it’s enough. Now everything has changed. Psychological Thriller
WEST OF SUNSET by Stewart O'Nan In 1937, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a troubled, uncertain man whose literary success was long over. In poor health, with his wife consigned to a mental asylum and his finances in ruins, he struggled to make a new start as a screenwriter in Hollywood. By December 1940, he would be dead of a heart attack. Those last three years of Fitzgerald’s life, often obscured by the legend of his earlier Jazz Age glamour, are the focus of Stewart O’Nan’s new novel. Historical Fiction
MY FATHER’S WIVES by Mike Greenberg
Jonathan Sweetwater has been blessed with money, a fulfilling career and a beautiful family. But there’s one thing he never had: a relationship with his late father. On his quest for understanding --- about himself, about manhood, about marriage --- Jonathan decides to track down his father’s five ex-wives. His journey will take him from cosmopolitan cities to the mile-high mountains to a tropical island --- and ultimately back to confront the one thing Jonathan has that his father never did: home. Fiction
A SMALL INDISCRETION by Jan EllisonAt 19, Annie Black trades a bleak future in her washed-out hometown for a London winter of drinking and abandon. Some two decades later, in San Francisco, she is a successful lighting designer married to a good man and the mother of three children. Then, one June morning, a photograph arrives in her mailbox, igniting an old longing and setting off a chain of events that threaten to overturn her family’s hard-won happiness. Fiction
NEW IN PAPERBACK
ALL JOY AND NO FUN: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood by Jennifer SeniorThousands of books have examined the effects of parents on their children. But almost none have thought to ask: What are the effects of children on their parents? In ALL JOY AND NO FUN, award-winning journalist Jennifer Senior analyzes the many ways children reshape their parents' lives. She argues that changes in the last half century have radically altered the roles of today's mothers and fathers, making their mandates at once more complex and far less clear. Parenting/Sociology
OUT OF THE WOODS: A Memoir of Wayfinding by Lynn DarlingWhen her college-bound daughter leaves home, Lynn Darling, widowed over a decade earlier, finds herself alone and utterly lost, with no idea of what she wants or even who she is. Searching for answers, she leaves New York for the solitary woods of Vermont. Removed from the familiar, cocooned in the natural world, her only companions a new dog and a compass, she hopes to develop a sense of direction --- both in the woods and in her life. Memoir
ROOSEVELT’S BEAST by Louis BayardPlagued by hunger and suffering the lingering effects of malaria, Theodore Roosevelt, his son Kermit, and the other members of the now-ravaged Roosevelt-Rondon scientific expedition are traveling deeper and deeper into the jungle. When Kermit and Teddy are kidnapped by a never-before-seen Amazonian tribe, the great hunters are asked one thing in exchange for their freedom: find and kill a beast that leaves no tracks and that no member of the tribe has ever seen. Historical Thriller
Peeking into the archives...today in:
2014:
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea by April Genevieve Tucholke2013:
Behemoth (Leviathan #2) by Scott Westerfeld2012:
15 Great Works of Literature-Inspired Nail Art2011:
Closing down for end of the year Festivus...2010:
Seriously cool pop-up book!2009:
News: Edgar Allan Poe Postage Stamp & Discussion Question