Feh by Shalom Auslander

From the acclaimed author of Foreskin’s Lament, a memoir of the author’s attempt to escape the biblical story he’d been raised on and his struggle to construct a new story for himself and his family

Shalom Auslander was raised like a veal in a dysfunctional family in the Orthodox community of Monsey, New York: the son of an alcoholic father; a guilt-wielding mother; and a violent, overbearing God. Now, as he reaches middle age, Auslander begins to suspect that what plagues him is something worse, something he can’t so easily escape: a story. The story. One indelibly implanted in him at an early age, a story that told him he is fallen, broken, shameful, disgusting, a story we have all been told for thousands of years, and continue to be told by the religious and secular alike, a story called “Feh.”

Yiddish for “Yuck.”

Feh follows Auslander’s midlife journey to rewrite that story, a journey that involves Phillip Seymour Hoffman, a Pulitzer-winning poet, Job, Arthur Schopenhauer, GHB, Wolf Blitzer, Yuval Noah Harari and a pastor named Steve in a now-defunct church in Los Angeles.

Can he move from Feh to merely meh? Can he even dream of moving beyond that?

Auslander’s recounting of his attempt to exorcize the story he was raised with—before he implants it onto his children and/or possibly poisons the relationship of the one woman who loves him—isn’t sacred. It is more-than-occasionally profane. And like all his work, it is also relentlessly funny, subversively heartfelt and fearlessly provocative.

Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

A year in the life of the unforgettable Catalina Ituralde, a wickedly wry and heartbreakingly vulnerable student at an elite college, forced to navigate an opaque past, an uncertain future, tragedies on two continents, and the tantalizing possibilities of love and freedom

“Diabolically charming and magnetic. I enjoyed the hell out of this little exploding geyser of a book.”—Ira Glass

When Catalina is admitted to Harvard, it feels like the fulfillment of destiny: a miracle child escapes death in Latin America, moves to Queens to be raised by her undocumented grandparents, and becomes one of the chosen. But nothing is simple for Catalina, least of all her own complicated, contradictory, ruthlessly probing mind. Now a senior, she faces graduation to a world that has no place for the undocumented; her sense of doom intensifies her curiosities and desires. She infiltrates the school’s elite subcultures—internships and literary journals, posh parties and secret societies—which she observes with the eye of an anthropologist and an interloper’s skepticism: she is both fascinated and repulsed. Craving a great romance, Catalina finds herself drawn to a fellow student, an actual budding anthropologist eager to teach her about the Latin American world she was born into but never knew, even as her life back in Queens begins to unravel. And every day, the clock ticks closer to the abyss of life after graduation. Can she save her family? Can she save herself? What does it mean to be saved?

Brash and daring, part campus novel, part hagiography, part pop song, Catalina is unlike any coming-of-age novel you’ve ever read—and Catalina, bright and tragic, circled by a nimbus of chaotic energy, driven by a wild heart, is a character you will never forget.

On Cuba by Noam Chomsky, Vijay Prashad

An intimate conversation between towering public intellectuals examining the contentious interplay between the Cuban Revolution and U.S. empire

An audacious revolutionary experiment in the backyard of empire, Cuba has occupied a vexed role in the international order for decades. Though its doctors (and fighters)–and the outsized influence of its example–have traversed the globe, from Venezuela to Angola, its political and economic future remain uncertain as the Castro era comes to a close and the U.S. embargo proceeds unabated.

Through an intimate conversation between two of the country’s most astute observers of international politics, Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad, On Cuba traces Cuban history from the early days of the 1950s revolution to the present, interrogating U.S. interventions and extracting lessons on U.S. power and influence in the Western Hemisphere along the way. Neither a jingoistic condemnation nor an uncritical celebration, Chomsky’s heterodox approach to world affairs is on full display as he and Prashad grapple with Cuba’s unique place on the international scene.

In a media landscape saturated with half-truths and fake news, Chomsky and Prashad–“our own Frantz Fanon . . . whose] writing of protest is always tinged with the beauty of hope” (Amitava Kumar, author of Immigrant, Montana)–seek to shed light on the truth of a complex and perennially controversial nation, while examining the limits of mainstream media discourse.

I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

From New York Times bestselling horror writer Stephen Graham Jones comes a classic slasher story with a twist—perfect for fans of Riley Sager and Grady Hendrix.

1989, Lamesa, Texas. A small west Texas town driven by oil and cotton—and a place where everyone knows everyone else’s business. So it goes for Tolly Driver, a good kid with more potential than application, seventeen, and about to be cursed to kill for revenge. Here Stephen Graham Jones explores the Texas he grew up in, the unfairness of being on the outside, through the slasher horror he lives but from the perspective of the killer, Tolly, writing his own autobiography. Find yourself rooting for a killer in this summer teen movie of a novel gone full blood-curdling tragic.

JFK JR. by RoseMarie Terenzio, Liz McNeil

The first oral biography of John F. Kennedy Jr. is an extraordinarily intimate, comprehensive look at the real man behind the myth. Sharing never-before-told stories and insights, his closest friends, confidantes, lovers, classmates, teachers, and colleagues paint a vivid portrait of one of the most beloved figures of the 20th century, revealing how the boy who saluted became the man America came to know and love who still captures public imagination twenty-five years after his tragic death.

Born into the spotlight, John F. Kennedy Jr. lived a short but remarkable life filled with expectation, ambition, family pressures, love, and tragedy. JFK Jr. dives deep into his complicated psyche and explores the what-ifs, illuminating both the cultural and political moment he inhabited and the way this son of a president, so full of promise and possibility, embodied America’s most cherished hopes.

The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer

Inspired by C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, this wild and wondrous novel is a fairy tale for grown-ups who still knock on the back of wardrobes—just in case—from the author of The Wishing Game.

“This is the book you’ve been waiting for.”—Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Empire Falls and the North Bath Trilogy

Fifteen years after their miraculous homecoming, Rafe is a reclusive artist who still bears scars inside and out but has no memory of what happened during those months. Meanwhile, Jeremy has become a famed missing persons’ investigator. With his uncanny abilities, he is the one person who can help vet tech Emilie Wendell find her sister, who vanished in the very same forest as Rafe and Jeremy.

Jeremy alone knows the fantastical truth about the disappearances, for while the rest of the world was searching for them, the two missing boys were in a magical realm filled with impossible beauty and terrible danger. He believes it is there that they will find Emilie’s sister. However, Jeremy has kept Rafe in the dark since their return for his own inscrutable reasons. But the time for burying secrets comes to an end as the quest for Emilie’s sister begins. The former lost boys must confront their shared past, no matter how traumatic the memories.

Alongside the headstrong Emilie, Rafe and Jeremy must return to the enchanted world they called home for six months—for only then can they get back everything and everyone they’ve lost.

Drop In: The Gender Rebels Who Changed the Face of Skateboarding By Deborah Stoll

The bad*ss story of the female, queer, bi, and nonbinary skaters who charted a path to the Olympics and changed the face of skateboarding.

Who gets to tell the story of skateboarding? Drop In is the first book to recognize and historicize the female, queer, bi, and nonbinary humans who blazed the path that led to today’s more equitable skate culture. It wasn’t easy getting here.

Like the rest of the world, skateboarding has long been patriarchal. In the 70s, it personified the punk rock, lock-up-your-daughters, middle-finger-to-the-man ethos. In the 80s, it was Miami Vice soundtracks and parachute pants, neon graphics and fingerless gloves. In the 90s it was New York City—graffiti, hip-hop, and skating in the street. Rarely did you see a woman’s name in a skate video—either on a deck or behind the lens.

The four skateboarders at the heart of Drop In defied expectations of gender, talent, physical ability, and mental capacity to fight the status quo: Alana as the first openly nonbinary athlete in Olympic history; Vanessa as a record breaking runaway; Marbie as an accidental boundary-breaking trans icon; and Victoria as the skate rookie turned social media sensation. Drop In spotlights their paths from rebellious outsiders to recognized pioneers on the historic stage of the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, where skateboarding made its debut. Their experiences reveal a side of skateboarding that’s never been recorded, amplifying voices that have, for too long, gone unheard.

Black Bird Oracle by Deborah Harkness

Diana Bishop journeys to the darkest places within herself—and her family history—in the highly anticipated fifth novel of the beloved #1 New York Times bestselling All Souls series.

The Black Bird Oracle deftly explores the nexus of memory, history, and parenthood—the magic, pain, and promises mothers pass onto their children.”—Jodi Picoult

The stunning hardcover of The Black Bird Oracle features a custom-stamped case, beautiful endpapers, and a premium dust jacket!

Deborah Harkness first introduced the world to Diana Bishop, an Oxford scholar and witch, and vampire geneticist Matthew de Clermont in A Discovery of Witches. Drawn to each other despite long-standing taboos, these two otherworldly beings found themselves at the center of a battle for a lost, enchanted manuscript known as Ashmole 782. Since then, they have fallen in love, traveled to Elizabethan England, dissolved the Covenant between the three species, and awoken the dark powers within Diana’s family line.

Now, Diana and Matthew receive a formal demand from the Congregation: They must test the magic of their seven-year-old twins, Pip and Rebecca. Concerned with their safety and desperate to avoid the same fate that led her parents to spellbind her, Diana decides to forge a different path for her family’s future and answers a message from a great-aunt she never knew existed, Gwyneth Proctor, whose invitation simply reads: It’s time you came home, Diana.

On the hallowed ground of Ravenswood, the Proctor family home, and under the tutelage of Gwyneth, a talented witch grounded in higher magic, a new era begins for Diana: a confrontation with her family’s dark past and a reckoning for her own desire for even greater power—if she can let go, finally, of her fear of wielding it.

In this stunning new novel, grand in scope, Deborah Harkness deepens the beloved world of All Souls with powerful new magic and long-hidden secrets, and the path Diana finds at Ravenswood leads to the most consequential moments yet in this cherished series.

What the Wild Sea Can Be by Helen Scales

The acclaimed marine biologist and author of The Brilliant Abyss examines the existential threats the world’s ocean will face in the coming decades and offers cautious optimism for much of the abundant life within in

No matter where we live, “we are all ocean people,” Helen Scales emphatically observes in her bracing yet hopeful exploration of the future of the ocean. Beginning with its fascinating deep history, Scales links past to present to show how the prehistoric ocean ecology was already working in ways similar to the ocean of today. In elegant, evocative prose, she takes readers into the realms of animals that epitomize today’s increasingly challenging conditions. Ocean life everywhere is on the move as seas warm, and warm waters are an existential threat to emperor penguins, whose mating grounds in Antarctica are collapsing. Shark populations–critical to balanced ecosystems–have shrunk by 71 per cent since the 1970s, largely the result of massive and oft-unregulated industrial fishing. Orcas–the apex predators–have also drastically declined, victims of toxic chemicals and plastics with long half-lives that disrupt the immune system and the ability to breed.

Yet despite these threats, many hopeful signs remain. Increasing numbers of no-fish zones around the world are restoring once-diminishing populations. Amazing seagrass meadows and giant kelp forests rivaling those on land are being regenerated and expanded. They may be our best defense against the storm surges caused by global warming, while efforts to reengineer coral reefs for a warmer world are growing.

Offering innovative ideas for protecting coastlines and cleaning the toxic seas, Scales insists we need more ethical and sustainable fisheries and must prevent the other existential threat of deep-sea mining, which could significantly alter life on earth. Inspiring us all to maintain a sense of awe and wonder at the majesty beneath the waves, she urges us to fight for the better future that still exists for the Anthropocene ocean.

July Staff Pick: The Paris Novel

The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl (Random House), picked by bookseller Gina

When her mother dies Stella is left with a one way ticket and an unusual request “Go to Paris”…

Very similar to myself, Stella isn’t one to stray to far out of her comfort zone, but impulsively she honors her mother’s final request.

Here’s where the fun starts: through fashion, new friends, a mysterious painting and most importantly FOOD Stella begins to understand what it truly means to live YOUR life, take chances, and live your life to the fullest. (Hey, I quit my job and moved to Key West!)

This book is a true feast for the senses (especially your taste buds – did I mention the food???)

Transport yourself to Paris and LIVE!

~ Gina