Celebrate Pride – A Free People Read Freely

People sometimes look at our banned books display and say: They aren’t really banned, are they? You have them for sale here.

Some of the books you’ll likely find on our Pride Reads display this year.

Yes, you can buy Judy Blume’s Forever or Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye or All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson in our store or from our online shop. But those same books can’t be found in many schools and libraries here in Florida or around the country. PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for free expression, found that during the 2021-2022 school, Florida schools banned 565 books, many of them because they have “LGBTQ+ themes, protagonists of color, or that touch on race or racism.”

We sell books because we believe books are important. We believe books help us think about who we are and who we could be. Hiding the books doesn’t erase the history some people would like to forget, or stop people from being gay or nonbinary or transgender – but it may make those experiences harder for many people to talk about, learn about, and empathize with.

Juno Dawson Quote, courtesy of Libro.fm

As Juno Dawson, author of This Book is Gay, says, “LGBTQ people exist. We have always existed. Banning books isn’t going to remove us from the world. What it will do is leave a vulnerable minority in real danger. Young LGBTQ people deserve the same education and information as anyone else.”

Or as LeVar Burton, former host of Reading Rainbow, says, “Read the books they’re banning. That’s where the good stuff is! If they don’t want you to read it, there’s a reason why.” 

Celebrate Pride with us by reading something from our Pride Reads display or browse online: fiction & nonfiction.

* Thanks to Tracie D. Hall, Executive Director of the American Library Association, for the phrase, “Free people read freely.” (https://time.com/6276657/librarian-tracie-d-hall-full-time100-speech/)

Why Fathers Cry at Night: A Memoir in Love Poems, Recipes, Letters, and Remembrances by Kwame Alexander

This powerful memoir from a #1 New York Times bestselling author and Newbery Medalist features poetry, letters, recipes, and other personal artifacts that provide an intimate look into his life and the loved ones he shares it with.In an intimate and non-traditional (or “new-fashioned”) memoir, Kwame Alexander shares snapshots of a man learning how to love. He takes us through stories of his parents: from being awkward newlyweds in the sticky Chicago summer of 1967, to the sometimes-confusing ways they showed their love to each other, and for him. He explores his own relationships—his difficulties as a newly wedded, 22-year-old father, and the precariousness of his early marriage working in a jazz club with his second wife. Alexander attempts to deal with the unravelling of his marriage and the grief of his mother’s recent passing while sharing the solace he found in learning how to perfect her famous fried chicken dish. With an open heart, Alexander weaves together memories of his past to try and understand his greatest love: his daughters.

Full of heartfelt reminisces, family recipes, love poems, and personal letters, Why Fathers Cry at Night inspires bravery and vulnerability in every reader who has experienced the reckless passion, heartbreak, failure, and joy that define the whirlwind woes and wonders of love.

The Lost Journals of Sacajewea by Debra Magpie Earling

A June 2023 Indie Next Pick, Selected by Booksellers
Minneapolis Star Tribune Recommended Fiction Read for 2023
Millions Most Anticipated Read for 2023
Library Journal Recommended Read for 2023
A Motherly Best Book of 2023From the award-winning author of Perma Red comes a devastatingly beautiful novel that challenges prevailing historical narratives of Sacajewea.

“In my seventh winter, when my head only reached my Appe’s rib, a White Man came into camp. Bare trees scratched sky. Cold was endless. He moved through trees like strikes of sunlight. My Bia said he came with bad intentions, like a Water Baby’s cry.”

Among the most memorialized women in American history, Sacajewea served as interpreter and guide for Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. In this visionary novel, acclaimed Indigenous author Debra Magpie Earling brings this mythologized figure vividly to life, casting unsparing light on the men who brutalized her and recentering Sacajewea as the arbiter of her own history.

Raised among the Lemhi Shoshone, in this telling the young Sacajewea is bright and bold, growing strong from the hard work of “learning all ways to survive” gathering berries, water, roots, and wood; butchering buffalo, antelope, and deer; catching salmon and snaring rabbits; weaving baskets and listening to the stories of her elders.

When her village is raided and her beloved Appe and Bia are killed, Sacajewea is kidnapped and then gambled away to Charbonneau, a French Canadian trapper.Heavy with grief, Sacajewea learns how to survive at the edge of a strange new world teeming with fur trappers and traders. When Lewis and Clark’s expedition party arrives, Sacajewea knows she must cross a vast and brutal terrain with her newborn son, the white man who owns her, and a company of men who wish to conquer and commodify the world she loves.

Written in lyrical, dreamlike prose, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is an astonishing work of art and a powerful tale of perseverance–the Indigenous woman’s story that hasn’t been told.

The Flavor Theasurus by Niki Segnit

“The reigning champion of matching ingredients.” -Yotam Ottolenghi

“Brilliant, informative, and witty.” -Rukmini Iyer

The plant-led follow-up to The Flavor Thesaurus, “a rich and witty and erudite collection” (Epicurious), featuring 92 essential ingredients and hundreds of flavor combinations.

With her debut cookbook, The Flavor Thesaurus, Niki Segnit taught readers that no matter whether an ingredient is “grassy” like dill, cucumber, or peas, or “floral fruity” like figs, roses, or blueberries, flavors can be created in wildly imaginative ways. Now, she again draws from her “phenomenal body of work” (Yotam Ottolenghi) to produce a new treasury of pairings-this time with plant-led ingredients.

More Flavors explores the character and tasting notes of chickpea, fennel, pomegranate, kale, lentil, miso, mustard, rye, pine nut, pistachio, poppy seed, sesame, turmeric, and wild rice-as well as favorites like almond, avocado, garlic, lemon, and parsley from the original-then expertly teaches readers how to pair them with ingredients that complement. With her celebrated blend of science, history, expertise, anecdotes, and signature sense of humor, Niki Segnit’s More Flavors is a modern classic of food writing, and a brilliantly useful, engaging reference book for every cook’s kitchen.

The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY VOGUEELLE, OPRAH DAILY, THE WASHINGTON POST, BUZZFEED AND VULTURE

“Erudite, intimate, hilarious, poignant . . . A gorgeously written novel of youth’s promise, of the quest to find one’s tribe and one’s calling.” —Leigh Haber, Oprah Daily

The Booker Prize finalist and widely acclaimed author of Real Life and Filthy Animals returns with a deeply involving new novel of young men and women at a crossroads

In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. Among them are Seamus, a frustrated young poet; Ivan, a dancer turned aspiring banker who dabbles in amateur pornography; Fatima, whose independence and work ethic complicate her relationships with friends and a trusted mentor; and Noah, who “didn’t seek sex out so much as it came up to him like an anxious dog in need of affection.” These four are buffeted by a cast of artists, landlords, meatpacking workers, and mathematicians who populate the cafes, classrooms, and food-service kitchens of the city, sometimes to violent and electrifying consequence. Finally, as each prepares for an uncertain future, the group heads to a cabin to bid goodbye to their former lives—a moment of reckoning that leaves each of them irrevocably altered.

A novel of friendship and chosen family, The Late Americans asks fresh questions about love and sex, ambition and precarity, and about how human beings can bruise one another while trying to find themselves. It is Brandon Taylor’s richest and most involving work of fiction to date, confirming his position as one of our most perceptive chroniclers of contemporary life.

King: A Life by Jonathan Eig

“Supple, penetrating, heartstring-pulling and compulsively readable . . . Eig’s book is worthy of its subject.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“[King is] infused with the narrative energy of a thriller . . . The most compelling account of King’s life in a generation.” —Mark Whitaker, The Washington Post

Named a most anticipated book of 2023 by The Washington PostThe Millions, and Literary Hub


The first full biography in decades, King mixes revelatory and exhaustive new research with brisk and accessible storytelling to forge the definitive life for our times.

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.—and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father—as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr.

In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.

Includes 8 pages of black-and-white photographs

The Guest by Emma Cline

A young woman pretends to be someone she isn’t in this “spellbinding” (Vogue), “smoldering” (The Washington Post) novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls.

“Under Cline’s command, every sentence as sharp as a scalpel, a woman toeing the line between welcome and unwelcome guest becomes a fully destabilizing force.”—The New York Times

“Alex drained her wineglass, then her water glass. The ocean looked calm, a black darker than the sky. A ripple of anxiety made her palms go damp. It seemed suddenly very tenuous to believe that anything would stay hidden, that she could successfully pass from one world to another.”

Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome.

A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she’s been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city.

With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarefied world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.

Taut, propulsive, and impossible to look away from, Emma Cline’s The Guest is a spellbinding literary achievement.

Uncle of the Year by Andrew Rannells

From the star of The Book of Mormon and Girls, candid, hilarious essays on anxiety, ambition, and the uncertain path to adulthood that ask: How will we know when we get there?

“With the unsparing eye of David Sedaris and the social wisdom of Nora Ephron, Andrew Rannells tackles the most foundational questions of growing up.”—Lena Dunham

In Uncle of the Year, Andrew Rannells wonders: If he, now in his forties, has everything he’s supposed to need to be an adult—a career, property, a well-tailored suit—why does he still feel like an anxious twenty-year-old climbing his way toward solid ground? Is it because he hasn’t won a Tony, or found a husband, or had a child? And what if he doesn’t want those things? (A husband and a child, that is. He wants a Tony.)

In deeply personal essays drawn from his life as well as his career on Broadway and in Hollywood, Rannells argues that we all pretend—for friends, partners, parents, and others—that we are constantly succeeding in the process known as “adulting.” But if this acting is leaving us unfulfilled, then we need new markers of time, new milestones, new expectations of what adulthood is and can be.

Along the way, Rannells navigates dating, aging, mental health, bad jobs, and much more. In his essay “Uncle of the Year,” he explores the role that children play in his life, as a man who never thought having kids was necessary or even possible—until his siblings have kids and he falls in love with a man with two of his own. In “Always Sit Next to Mark Ruffalo,” he reveals the thrills and absurdities of the awards circuit, and the desire to be recognized for one’s work. And in “Horses, Not Zebras,” he shares the piece of wisdom that helped him finally come to terms with his anxiety and perfectionism.

Filled with honest insights and a sharp wit, Uncle of the Year challenges us to take a long look at who we’re pretending to be, who we know we are, and who we want to become.

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

White lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences… Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn’t write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American—in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from R.F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel.

Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena’s a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.

So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I.

So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn’t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That’s what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.

But June can’t get away from Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June’s (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.

With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media. R.F. Kuang’s novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable. 

Pieces of Blue by Holly Goldberg Sloan

From New York Times bestselling author Holly Goldberg Sloan, a compelling and heartfelt novel for fans of Maria Semple and Emma Straub about a family trying to restore a ramshackle beachside motel—and their own lives

What good was thinking the future only held cloudy skies? Wasn’t the reality that pieces of blue were always there, waiting to break through?

When Paul Hill drowns in a surfing accident, his broken-hearted wife, Lindsey, and their three children are left in huge financial trouble. Once Paul’s life insurance finally comes through, Lindsey impulsively uses the money to buy a charmingly ramshackle motel in Hawai’i, hoping for a fresh start. Teenage Olivia quickly develops a crush on a handsome but monosyllabic skateboarder. Twelve-year-old Carlos reinvents himself as a popular kid named Carl. And Sena, the youngest, will do whatever it takes to protect her beloved motel chickens.

But while the kids adjust, Lindsey is flailing, trying to pretend she knows how to bring a motel—and herself—back to life. Then a handsome stranger rolls into the motel parking lot, and she’s surprised to feel a long-dormant part of herself stirring. She accepts his offer to help, unaware that he may have secrets of his own. And all the while, out in the Pacific, the trade winds are fiercely blowing.

Funny and tender, full of twists and turns and heart, Pieces of Blue is a portrait of an irresistible family learning to start over.