Category: Book

Lucky Dogs by Helen Schulman

The paths of two women on opposite ends of a high-profile sexual abuse scandal set them on a devastating collision course.

“Part thriller, part Hollywood satire, Lucky Dogs is a brash, sometimes heartbreaking saga in which trauma and self-preservation converge across decades and continents. This is Helen Schulman’s best novel yet.”Jennifer Egan, best-selling author of A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Candy House

On a sultry summer night in Paris, two women meet in line at an ice cream kiosk on the Ile de la Cité. One is tall, fair, striking, with an indeterminate accent. The other, a troubled American TV star, is hiding her beauty and identity under a shapeless sweatshirt, wearing sunglasses even in the darkness. When leering male tourists hassle the pair, the blonde pulls out a knife and a sisterhood is born. Both women have been victims of male violence, and both are warriors—one trained and calculating, one instinctually ferocious. They each think they know who they are dealing with. But both are very, very wrong.

In a story that unfolds with unexpected humor and the pace of a thriller, acclaimed novelist Helen Schulman lays bare what happens to women—no matter how fortunate they may appear to be on the surface—whose lives have been warped by brutality and misogyny. The issues are universal, but the core of the story is intimate: a passionate exploration of love, betrayal, and survival. Lucky Dogs asks and answers a shattering question: How could one woman so utterly betray another?

The Question That Matters Most by Jane Smiley

One of California’s leading writers, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, presents her first nonfiction volume on writing since 2005’s best-selling Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel.

Long acclaimed as one of America’s preeminent novelists, Jane Smiley is also an unparalleled observer of the craft of writing. In The Questions That Matter Most this Pulitzer Prize-winning writer offers steady and penetrating essays on some of the aesthetic and cultural issues that mark any serious engagement with reading and writing. Beginning with a personal introduction tracing Smiley’s migration from Iowa to California, the author reflects on her findings in the varied literature of the Golden State, whose writers have for decades litigated the West’s contested legacies of racism, class conflict, and sexual politics through their pens.

As she considers the ambiguity of character and the weight of history, her essays provide new entry points into literature, and we lucky readers can see how Smiley draws inspiration from across the literary spectrum to invigorate her own writing. With enthusiasm and meticulous attention, Smiley dives beneath surface-level interpretations to examine the works of Marguerite de Navarre, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Franz Kafka, Halld r Laxness, and Jessica Mitford. Throughout, Smiley seeks to think harder and, in her words, with “more clarity and nuance” about the questions that matter most.

Big Gay Wedding by Byron Lane

Named one of Shondaland and Town & Country’Best Books of May • Named one of Lambda Literary’s Most Anticipated LGBTQIA+ Books • Named one of Cosmopolitan’s Best Books of 2023 (So Far)

An unashamedly proud, loud, and hilarious novel about a small town that’s forever changed by a big gay wedding, perfect for fans of Red, White & Royal Blue and The Guncle

Two grooms. One mother of a problem.

Barnett Durang has a secret. No, not THAT secret. His widowed mother has long known he’s gay. The secret is Barnett is getting married. At his mother’s farm. In their small Louisiana town. She just doesn’t know it yet.

It’ll be an intimate affair. Just two hundred or so of the most fabulous folks Barnett is shipping in from the “heathen coasts,” as Mom likes to call them, turning her quiet rescue farm for misfit animals into a most unlikely wedding venue.

But there are forces, both within this modern new family and in the town itself, that really don’t want to see this handsome couple march down the aisle. It’ll be the biggest, gayest event in the town’s history if they can pull it off, and after a glitter-filled week, nothing will ever be the same. Big Gay Wedding is an uplifting book about the power of family and the unconditional love of a mother for her son.

Allergic by Theresa MacPhail

An “important and deeply researched” (The Wall Street Journal) exploration of allergies, from their first medical description in 1819 to the cutting-edge science that is illuminating the changes in our environment and lifestyles that are making so many of us sick

Hay fever. Peanut allergies. Eczema. Either you have an allergy or you know someone who does. Billions of people worldwide—an estimated 30 to 40 percent of the global population—have some form of allergy. Even more concerning, over the last decade the number of people diagnosed with an allergy has been steadily increasing, placing an ever-growing medical burden on individuals, families, communities, and healthcare systems.

Medical anthropologist Theresa MacPhail, herself an allergy sufferer whose father died of a beesting, set out to understand why. In pursuit of answers, MacPhail studied the dangerous experiments of early immunologists as well as the mind-bending recent development of biologics and immunotherapies that are giving the most severely impacted patients hope. She scaled a roof with an air-quality controller who diligently counts pollen by hand for hours every day; met a mother who struggled to use WIC benefits for her daughter with severe food allergies; spoke with doctors at some of the finest allergy clinics in the world; and discussed the intersecting problems of climate change, pollution, and pollen with biologists who study seasonal respiratory allergies.

This is the story of allergies: what they are, why we have them, and what that might mean about the fate of humanity in a rapidly changing world.

The Celebrants by Steven Rowley

A TODAY Show #ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick

Big Chill for our times, celebrating decades-long friendships and promises—especially to ourselves—by the bestselling and beloved author of The Guncle.

It’s been a minute—or five years—since Jordan Vargas last saw his college friends, and twenty-eight years since their graduation when their adult lives officially began. Now Jordan, Jordy, Naomi, Craig, and Marielle find themselves at the brink of a new decade, with all the responsibilities of adulthood, yet no closer to having their lives figured out. Though not for a lack of trying. Over the years they’ve reunited in Big Sur to honor a decades-old pact to throw each other living “funerals,” celebrations to remind themselves that life is worth living—that their lives mean something, to one another if not to themselves.

But this reunion is different. They’re not gathered as they were to bolster Marielle as her marriage crumbled, to lift Naomi after her parents died, or to intervene when Craig pleaded guilty to art fraud. This time, Jordan is sitting on a secret that will upend their pact.

A deeply honest tribute to the growing pains of selfhood and the people who keep us going, coupled with Steven Rowley’s signature humor and heart, The Celebrants is a moving tale about the false invincibility of youth and the beautiful ways in which friendship helps us celebrate our lives, even amid the deepest challenges of living.

Lesbian Love Story by Amelia Possanza

For readers of Saidiya Hartman and Jeanette Winterson, Lesbian Love Story is an intimate journey into the archives—uncovering the romances and role models written out of history and what their stories can teach us all about how to love

When Amelia Possanza moved to Brooklyn to build a life of her own, she found herself surrounded by queer stories: she read them on landmark placards, overheard them on the pool deck when she joined the world’s largest LGBTQ swim team, and even watched them on TV in her cockroach-infested apartment. These stories inspired her to seek out lesbians throughout history who could become her role models, in romance and in life.

Centered around seven love stories for the ages, this is Possanza’s journey into the archives to recover the personal histories of lesbians in the twentieth century: who they were, how they loved, why their stories were destroyed, and where their memories echo and live on. Possanza’s hunt takes readers from a drag king show in Bushwick to the home of activists in Harlem and then across the ocean to Hadrian’s Library, where she searches for traces of Sappho in the ruins. Along the way, she discovers her own love—for swimming, for community, for New York City—and adds her record to the archive.

At the heart of this riveting, inventive history, Possanza asks: How could lesbian love help us reimagine care and community? What would our world look like if we replaced its foundation of misogyny with something new, with something distinctly lesbian?

Killing Moon by Jo Nesbo

This is book number 13 in the Harry Hole Series series.

This killer will get inside your head. • Brilliant rogue police investigator Harry Hole is back, this time as an outsider assembling his own team to help find a serial killer who is murdering young women in Oslo in the next novel in the New York Times best-selling series.

“One of today’s most interesting thriller writers.” —Lee Child, author of the #1 New York Times best-selling Jack Reacher series

THE HUNT IS ON AND THE POLICE ARE RUNNING OUT OF TIME. Two young women are missing, their only connection a party they both attended, hosted by a notorious real-estate magnate. When one of the women is found murdered, the police discover an unusual signature left by the killer, giving them reason to suspect he will strike again.

THEY’RE FACING A KILLER UNLIKE ANY OTHER. And exposing him calls for a detective like no other. But the legendary Harry Hole is gone—fired from the force, drinking himself to oblivion in Los Angeles. It seems that nothing can entice him back to Oslo. Until the woman who saved Harry’s life is put in grave danger, and he has no choice but to return to the city that haunts him and track down the murderer.

CATCHING HIM WILL PUSH HARRY TO THE LIMIT. He’ll need to bring together a misfit team of former operatives to accomplish what he can’t do alone: stop an unstoppable killer. But as the evidence mounts, it becomes clear that there is more to this case than meets the eye…

Genealogy of a Murder by Lisa Belkin

A Next Big Idea Club Must-Read Book for May 2023

The multigenerational tale of three families whose paths collide one summer night in 1960 with the murder of a police officer.

Independence Day weekend, 1960: a young cop is murdered, shocking his close-knit community in Stamford, Connecticut. The killer remains at large, his identity still unknown. But on a beach not far away, a young Army doctor, on vacation from his post at a research lab in a maximum-security prison, faces a chilling realization. He knows who the shooter is. In fact, the man—a prisoner out on parole—had called him only days before. By helping his former charge and trainee, the doctor, a believer in second chances, may have inadvertently helped set the murder into motion. And with that one phone call, may have sealed a policeman’s fate.

Alvin Tarlov, David Troy, and Joseph DeSalvo were all born of the Great Depression, all with grandparents who’d left different homelands for the same American Dream. How did one become a doctor, one a cop, and one a convict? In Genealogy of a Murder, journalist Lisa Belkin traces the paths of each of these three men—one of them her stepfather. Her canvas is large, spanning the first half of the 20th century: immigration, the struggles of the working class, prison reform, medical experiments, politics and war, the nature/nurture debate, epigenetics, the infamous Leopold and Loeb case, and the history of motorcycle racing. It is also intimate: a look into the workings of the mind and heart.

Following these threads to their tragic outcome in July 1960, and beyond, Belkin examines the coincidences and choices that led to one fateful night. The result is a brilliantly researched, narratively ingenious story, which illuminates how we shape history even as we are shaped by it.

June Staff Pick: Stone Blind

Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes (Harper), picked by Bookseller Camila

I see you. I see all those who men call monsters. And I see the men who call them that. Call themselves heroes, of course. I only see them for an instant, Then they’re gone. But it’s enough. Enough to know that the hero isn’t the one who’s kind or brave or loyal. Sometimes – not always, but sometimes – he is monstrous.

And the monster? Who is she? She is what happens when someone cannot be saved. This particular monster is assaulted, abused, and vilified. And yet, as the story is always told, she is the one you should fear. She is the monster.

We’ll see about that”Stone Blind

Most people that know me, know that I absolutely LOVE Greek mythology. Circe by Madeline Miller is one of my top book recommendations, and when I was just a ‘tween in middle school Clash of the Titans was a favorite of mine! I think I watched that movie over 50 times. Gods and goddesses coming to the aid of our hero Perseus (played by a young Harry Hamlin), demigod and the son of Zeus! I cheered him on while he on on his quest to save Andromeda and slay the gorgon Medusa. When I came across Natalie Haynes’ Stone Blind on the Indie Bestseller list I knew that this was going to be my next book recommendation. I couldn’t wait to delve into the legend of Medusa.

Stone Blind is a beautifully written retelling of the classic myth of the gorgon Medusa. Medusa’s story is narrated by the multiple characters in the book. Each chapter is told from various perspectives including Medusa herself, her gorgon sisters (Sthenno & Euryale), Perseus, Athene, Poseidon, Hera, and many more. We even hear from the “gorgons head” and an olive grove, truly original storytelling!

We learn how the gorgon Medusa came to be as we know her, writhing snakes replacing her beautiful hair, her eyes replaced with a burning weapon that will turn any living creature to stone and condemn her to a life of solitude. Haynes’ storytelling weaves a beautiful tale of love between the gorgon sisters and the heartbreak of what was to come. The vilified gorgons come across as the most human and caring characters while the heroes and gods are petty, callous, cruel and violent. We follow Perseus on his quest to slay Medusa, and while reading we find ourselves on the side of the monsters while abhorring the behavior of the hero Perseus and disgusted by behaviors of the gods & goddesses.

I was already familiar with the legend of Medusa & Perseus. I found myself dreading their eventual confrontation and kept hoping for a different ending. Stone Blind leaves you questioning who really is the monster? And who are the true heroes? Natalie Haynes writes with wit and heartbreak, telling a story that has you rooting for the “monsters.”

~ Camila

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.