by Richard Powers
Richard Powers (Bewilderment, The Overstory) delivers a novel of spectacular thematic scope and surreal drama, centered on the tiny French Polynesian island of Makatea in the Pacific Ocean and those destined to make it their home. Starring four principal characters and the intriguing manner in which their stories converge and collide, Playground glides across the final decades of the 20th century and spills into the present day, culminating in a dramatic vision for mankind's oceanic and land-based
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by Richard Flanagan
Ten years after winning the Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan revisits his father's time as a prisoner of war. It's the starting point but ultimately just one thread in Question 7, an astonishing and uncategorizable work that combines family memoir, biography, and history to examine how love and memory endure.
In 1945, while Flanagan's father was an enslaved laborer in Japan, the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing at least 60,000 people. The physicist Leo Szilard,
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by Michael Eric Dyson, Marc Favreau
Michael Eric Dyson and Marc Favreau, co-authors of Unequal: A Story of America, team up again to bring young readers accessible, comprehensive, and invaluable information about the American political system. In this collaboration, the authors focus on the history and importance of voting in the United States.
Dyson and Favreau discard the traditional history books and reveal many of the discriminatory reasons behind voting constructs like the Electoral College ("to block the will of the people"), property
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by Jesse Ball
Novelist and poet Jesse Ball's The Repeat Room is a Kafkaesque descent into a legal system based on an experimental program that allows one juror to have an immersive experience of the defendant's life. Abel, a low-class worker in a near-future society with a strict caste system, has been selected to be the juror to experience the life of a man charged with murder. As he is shuffled through a cold, bureaucratic selection process, he also shares a few glimpses into his own alienated life.
Once in
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by Jenny Factor
Want, the Lake, Jenny Factor's long, intricate second poetry collection, envisions womanhood as a tug of war between desire and constraint. "If want is a lake, I learned to sail in it," she writes, recalling her time as a girl at summer camp--until later life restricted her cravings.
Factor (Unraveling at the Name) showcases the tension between past and present, license and limit. Two poems titled "Elegy for a Younger Self" string together vivid reminiscences. "The Modern Lotus Eaters" subverts Alfred, Lord
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by Heather Smith
In this sensitive, absorbing, and funny novel, 11-year-old Tig must learn how to live with love, care, and hope from kind, stable uncles after a lifetime of neglect.
Tig and her older brother, Peter, were abandoned by their mother, left alone in their house for four months. Once the children are discovered, they are turned over to their sweetly bumbling Uncle Scott and his partner, Manny. The kids are "different" now, though: "It's like how abandoned animals stop trusting humans. They go wild and crazy and
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by Bernard Mensah, illus. by Raissa Figueroa
A girl must be brave when she loses her parents at a festival in this dazzling, triumphant picture book by debut author Bernard Mensah and Coretta Scott King illustrator honor recipient Raissa Figueroa (We Wait for the Sun).
Esi the Brave (Who Was Not Afraid of Anything) "loved monsters and ghosts and things that went bump in the night." When Mummy warned Esi that the Kakamotobi Festival would have loud music, scary monster faces, and a big crowd, Esi replied, "I am NOT afraid." On their drive to the festival,
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