Join Yvonne Brooks for Saturday Storytime! This week we're reading John's Turn by E.B. White Read-Aloud winner Mac Barnett.
It’s John’s big day at school today—a performance for Sharing Gifts time. His bag is carefully packed and prepared, his classmates are ready, and the curtain is waiting to open. John is nervous, looking out at all the other children staring back at him. But he takes a big breath and begins. Mac Barnett’s compassionate text and Kate Berube’s understated and expressive art tell the story of a kid who finds the courage to show others his talent for dancing.
We don't require vaccinations, but we do need kids to wear masks during Storytime. Kids: Whether you left your mask at home or dropped it while riding your scooter to McNally Jackson, we have extra kid-sized masks if you need one.
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Plot, Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Latecomer is a layered and immersive literary novel about three siblings, desperate to escape one another, and the upending of their family by the late arrival of a fourth.
The Latecomer follows the story of the wealthy, New York City-based Oppenheimer family, from the first meeting of parents Salo and Johanna, under tragic circumstances, to their triplets born during the early days of IVF. As children, the three siblings – Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally – feel no strong familial bond and cannot wait to go their separate ways, even as their father becomes more distanced and their mother more desperate. When the triplets leave for college, Johanna, faced with being truly alone, makes the decision to have a fourth child. What role will the “latecomer” play in this fractured family?
A complex novel that builds slowly and deliberately, The Latecomer touches on the topics of grief and guilt, generational trauma, privilege and race, traditions and religion, and family dynamics. It is a profound and witty family story from an accomplished author, known for the depth of her character studies, expertly woven storylines, and plot twists.
Join the International Literature Book Club on Monday, June 6th, at 7pm to discuss Hotel Silence by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir. Hosted by Yvonne Brooks.
Winner of the Icelandic Literary Prize, Hotel Silence is a delightful and heartwarming new novel from Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, a writer who "upends expectations" (New York Times). Told with grace, insight, and humor, this is the story of one man's surprising mid-life adventure of self-discovery that leads him to find a new reason for being.
Hilariously insightful and delightfully suspenseful, Cult Classic is an original: a masterfully crafted tale of love, memory, morality, and mind control, as well as a fresh foray into the philosophy of romance.
MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK of 2022 by Glamour, W, Nylon, Fortune, Lit Hub, The Millions, and more!
One night in New York City’s Chinatown, a woman is at a work reunion dinner with former colleagues when she excuses herself to buy a pack of cigarettes. On her way back, she runs into a former boyfriend. And then another. And . . . another. Nothing is quite what it seems as the city becomes awash with ghosts of heartbreaks past.
With her gimlet eye, Sloane Crosley spins a wry literary fantasy that is equal parts page-turner and poignant portrayal of alienation.
A riveting, tender debut novel, following a brother and sister whose paths diverge—one forced to leave, one left behind—in the wake of a nationalist coup in the South Pacific
“A brilliant debut novel of contemporary displacement, destabilization, and shifting identity. Heartrending in its domestic drama, illuminating and instructive in its exploration of the political as personal, Mother Ocean Father Nation is a memorable work of fiction to place beside the work of Nishant Batsha’s gifted contemporaries Mohsin Hamid, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and others bravely bearing witness to a world suddenly and tragically dividing into ‘native-born’ and ‘refugees’—the overwhelming political drama of our time.” — Joyce Carol Oates, author of Breathe
“A moving saga about the experience of Indian migrants in the South Pacific.” — Amitav Ghosh, author of Sea of Poppies
A double portrait of two of America's most influential writers that reveals the surprising connections between them--and their uncanny relevance to our age of crisis.
Up from the Depths tells the interconnected stories of two of the most important writers in American history--the novelist and poet Herman Melville (1819-1891) and one of his earliest biographers, the literary critic and historian Lewis Mumford (1895-1990). Deftly cutting back and forth between the writers, Aaron Sachs reveals the surprising resonances between their lives, work, and troubled times--and their uncanny relevance in our own age of crisis.
Heartburn could have been a real bummer of a novel--it's about a cookbook author who discovers her husband is cheating on her while she's seven months pregnant. Lucky for us this book is written by the late Nora Ephron (she of When Harry Met Sally and I Feel Bad About My Neck, but this is before that) and it's hilarious and gossipy and deep. Consider this description of the husband and his mistress: "My husband, a fairly short person, and Thelma Rice, a fairly tall person with a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs, never mind her feet, which are sort of splayed." Add to the mix that the protagonist Rachel Samstat is a stand-in for Ephron and the whole thing is a roman à clef about her breakup from Carl Bernstein. We will discuss fiction and autobiography, food, why everyone in the 1980's was obsessed with group therapy. The book was turned into a film starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson and a very memorable postcoital spaghetti carbonara and we can watch that too.
Marisa Meltzer is a journalist and author, most recently of This Is Big, a biography of Weight Watchers founder Jean Nidetch. She has previously led seminars for McNally Jackson on Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls, and Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter.