To find these selections and many other new titles, see the NMC library catalog.
New Non-Fiction
Small Fires by Rebecca May Johnson
Why do we cook? Is it just to feed ourselves and others? Or is there something more revolutionary going on? In this book, Rebecca May Johnson reinvents cooking — that simple act of rolling up our sleeves, wielding a knife, spattering red hot sauce on our books — as a way of experiencing ourselves and the world. Cooking is thinking: about the liberating constraint of tying apron strings; the transformative dynamics of shared meals; the meaning of appetite and bodily pleasure; the wild subversiveness of the recipe, beyond words or control. Johnson shows us the radical potential of the thing we do every day: the power of small fires burning everywhere.
Battleground by Daron R. Shaw, Scott L. Althaus, & Costas Panagopoulos
Drawing on internal campaign records and novel data sources covering every presidential election from 1952 through 2020, this book identifies the Electoral College strategies for every major presidential campaign in the modern era, assesses how well they executed their plans, and illuminates what difference their state-by-state allocation of candidate visits and television spending made on election day. From Eisenhower to Trump, Shaw, Althaus, and Panagopoulos show how battleground states have been selected and contested, and why campaign strategies are important for shaping Electoral College outcomes. They find that presidential campaigns in the modern era have been consistently strategic, sophisticated, and effective. As a result, campaign strategies can still be pivotal for shaping Electoral College outcomes, even if their influence looks somewhat different today than in 1952. This book provides readers with a sophisticated yet straightforward look at how (and how much) presidential campaigns affect the selection of the most powerful person in the world.
There’s Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib
rowing up in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1990s, Hanif Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron James were forged and countless others weren’t. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tension between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with intimate, personal storytelling. “Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father’s jump shot,” Abdurraqib writes. “The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time.” This book is a triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. No matter the subject of his keen focus—whether it’s basketball, or music, or performance— Abdurraqib’s exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.
Original Sins by Eve L. Ewing
American public schools have been called the ‘great equalizer.’ If all children could just get an education, the logic goes, they would have the same opportunities later in life. But this historical tour-de-force makes it clear that the opposite is true: the educational system has played an instrumental role in creating racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives. In this book, Ewing demonstrates that schools were designed to propagate the idea of white intellectual superiority, to ‘civilize’ Native students and to prepare Black students for menial labor. Schools were not an afterthought for the ‘founding fathers’; they were envisioned by Thomas Jefferson to fortify the country’s racial hierarchy. And while those dynamics are less overt now than they were in centuries past, Ewing shows that they persist in a curriculum that continues to minimize the horrors of American history.
Yoko Ono edited by Juliet Bingham, Connor Monahan, & Jon Hendricks
Yoko Ono (b. 1933) firmly established herself as a leading figure in the Fluxus movement by the mid-1960s. Since that time, her multimedia practice, encompassing sculpture, film, performance, instruction, and music, has had a significant impact on the trajectory of contemporary art. The first major publication on Ono’s work in more than a decade, this important volume celebrates her career at a pivotal moment and illustrates the prescient themes that the artist has long championed and that have become central to today’s art practice. It traces Ono’s career across continents, beginning with the artist’s early work in Tokyo. Drawing on key themes of audience participation, play, and music, this book employs Ono’s own words to encourage readers to experience Ono’s work through actions that she finds particularly resonant: reading, enacting, imagining, and wishing.
New Fiction
The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy
Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood-overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences-swoops in and stays. As these friends move from the late 2000’s into the late 2020’s, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another-amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern American life. A generational talent, Flournoy captures with disarming wit and electric language how the most profound connections over a lifetime can lie in the tangled, uncertain thicket of friendship.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated, yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that only served to drive Sonia and Sunny apart. Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India, fearing she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world. This novel is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next.
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
Sybil Van Antwerp has throughout her life used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter. Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has—a mother, grandmother, wife, divorcee, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a very full life. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes that the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness.
Heart the Lover by Lily King
Our narrator understands good love stories-their secrets and subtext, their highs and their free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the simple rules. In the fall of her senior year of college, she meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit class: Sam and Yash. Best friends living off campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. Youthful passion is unpredictable though, and she soon finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever. Decades later, Jordan is living the life she dreamed of, and the vulnerable days of her youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news brings the past crashing into the present, she returns to a world she left behind and is forced to confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.
Buckeye by Patrick Ryan
In Bonhomie, Ohio, a stolen moment of passion, sparked in the exuberant aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe, binds Cal Jenkins, a man wounded not in war but by his inability to serve in it, to Margaret Salt, a woman trying to obscure her past. Cal’s wife, Becky, has a spiritual gift: She is a seer who can conjure the dead, helping families connect with those they’ve lost. Margaret’s husband, Felix, is serving on a Navy cargo ship, out of harm’s way—until a telegram suggests that the unthinkable might have happened. Later, as the country reconstructs in the postwar boom, a secret grows in Bonhomie—but nothing stays buried forever in a small town. Against the backdrop of some of the most transformative decades in modern America, the consequences of that long-ago encounter ripple through the next generation of both families, compelling them to reexamine who they thought they were and what the future might hold.
Summaries and images adapted from publishers.