Alex Temblador

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Wisconsin

A Guide for Creative Writers

Writing an Identity Not Your Own

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Nancy MacDonell

World War II, New York City, and the Birth of American Fashion

In the tradition of The Barbizon and The Girls of Atomic City, fashion historian and journalist Nancy MacDonell chronicles the untold story of how the Nazi invasion of France gave rise to the American fashion industry. Calvin Klein. Ralph Lauren. Donna Karan. Halston. Marc Jacobs. Tom Ford. Michael Kors. Tory Burch. Today, American designers are some of the biggest names in fashion, yet before World War II, they almost always worked anonymously. The industry, then centered on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, had always looked overseas for "inspiration"—a polite phrase for what was often blatant copying––because style, as all the world knew, came from Paris. But when the Nazis invaded France in 1940, the capital of fashion was cut off from the rest of the world. The story of the chaos and tragedy that followed has been told many times—but how it directly affected American fashion is largely unknown. Defying the naysayers, New York-based designers, retailers, editors, and photographers met the moment, turning out clothes that were perfectly suited to the American way of life: sophisticated, modern, comfortable, and affordable. By the end of the war, "the American Look" had been firmly established as a fresh, easy elegance that combined function with style. But none of it would have happened without the influence and ingenuity of a small group of women who have largely been lost to history. Empresses of Seventh Avenue will tell the story of how these extraordinary women put American fashion on the world stage and created the template for modern style––and how the nearly $500 billion American fashion industry, the largest in the world, could not have accrued its power and wealth without their farsightedness and determination.

Empresses of Seventh Avenue

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Lindsey Davis

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

A Flavia Albia Novel

In first century Rome, a murder victim found in the Tiber leads to a brutal gang war and Flavia Albia to a confrontation with her long-hated nemesis, with all that she loves in the balance. First century Rome is plagued by all the evils the have beset major cities since time immemorial: crime, corruption, squalor, and worst of all, tourists. When a barge full of those entitled creatures arrives in Rome, they hit all the touristy hot-spots (the Amphitheatre, the Capitol, the dodgy bars with dubious entertainments) before departing for the next destination – leaving behind one of their party, dead and floating in the Tiber. While the authorities first try to pass her death off as a suicide, it’s quickly proved that the victim strangled to death and her body dumped. When Flavia Albia, a private informer, learns that the victim was in Rome searching for the man who abandoned her, Florius, Albia’s vicious nemesis, Albia is determined to find out the truth behind the murder and finally have her revenge. Florius is the husband of the leader of the Balbinus, one of Rome’s most vicious criminal gangs, giving him even more reason to have murdered his former mistress. Currently engaged in a brutal turf war, with bodies dropping everywhere, Florius is fighting for his very survival and has little interest in one dead body. Now Albia must risk everything, including the life she has carefully built, if she is finally to bring Florius to justice. If justice is even possible.

Death on the Tiber

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Katie Tallo

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

A Novel

"A fast-paced, exciting, missing persons thriller with a heart pounding twisty final third that I very much enjoyed. Katie Tallo is a big new talent."--New York Times bestselling author Adrian McKinty In this edge-of-your-seat thriller--the follow-up to the international bestselling Dark August and Poison Lilies--Gus Monet and her daughter embark on a perilous road trip to find a missing person. When the love of her life disappeared on a camping trip, Gus Monet was devastated. Her daughter was only nine at the time, but young Bly still remembers the heartbreak vividly. Howard had been like a father to her. He was a journalist working on a story that took a dark and dangerous turn. The last time they saw him, he was going to meet a source he believed could blow the story wide open. Three years later, shocked to see Howard's obituary in the paper, Gus and Bly are drawn back to Prince Edward County where he was last seen and where the camper Howard was driving has been found. Sneaking into the camper, mother and daughter find what investigators missed. Hidden behind a secret panel are Howard's notebook, cell phone, and a video message recorded right before he vanished, evidence that turns the cold case red hot. Searching for answers, Gus and Bly vow to follow the story Howard was pursuing and to expose whoever went to deadly lengths to stop him from revealing the truth. Told in the compelling, thoughtful voice of young Bly, this edge-of-your-seat thriller ratchets up the tension, culminating in a heart-pounding, soul crushing, shocking finale. Infused with vivid summer imagery, set among eerie abandoned places, and steeped with sinister small-town secrets, Buried Road is the story of a young girl and a mother whose reckless resolve leads them ever closer to lethal danger--but ultimately might be what ensures their survival.

Buried Road

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Bruce Borgos

A Porter Beck Mystery

Shades of Mercy

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Ellen Atlanta

How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women

A generation-defining exposé of toxic beauty culture—from Botox and Instagram filters to lip flips and editing apps—and the realities of coming of age online We live in a new age of beauty. With advancements in cosmetic surgery, walk-in treatments, augmented reality face filters, photo editing apps, and exposure to more images than ever, we have the ability to craft the image we want everyone to see. We pinch, pull, squeeze, tweeze, smooth and slice ourselves beyond recognition. But is our beauty culture truly empowering? Are we really in control? In Pixel Flesh, Ellen Atlanta holds a mirror up to our modern beauty ideal, as well as the pressure to present a perfect image, to live in an age of constant comparison and curated feeds. She weaves in her personal story with others’ to reconfigure our obsession with the cult of beauty and explore the reality of living in a world of paradoxes: we know our standards are unhealthy, but understand it’s a way to succeed. We resent social media but continue to scroll. We know digital beauty is artificial, but we still strive for it. From Love Island to lip filler, blackfishing to the beauty tax, Pixel Flesh is a fascinating account of what young women face under a dominant industry. Nuanced, unflinching, and razor sharp, this book unmasks the absurdities of the standards we suddenly find ourselves upholding, and acts as a rallying cry and a refusal to suffer in silence, forming the definitive book about what it truly feels like to exist as a woman today.

Pixel Flesh

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Kailee Pedersen

Inspired by Kailee Pedersen's own journey being adopted from Nanning, China in 1996 and growing up on a farm in Nebraska, this rich and atmospheric supernatural horror debut explores an ancient Chinese mythology. The last thing Nick Morrow expected to receive was an invitation from his father to return home. When he left rural Nebraska behind, he believed he was leaving everything there, including his abusive father, Carlyle, and the farm that loomed so large in memory, forever. But neither Nick nor his brother Joshua, disowned for marrying Emilia, a woman of Asian descent, can ignore such summons from their father, who hopes for a deathbed reconciliation. Predictably, Joshua and Carlyle quickly warm to each other while Nick and Emilia are left to their own devices. Nick puts the time to good use and his flirtation with Emilia quickly blooms into romance. Though not long after the affair turns intimate, Nick begins to suspect that Emilia’s interest in him may have sinister, and possibly even ancient, motivations. Punctuated by scenes from Nick’s adolescent years, when memories of a queer awakening and a shadowy presence stalking the farm altered the trajectory of his life forever, Sacrificial Animals explores the violent legacy of inherited trauma and the total collapse of a family in its wake.

Sacrificial Animals

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Kate Winkler Dawson

Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne

Acclaimed journalist, podcaster, and true-crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson tells the true story of the scandalous murder investigation that became the inspiration for both Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and the first true-crime book published in America. On a cold winter day in 1832, Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead in a quiet farmyard in a small New England town. When her troubled past and a secret correspondence with charismatic Methodist minister Reverend Ephraim Avery was uncovered, more questions emerged. Was Sarah’s death a suicide...or something much darker? Determined to uncover the real story, Victorian writer Catharine Read Arnold Williams threw herself into the investigation as the trial was unfolding and wrote what many claim to be the first American true-crime narrative, Fall River. The murder divided the country and inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter—but the reverend was not convicted, and questions linger to this day about what really led to Sarah Cornell’s death. Until now. In The Sinners All Bow, acclaimed true-crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson travels back in time to nineteenth-century small-town America, emboldened to finish the work Williams started nearly two centuries before. Using modern investigative advancements—including “forensic knot analysis” and criminal profiling (which was invented fifty-five years later with Jack the Ripper)—Dawson fills in the gaps of Williams’s research to find the truth and bring justice to an unsettling mystery that speaks to our past as well as our present, anchored by three women who subverted the script they were given.

The Sinners All Bow

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Susan Barker

The Historian meets Under the Skin in this searingly provocative literary horror novel about one woman’s determination to stay alive at any terrifying cost. In Osaka, two strangers, Jake and Mariko, miss a flight, and over dinner, discover they've both brutally lost loved ones whose paths crossed with the same beguiling woman no one has seen since. Following traces this mysterious person left behind, Jake travels from country to country gathering chilling testimonies from others who encountered her across the decades—a trail of shattered souls that eventually leads him to Theo, a dying sculptor in rural New Mexico, who knows the woman better than anyone—and might just hold the key to who, or what, she is. Part horror, part western, part thriller, Old Soul is a fearlessly bold and genre-defying tale about predation, morality and free will, and one man’s quest to bring a centuries-long chain of human devastation to an end.

Old Soul

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Ann Dávila Cardinal

We Need No Wings

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Kate Christensen

"Kate Christensen's new novel, Welcome Home, Stranger, is a revelation, offering characters as real as your family and friends, a rich, vividly drawn setting, grab-you-by-the-throat drama and always, lurking in the shadows, a fierce authorial intelligence. What more could you ask?"--Richard Russo, author of Somebody's Fool "To the great literature of going home again we can now add Kate Christensen's superb new novel Welcome Home, Stranger, a triumph of intelligence and wit (which will surprise none of her many fans). The prodigal here is a brilliant journalist grieving the loss of a very difficult mother while attempting peace with those she left behind: a resentful sister and an ex-lover who can be neither trusted nor forgotten. A spellbinding book from one of our best chroniclers of the very American struggle to strive for excellence while still living in community with others."--Ann Packer, author of The Children's Crusade "A deeply endearing story about confronting one's past and constructing a new future--under extreme duress. . . . Welcome Home, Stranger . . . arrives at the most lovely ending of a novel I've read all year."--Washington Post[ From the PEN-Faulkner Award-winning author of The Great Man comes a novel about grief, love, growing older, and the complications of family that is the story of a fifty-something woman who goes home--reluctantly--to Maine after the death of her mother. Can you ever truly go home again? An environmental journalist in Washington, DC, Rachel has shunned her New England working-class family for years. Divorced and childless in her middle age, she's a true independent spirit with the pain and experience to prove it. Coping with challenges large and small, she thinks her life is in free fall-until she's summoned home to deal with the aftermath of her mother's death. Then things really fall apart. Surrounded by a cast of sometimes comic, sometimes heartbreakingly serious characters--an arriviste sister, an alcoholic brother-in-law and, most importantly, the love of her life recently married to the sister's best friend-Rachel must come to terms with her past, the sorrow she has long buried, and the ghost of the mother who, for better and worse, made her the woman she is. Lively, witty, and painfully familiar, this sophisticated and emotionally resonant novel from the author of The Great Man holds a mirror up to modern life as it considers the way some of us must carry on now.

Welcome Home, Stranger

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S. Jae-Jones

Sailor Moon meets Beauty and the Beast in Guardians of Dawn: Ami, the second book in a new, richly imagined fantasy series from S. Jae-Jones, the New York Times bestselling author of Wintersong. When the Pillar blooms, the end of the world is not far behind. Li Ami was always on the outside—outside of family, outside of friendships, outside of ordinary magic. The odd and eccentric daughter of a former imperial magician, she has devoted her life to books because she finds them easier to read than people. Exiled to the outermost west of the Morning Realms, Ami has become the sole caretaker of her mentally ill father, whose rantings and ravings may be more than mere ramblings; they may be part of a dire prophecy. When her father is arrested for trespassing and stealing a branch from the sacred tree of the local monastery, Ami offers herself to the mysterious Beast in the castle, who is in need of someone who can translate a forbidden magical text and find a cure for the mysterious blight that is affecting the harvest of the land. Meanwhile, as signs of magical corruption arise throughout the Morning Realms, Jin Zhara begins to realize that she might be out of her element. She may have defeated a demon lord and uncovered her identity as the Guardian of Fire, but she’ll be more than outmatched in the coming elemental battle against the Mother of Ten Thousand Demons...unless she can find the other Guardians of Dawn. Her magic is no match for the growing tide of undead, and she needs the Guardian of Wood with power over life and death in order to defeat the revenants razing the countryside. The threat of the Mother of Ten Thousand Demons looms larger by the day, and the tenuous peace holding the Morning Realms together is beginning to unravel. Ami and Zhara must journey to the Root of the World in order to seal the demon portal that may have opened there and restore balance to an increasingly chaotic world.

Guardians of Dawn: Ami

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Tore C. Olsson

A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past

A pathbreaking new way to examine US history, through the lens of a bestselling video game Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption II, set in 1911 and 1899, are the most-played American history video games since The Oregon Trail. Beloved by millions, they’ve been widely acclaimed for their realism and attention to detail. But how do they fare as recreations of history? In this engaging book, award-winning American history professor Tore Olsson takes up that question and more. Weaving the games’ plot and characters into an exploration of American violence between 1870 and 1920, Olsson shows that it was more often disputes over capitalism and race, not just poker games and bank robberies, that fueled the bloodshed of these turbulent years. As such, this era has much to teach us today. From the West to the Deep South to Appalachia, Olsson reveals the gritty and brutal world that inspired the games, but sometimes lacks context and complexity on the digital screen. Colorful, fast-paced, and dramatic, Red Dead’s History sheds light on dark corners of the American past for gamers and history buffs alike.

Red Dead's History

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Heather O'Neill

"From the hugely acclaimed author beloved by literary lights, including Emily St. John Mandel, Kelly Link, and Mona Awad, a dark dystopian fairytale about an idyllic country ravaged by war-and a girl torn between safety and loyalty. Sofia Bottom lives in Elysia, a small country forgotten by Europe. But inside its borders, the old myths of trees that come alive and faeries who live among their roots have given way to an explosion of the arts and the consolations of philosophy. From the clarinetists to the cabaret singers, no artist is as revered as Sofia's brilliant mother, the writer Clara Bottom. How can fourteen-year-old Sofia, with her tin ear and enduring love of ancient myths, ever hope to win her mother's love? When the country's greatest enemy invades, and the Capital is under threat, Clara turns to her daughter to smuggle her new manuscript to safety on the last train evacuating children from the city. But when the train draws to a suspicious halt in the middle of a forest, Sofia is forced to run for her life and loses her mother's most prized possession. Frightened and alone in a country at war, Sofia must find a way to reclaim what she has lost. On an epic journey through woods and razed towns, colliding with soldiers, survivors, and other lost children, Sofia must make the choice between kindness and her own survival. In this stunning novel set in an imaginative world yet reflective of our own times, Heather O'Neill delivers a vivid, breathtaking dark fairytale of life, death, and betrayal"--

The Capital of Dreams

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Casey Michel

How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World

An stunning investigation and indictment of the United States' foreign lobbying industry and the threat it poses to democracy. For years, one group of Americans has worked as foot-soldiers for the most authoritarian regimes around the planet. In the process, they've not only entrenched dictatorships and spread kleptocratic networks, but they've secretly guided U.S. policy without the rest of America even being aware. And now, they've begun turning their sights on American democracy itself. These Americans are known as foreign lobbyists, and they've spent years ushering dictatorships directly into the halls of Washington, all while laundering the reputations of the most heinous, repressive regimes in the process. These foreign lobbyists include figures like Ivy Lee, the inventor of the public relations industry - a man who whitewashed Mussolini, opened doors to the Soviets, and advised the Nazis on how to sway American audiences. They include people like Paul Manafort, who invented lobbying as we know it - and who then took his talents to autocrats from Ukraine to the Philippines, and then back to the White House. And they now include an increasing number of Americans elsewhere: in law firms and consultancies, among PR specialists and former lawmakers, and even within think tanks and universities. All of these industries, and all of these Americans, have transformed into proxies for dictators and strongmen wherever they can be found. And for years, they've escaped scrutiny. In Foreign Agents, Casey Michel shines a light on these foreign lobbyists, and all the damage and devastation they have caused in Washington and elsewhere. From Moscow to Beijing, from far-right nationalists to far-left communists, from anti-American autocrats to pro-Western authoritarians, these foreign lobbyists have helped any illiberal, anti-democratic government they can find. And after decades of success in installing dictator after dictator, and in tilting American policy in the process, they've now begun trying to end America's democratic experiment, once and for all.

Foreign Agents

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Maggie Hentz

Maggie Hentz

@travelingbookblog

Books Listed

Following

Followers

Alex Temblador

Writing an Identity Not Your Own

Nancy MacDonell

Empresses of Seventh Avenue

Lindsey Davis

Death on the Tiber

Katie Tallo

Buried Road

Bruce Borgos

Shades of Mercy

Ellen Atlanta

Pixel Flesh

Kailee Pedersen

Sacrificial Animals

Kate Winkler Dawson

The Sinners All Bow

Susan Barker

Old Soul

Ann Dávila Cardinal

We Need No Wings

Kate Christensen

Welcome Home, Stranger

S. Jae-Jones

Guardians of Dawn: Ami

Tore C. Olsson

Red Dead's History

Heather O'Neill

The Capital of Dreams

Casey Michel

Foreign Agents

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Alex Temblador

Writing an Identity Not Your Own

Nancy MacDonell

Empresses of Seventh Avenue

Lindsey Davis

Death on the Tiber

Katie Tallo

Buried Road

Bruce Borgos

Shades of Mercy

Ellen Atlanta

Pixel Flesh

Kailee Pedersen

Sacrificial Animals

Kate Winkler Dawson

The Sinners All Bow

Susan Barker

Old Soul

Ann Dávila Cardinal

We Need No Wings

Kate Christensen

Welcome Home, Stranger

S. Jae-Jones

Guardians of Dawn: Ami

Tore C. Olsson

Red Dead's History

Heather O'Neill

The Capital of Dreams

Casey Michel

Foreign Agents

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