Want to know what’s new to the collection? Be sure to check out the New in the Library pages (buttons located on the right sidebar) to see our new and upcoming titles! Want to be the first to read the new releases? Ask library staff about the Adopt a Book Program or learn more online at the Adopt a Book page.
Here’s a sample of our recent acquisitions:
While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction by Kurt Vonnegut
In these previously unpublished stories, Vonnegut’s originality infuses a unique landscape of factories, trailers, and bars—and characters who pit their dreams and fears against a cruel and sometimes comically indifferent world. Here are stories of men and machines, art and artifice, and how ideals of fortune, fame, and love take curious twists in ordinary lives. An ambitious builder of roads, commanding an army of bulldozers, graders, and asphalt spreaders, fritters away his free time with miniature trains—until the women in his life crash his fantasy land. Trapped in a stenography pool, a young dreamer receives a call from a robber on the run, who presents her with a strange proposition. A crusty newspaperman is forced onto a committee to judge Christmas displays—a job that leads him to a suspiciously ostentatious ex-con and then a miracle. A hog farmer’s widow receives cryptic, unsolicited letters from a man in Schenectady about “the indefinable sweet aches of the spirit.” But what will she find when she goes to meet him in the flesh?
Click here to view our new and upcoming fiction titles.
Young Mandela: the Revolutionary Years by David James Smith
Nelson Mandela is well-known throughout the world as a heroic leader who symbolizes freedom and moral authority. He is fixed in the public mind as the world’s elder statesman–the gray-haired man with a kindly smile who spent 27 years in prison before becoming the first black president in South Africa. But Nelson Mandela was not always elderly or benign. And, in Young Mandela, award-winning journalist and author David James Smith takes us deep into the heart of racist South Africa to paint a portrait of the Mandela that many have forgotten: the committed revolutionary who left his family behind to live on the run, adopting false names and disguises and organizing the first strikes to overthrow the apartheid state.
Click here to view our new and upcoming non-fiction titles.
Zora and Me by Victoria Bond & T.R. Simon
Whether she’s telling the truth or stretching it, Zora Neale Hurston is a riveting storyteller. Her latest creation is a shape-shifting gator man who lurks in the marshes, waiting to steal human souls. But when boastful Sonny Wrapped loses a wrestling match with an elusive alligator named Ghost — and a man is found murdered by the railroad tracks soon after — young Zora’s tales of a mythical evil creature take on an ominous and far more complicated complexion, jeopardizing the peace and security of an entire town and forcing three children to come to terms with the dual-edged power of pretending. A fictionalization of the early years of a literary giant, this astonishing novel is the first project ever to be endorsed by the Zora Neale Hurston Trust that was not authored by Hurston herself. Winners of the 2011 Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Award.
Click here to view our new and upcoming children and young adult titles.