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“People have been sleeping on the Bronx for too long,” says Noëlle Santos, who’s lived in New York’s northernmost borough her entire life. After decades of hard-won community building among deep city neglect, the Bronx is now on its way to becoming New York’s latest development bonanza, and Santos wants to save what she can before it’s too late. “We have all these arts and cultural institutions here. There are intellectuals, families, people building communities that are thriving.”
Hoping to help that culture flourish, Santos is working to open the borough’s newest bookstore, which will also be its only one. She’s calling it Lit Bar, because it will serve wine and, she hopes, be lit as hell.
In June we celebrate Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender
Pride Month (LGBT Pride Month) which honors the 1969 Stonewall riots in
Manhattan. First, President Bill Clinton declared June “Gay & Lesbian Pride
Month” on June 2, 2000. In 2009, President
Barack Obama declared June Lesbian,
Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month.
LGBT
Pride Month events attract millions of participants around the world. The
purpose of the commemorative month is to recognize the impact that lesbian,
gay, bisexual and transgender individuals have had on history locally,
nationally, and internationally. We realize that there are more people who
celebrate pride than those mentioned in the LGBT acronym, including but not
exclusive to those who are queer, intersex, asexual, non-binary and straight
allies. We have featured below titles that focus on as many experiences as
possible.
In
trade paperback for the first time, with a new introduction by the author, a
fresh, contemporary repackage of Rita Mae Brown’s ground-breaking, landmark
novel that Gloria Steinem has called “The rare work of fiction that has changed
real life…If you don’t yet know Molly Bolt—or Rita Mae Brown, who created her—I
urge you to read and thank them both.”
Trans
performance artist, playwright, and activist Kate Bornstein guides readers on a
funny, insightful, and wonderfully scenic journey across the frontiers of
gender and identity.
LGBTQ
people are a gift to the Church and have the potential to revitalize
Christianity.
As
an openly lesbian Episcopal priest and professional advocate for LGBTQ justice,
the Reverend Elizabeth Edman has spent her career grappling with the core
tenets of her faith. After deep reflection on her tradition, Edman is struck by
the realization that her queer identity has taught her more about how to be a
good Christian than the church.
This
moving collection of true stories about gay weddings shows how LGBT couples have
overcome cultural and personal obstacles to their unions, made wedding
traditions their own, and what everyone can learn from them.
Told
in a series of essays that mimics the course of a traditional wedding, from
engagement to walking down the aisle to the honeymoon and beyond, The Best
Party of Our Lives invites readers to reflect on what makes their own
relationships unique, and the significance of public celebrations of love.
A
milestone in the history of American civil and human rights, Obergefell et al.
v. Hodges legalized gay marriage across the United States. A powerful testament
to the progress of human and civil rights, The U.S. Supreme Court Decision on
Marriage Equality is an essential document of our times.
Twenty
stories of negotiating the triumphs and challenges of being an LGBT educator in
the twenty-first century. For more than twenty years, the One Teacher in Ten
series has served as an invaluable source of strength and inspiration for
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender educators. This all-new edition brings
together stories from across America—and around the world—resulting in a rich
tapestry of varied experiences.
For
more than three decades, while its writer’s world fame increased, Queer
remained unpublished because of its forthright depiction of homosexual
longings. Set in the corrupt and spectral Mexico City of the forties, Queer is
the story of William Lee, a man afflicted with both acute heroin withdrawal and
romantic and sexual yearnings for an indifferent user named Eugene Allerton.
For
more on these and related titles visit the collection PRIDE Month
On the last Monday of May we pay tribute to the American men and women who have died in service to our country. To honor the occasion, here is an essential list of nonfiction and fiction which honor their sacrifices. From classic, and award-winning, novels to front-line journalism, these titles take readers back to the Civil War and up to the Middle East conflict.
Winner of the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction, Marine
Corps veteran Phil Klay’s Redeployment
takes readers to the frontlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking us
to understand what happened there, and what happened to the soldiers who
returned.
The Mexican-American families who lived on one street in
Silvis, Illinoi sent fifty-seven of their children to fight in World War II and
Korea—more than any other place that size in the country. Eight of those
children died. It’s a distinction recognized by the Department of Defense, one
that earned that strip a distinguished name: Hero Street. Based on
interviews with relatives, friends, and soldiers who served alongside the men,
as well as personal letters and photographs, The Ghosts of Hero Street is the compelling and inspiring account of a
street of soldiers—and men—who would not be denied their dignity or their honor.
PACO’S STORY: A NOVEL by Larry Heinemann
Paco Sullivan is the only man in Alpha Company to survive
a cataclysmic Viet Cong attack on Fire Base Harriette in Vietnam. Everyone else
is annihilated. Brilliantly and vividly written, Paco’s Story–winner of a
National Book Award–plunges you into the violence and casual cruelty of the
Vietnam War, and the ghostly aftermath that often dealt the harshest blows.
They are the men of C-for-Charlie company—“Mad” 1st Sgt.
Eddie Welsh, Pvt. 1st Class Don Doll, Pvt. John Bell, Capt. James Stein, Cpl.
Fife, and dozens more just like them—infantrymen who are about to land, grim
and white-faced, on an atoll in the Pacific called Guadalcanal. This is their
story, a shatteringly realistic walk into hell and back.
Based on Evan Wright’s National Magazine Award-winning
story in Rolling Stone, this is the raw, firsthand account of the 2003 Iraq
invasion that inspired the HBO® original mini-series.
A searing reassessment of America’s foreign policy in the
Middle East over the past four decades—by a retired Army Colonel and New York
Times-bestselling author. From the end of World War II to 1980, virtually no
American soldiers were killed in action while serving in the Greater Middle
East. Since 1990, virtually no American soldiers have been killed in action
anywhere else outside the “open-ended war” in the Greater Middle East.
For the centenary of America’s entry into World War I, A.
Scott Berg presents a landmark anthology of American writing from the
cataclysmic conflict that set the course of the 20th century.
The experience of war has affected every generation in
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and every soldier has a story to
tell. Since the year 2000, the Veteran’s History Project, a permanent
department of the Library of Congress, has been collecting and preserving the
memories of veterans. In the first book to showcase the richness and depth of this
collection, Voices of War tells a compelling, emotional, history of the
experience of war, weaving together veterans’ stories from in World Wars I and
II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf.
Henry Fleming dreams of the thrill of battle and
performing heroic deeds in the American Civil War. But his illusions are
shattered when he comes face to face with the bloodshed and horrors of war. Now
he’s a raw recruit, Henry experiences both fear and self-doubt. Will war make
Henry a coward or a hero? A vivid fictionalized account of the experiences of
an ordinary innocent young soldier on the battlefields of the American Civil
War, introduced by American writer, illustrator and historian, Wendell Minor.
A visual and informative guide to one of the longest and
most controversial wars in American history, now revised and updated. Explore
the people, places, battles, and weapons of America’s Indochina struggle. Now available for
the first time in paperback, DK Eyewitness Books: Vietnam
War tells the dramatic story of patriotism, tragedy,
bloody conflict, and heroism.
For more on these and related titles visit the
collection Memorial
Day 2017
The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of. The condor is an icon of extinction. There’s little else to it now but being the last of its kind. And in this lies the diminution of the world. How can you love something, how can you fight to protect it, if all it means is loss?
May is
Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, a celebration of Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States. Originating with Congress in the 1970s, this celebration was initially only a week in May (a resolution signed by President Jimmy Carter). In 1992, Congress passed Public Law 102-450 which designated May as Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month. The official Asian Pacific American Heritage Month website has more information, including audio, video, and information for teachers.
We’ve put together a collection of amazing titles featuring authors and characters from Asian and/or Pacific Islander heritage and cultures.
From the bestselling author of Girl in Translation, an inspiring novel about a young woman torn between her family duties in Chinatown and her escape into a more Western world.
Called “A writer to watch, a tremendous talent” by the Chicago Tribune, Bich Minh Nguyen makes her fiction debut with the deeply moving and entertaining story of two Vietnamese sisters. Aside from their petite stature, Van and Linny Luong couldn’t be more different. Diligent, unassuming Van works as an immigration lawyer in the Michigan suburbs where she resides with her handsome, Chinese-American lawyer husband. Beautiful, fashionable Linny lives in Chicago and has drifted into an affair with a married man. When Van’s picture-perfect marriage collapses and Linny finds herself grappling to escape her dead-end life, the long-estranged sisters are unable to confide in one another- until their eccentric inventor father calls them back home to the Vietnamese American community they fled long ago.
L is for Lee. Korean American Henry Park is “surreptitious, B+ student of life, illegal alien, emotional alien, Yellow peril: neo-American, stranger, follower, traitor, spy…” or so says his wife, in the list she writes upon leaving him. Henry is forever uncertain of his place, a perpetual outsider looking at American culture from a distance. And now, a man of two worlds, he is beginning to fear that he has betrayed both and belongs to neither. Chang-Rae Lee’s first novel Native Speaker is a raw and lyrical evocation of the immigrant experience and of the question of identity itself.
In Shauna Singh Baldwin’s enthralling novel, two fascinating, strong-willed women must deal with the relentless logic forced upon them by survival: Damini, a Hindu midwife, and Anu, who flees an abusive marriage for the sanctuary of the Catholic church. When Sister Anu comes to Damini’s home village to open a clinic, their paths cross, and each are certain they are doing what’s best for women. What do health, justice, education and equality mean for women when India is marching toward prosperity, growth and becoming a nuclear power? If the baby girls and women around them are to survive, Damini and Anu must find creative ways to break with tradition and help this community change from within.
The night before Janie’s sister, Hannah, is born, her grandmother tells her a story: Since the Japanese occupation of Korea, their family has lost a daughter in every generation, and Janie is told to keep Hannah safe. Years later, when Hannah inexplicably cuts all ties and disappears, Janie goes to find her. Thus begins a journey that will force her to confront her family’s painful silence, the truth behind her parents’ sudden move to America twenty years earlier, and her own conflicted feelings toward Hannah.
The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, caught in the tragic sweep of history, The Kite Runner transports readers to Afghanistan at a tense and crucial moment of change and destruction. A powerful story of friendship, it is also about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacrifices, their lies.
An impulsive act of heroism thrusts an arrogant young man into the limelight of Shanghai as China begins to form its own Justice League of powerful heroes. As the government creates their own Superman, will they live to regret the person they’ve chosen? Rising from the ashes of SUPERMAN: THE FINAL DAYS OF SUPERMAN and the death of the Man of Steel, will this New Super-Man step up to the challenge, or be crushed under the weight of his hubris and inexperience?
A sly debut collection that conjures the experience of adolescence through the eyes of Chinese American girls growing up in New York City—for readers of Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, and Junot Díaz
Narrated by the daughters of Chinese immigrants who fled imperiled lives as artists back home only to struggle to stay afloat—dumpster diving for food and scamming Atlantic City casino buses to make a buck—these seven stories showcase Zhang’s compassion, moral courage, and a perverse sense of humor reminiscent of Portnoy’s Complaint. A darkly funny and intimate rendering of girlhood, Sour Heart examines what it means to belong to a family, to find your home, leave it, reject it, and return again.
Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood – and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster.
