Book of the Month for May 2013
The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers (New Poems) by Alice Walker
The poems in this collection remind us of our human capacity to come together in our troubled times. They illuminate what it means to live in our world today. “Walker distills struggles, crises, and tragedies down to bright, singing lessons in living with awareness and joy,” Booklist.
Book of the Month for April 2013
Astray by Emma Donoghue
The characters who roam across the pages of Donoghue’s short story collection have all gone astray. They are emigrants, runaways, drifters, gold miners and counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves. Inspired by various newspaper articles and stories from the last four centuries, these wanderings have profound echoes in the present. “Splendid…. [An] original and compelling collection,” The Boston Globe .
Book of the Month for March 2013
Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World by Matthew Goodman
On November 14, 1889 , Nellie Bly, the crusading young female reporter for Joseph Pulitzer’s World newspaper, left New York City by steamship on a quest to break the record for the fastest trip around the world. Also departing from New York that day–and heading in the opposite direction by train–was a young journalist from The Cosmopolitan magazine, Elizabeth Bisland. The dramatic race that ensued would span twenty-eight thousand miles, captivate the nation, and change both competitors’ lives forever.
Book of the Month for February 2013
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet. And the story begins again today, half a world away, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio’s back lot—searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier. “Why mince words? [It] is an absolute masterpiece,” Richard Russo.
Book of the Month for January 2013
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo
Winner of the National Book Award for 2012, this narrative nonfiction tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century’s great, unequal cities. “A triumph of a book – a beautiful account, told through real-life stories, of the sorrows and joys, anxieties and stamina, in the lives of the precarious and powerless in urban India,” Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics.
