National Network for Equitable Library Service

Alexander Chee presents a manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend.

From the earliest settler policies to deal with the “Indian problem,” to contemporary government-run programs ostensibly designed to help Indigenous people, public policy has played a major role in creating the historical trauma that so greatly impacts the lives of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples. Taking Back Our Spirits traces the link between Canadian public policies, the injuries they have inflicted on Indigenous people, and Indigenous literature’s ability to heal individuals and communities.

On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual fire alarm. As one fireman recounted, "Once that first stack got going, it was 'Goodbye, Charlie.'" The fire was disastrous: it reached 2000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more.

In The Man Who Would Be Sherlock, a world-famous biographer reveals the strange relationship between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's real life and that of Sherlock Holmes. Though best known for the fictional cases of his creation Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle was involved in dozens of real life cases, solving many and zealously campaigning for justice in all. Stanford thoroughly and convincingly makes the case that the details of the many events Doyle was involved in, and caricatures of those involved, would provide Conan Doyle the fodder for many of the adventures of the violin-playing detective.

A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Freedom and The Corrections. In The End of the End of the Earth, which gathers essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes-both human and literary-that have long preoccupied him. Whether exploring his complex relationship with his uncle, recounting his young adulthood in New York, or offering an illuminating look at the global seabird crisis, these pieces contain all the wit and disabused realism that we've come to expect from Franzen.

"Stunning...This is Kathryn Harrison in top form."'Augusten Burroughs In the tradition of The Hare with Amber Eyes and Running in the Family, a memoir of the author's upbringing by her grandparents in a fading mansion above Sunset Boulevard'a childhood at once privileged and unusual, filled with the mementos and echoes of their impossibly exotic and peripatetic lives. Kathryn Harrison always understood that her family was beyond eccentric--they'd breached the bounds of the unconventional.

To millions of kids, the books they read are more than entertainment - they are mirrors to hold up to their own lives. And the creators of those books are more than just writers - they are mentors, confidants, friends, sometimes the only ones who understand. There is often an unspoken, unseen bond between an author and his or her readers.

The essential guide for describing the extraordinary--the must-have reference for anyone wishing to rise above tired superlatives.

When Alice Ozma was in fourth grade, she and her father decided to see if he could read aloud to her for a hundred consecutive nights. On the hundredth night, they shared pancakes to celebrate, but it soon became evident that neither wanted to let go of their storytelling ritual. So they decided to continue what they called "The Streak." Alice's father read aloud to her every night without fail until the day she left for college.

Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland-one of Canada's most beloved writers and one of Canada's most significant publishers-enjoyed an unusual rapport. In this collection of annotated letters, readers gain rare insight into the private side of these literary icons. Their correspondence reveals a professional relationship that evolved into deep friendship over a period of enormous cultural change. Both were committed to the idea of Canadian writing; in a very real sense, their mutual and separate work helped bring "Canadian Literature" into being.