And a loud and joyful “Congratulations” to Margaret Atwood, who was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in Prague earlier this week!

The Franz Kafka Society has presented its prize annually 2001 to “contemporary authors whose literary works are exceptional in terms of artistic quality and can appeal to readers irrespective of their origin, nationality and culture, similar to the works by Kafka (1883-1924).”  Past winners of the Czech Republic’s only literary award include American Philip Roth, Austrian novelist, playwright and poet Elfriede Jelinek, British playwright Harold Pinter and this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature winner Haruki Murakami.

Though most people currently know Atwood as the author of The Handmaid’s Tale, which was made into an award-winning mini-series this year, she is also the author of more than 40 books across forms and genres.  Her novel Alias Grace will be released on Netflix starting November 3rd.

In accepting the award, Atwood noted that Kafka, the Prague-born Jewish-German writer whose writing revolutionized the world of fiction, was her first literary love.  And since Margaret Atwood was so many of our first literary loves here at the Library, we all take enormous pride in wishing her heaps of congratulations!

And now, on to some of the books that have tumbled down like leaves onto our shelves this week….

We Were Eight Years In Power: “We were eight years in power” was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s “first white president.”  But the story of these present-day eight years is not just about presidential politics. This book also examines the new voices, ideas, and movements for justice that emerged over this period—and the effects of the persistent, haunting shadow of our nation’s old and unreconciled history. Coates powerfully examines the events of the Obama era from his intimate and revealing perspective—the point of view of a young writer who begins the journey in an unemployment office in Harlem and ends it in the Oval Office, interviewing a president.  This is a book for anyone who was touched or educated or inspired by Coates’ previous work, as well as for those who have not yet encountered his powerful insights and gentle way of educating.  This book has been winning acclaim across the country, in addition to earning a starred review from Kirkus, who celebrated it “Biting cultural and political analysis from the award-winning journalist . . . He contextualizes each piece with candid personal revelations, making the volume a melding of memoir and critique. . . . Emotionally charged, deftly crafted, and urgently relevant.”

The Secret Life: Three True Stories of the Digital Age: The internet is a place where we live, though it’s not a place we can physically inhabit.  It has changed our lives, without being a physical presence.  And in these three essays, writer Andrew O’Hagan explores those porous borders between cyberspace and real life…from a consideration of  Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to how a dead man’s name was used to create a whole new life on the internet, O’Hagan’s searching pieces take us to the weirder fringes of life in a digital world while also casting light on our shared predicaments. What does it mean when your very sense of self becomes, to borrow a term from the tech world, “disrupted”?   This book is also being cheered as one of the best of the year, and earned a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly who hailed it as “Splendid . . . O’Hagan’s grasp of storytelling is prodigious…Taken as a whole, this is an unmissable collection of up-to-the-moment insights about life in our digital era.”

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: An ambitious title if there ever was one!  In our unique genomes, every one of us carries the story of our species—births, deaths, disease, war, famine, migration, …but those stories were always largely inaccessible, until recent scientific pioneering has led us to understand the smallest parts of our makeup.  In this fascinating and insightful work, Adam Rutherford explores how geneticists have suddenly become historians, and the hard evidence in our DNA has blown the lid off what we thought we knew. Acclaimed science writer Adam Rutherford explains exactly how genomics is completely rewriting the human story—from 100,000 years ago to the present.  This is a book filled with provocative questions that we’re on the cusp of answering: Are we still in the grasp of natural selection? Are we evolving for better or worse? And . . . where do we go from here?  Renowned science writer Siddhartha Mukherjee wrote a forward for this book, as well as providing a stellar blurb, which hails this book as  “Ambitious, wide-ranging, and deeply researched, Rutherford’s book sets out to describe the history of the human species—from our origins as a slight, sly, naked, apelike creature somewhere in Africa to our gradual spread across the globe and our dominion over the planet.”

Rebellion: Molly Patterson’s stellar debut crosses time and geography to tell a powerful story about four women whose rebellions, both large and small, change their worlds.  At the heart of the novel lies a mystery: In 1900, Addie, an American missionary in China, goes missing during the Boxer Rebellion, leaving her family back home to wonder at her fate. Her sister Louisa—newly married and settled in rural Illinois—anticipates tragedy, certain that Addie’s fate is intertwined with her own legacy of loss.  In 1958, Louisa’s daughter Hazel has her world upended by the untimely death of her husband.  Nearly half a century later, Juanlan has returned to her parents’ home in Heng’an. With her father ill, her sister-in-law soon to give birth, and the construction of a new highway rapidly changing the town she once knew, she feels pressured on every side by powers outside her control.  This is a work being celebrated by writers and critics alike, with Booklist calling it  “[A] remarkable debut… This is a book about the quiet unfolding of lives and the kind of rebellion that comes from following one’s heart.”

Here in Berlin: Cristina Garcia is a fascinating and insightful novelist whose work is utterly transporting.  This newest release brings us to the heart of Germany during the Second World War, delivering haunting scenes of survival, hope, and heartbreak.
An unnamed Visitor travels to Berlin with a camera looking for reckonings of her own. The city itself is a character―vibrant and postapocalyptic, flat and featureless except for its rivers, its lakes, its legions of bicyclists. Here in Berlin she encounters a people’s history: the Cuban teen taken as a POW on a German submarine only to return home to a family who doesn’t believe him; the young Jewish scholar hidden in a sarcophagus until safe passage to England is found; the female lawyer haunted by a childhood of deprivation in the bombed-out suburbs of Berlin who still defends those accused of war crimes; a young nurse with a checkered past who joins the Reich at a medical facility more intent to dispense with the wounded than to heal them; and the son of a zookeeper at the Berlin Zoo, fighting to keep the animals safe from both war and an increasingly starving populace.  This book also earned a starred review from Booklist, which said in its review “García, a transcendentally imaginative, piquantly satiric, and profoundly compassionate novelist, dramatizes the helter-skelter of lives ruptured by tyranny, war, and political upheavals with sharp awareness of unlikely multicultural alliances . . . García has created an intricate, sensitive, and provocative montage revolving around the question: ‘Do people remember only what they can endure, or distort memories until they can endure them?'”

And, as everyone has probably noticed by now, it’s Friday the 13th.  A day of bad luck, of ominous premonitions, of evil portents?  According to the Stress Management Center and Phobia Institute in Asheville, North Carolina, an estimated 17 to 21 million people in the United States are affected by a fear of this day.  Donald Dossey, founder of the SMC, notes, “It’s been estimated that [U.S] $800 or $900 million is lost in business on this day because people will not fly or do business they would normally do.”

But it’s important to bear in mind that the concept of Friday the 13th being unlucky is absolutely culturally constructed…and that construction is not as large as you might think.  For example, in Italian popular culture, Friday the 17th is considered the unlucky day, and 13 is considered a lucky number.  In a number of Spanish-speaking counties, Tuesday the 13th is the unlucky day, not Friday.   These beliefs are evolving now with the steady progress of Americanization, but nevertheless, it’s perhaps helpful and perhaps necessary to realize that the day doesn’t really have it out for you.

In fact, today seems like a perfect day to check out a few new Library books!  Why not have a look as some of the new titles that have fallen, like autumn leaves, upon our shelves this week…

Paradox Bound: Peter Clines’ books are wild and inventive, and their stories feel so big that they can’t quite be contained by any descriptions–especially this book.  But here goes.  Eli Teague lives in Saunders.  A town where nothing ever happens.  A town that still has a video store.  But Eli refuses to leave.  He’s still waiting to see again that mysterious traveler he’s seen twice before–a traveler who stops  just long enough to drop tantalizing clues before disappearing in a cloud of gunfire and a squeal of tires.  So when the mysterious traveler finally reappears, Eli’s determined that this time, he’s going to get some answers. But his hunt soon yields far more than he bargained for, plunging him headlong into a dizzying world full of competing factions and figures, with the history and fate of America itself at its heart.  Fans of Doctor Who and Jules Verne alike are going to find plenty to enjoy here, and Clines’ characters are always so real that you tend to miss them when they’re gone.  Kirkus Reviews agreed, giving this book a starred review and calling it,  “A timey-wimey, full-barrel adventure novel that also teaches a non-ironic lesson in American civics…[featuring] an epithet-wielding, pistol-packing heroine that will capture hearts.”

Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II: Another book about “Girls”, but this is a true story, and a remarkable one that readers of military history, as well as women’s history and American history will all be able to savor.  More than ten thousand women served as codebreakers during World War II.  Recruited from small towns, college, and universities across the country, they moved their lives to Washington, D.C., and undertook to learn the meticulous work of code-breaking. Their efforts shortened the war, saved countless lives, and gave them access to careers previously denied to them. A strict vow of secrecy nearly erased their efforts from history; now, through painstaking research and interviews with surviving code girls, Liza Mundy brings their riveting stories, and their enduring contributions to the Allied forces, to worldwide scientific knowledge, and to American history, to life.  The Washingtonian praised Mundy’s work, noting how her “fascinating book suggests that [the Code Girls’] influence did play a role in defining modern Washington and challenging gender roles–changes that still matter 75 years later.”

The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life: Growing up in rural El Salvador in the wake of the civil war, Ernesto Flores had always had a fascination with the United States, the distant land of skyscrapers and Nikes, while his identical twin, Raul, never felt that northbound tug. But when Ernesto ends up on the wrong side of the region’s brutal gangs he is forced to flee the country, and Raul, because he looks just like his brother, follows close behind—away from one danger and toward the great American unknown.  In this stunning and harrowing tale, journalist Lauren Markham follows the seventeen-year-old Flores twins as they make their harrowing journey across the Rio Grande and the Texas desert, into the hands of immigration authorities, and eventually to life in California, where they try desperately to fit in with American culture without the language and only each other for support.  This book is a story of a beautiful bond, a nuanced portrait of Central America’s child exodus, an investigation of U.S. immigration policy, and an unforgettable testament to the migrant experience that is sure to rivet news junkies and novel-readers alike.  The New York Times gave this book a glowing review, noting that it is an “impeccably timed, intimately reported and beautifully expressed. Markham brings people and places to rumbling life; she has that rare ability to recreate elusive, subjective experiences—whether they’re scenes she never witnessed or her characters’ interior psychological states—without taking undue liberties.”

What The Hell Did I Just Read: A perfect selection for All-Hallows Read, David Wong’s third installment of the blackly-comic, spine-chilling series that began with John Dies at the End is absurd, the most artistic of ways, emotional in the most surprising of ways, and creepy in all the ways you’ve come to expect if you’ve ever savored one of his stories.  While investigating a fairly straightforward case of a shape-shifting interdimensional child predator, Dave, John and Amy realized there might actually be something weird going on. Together, they navigate a diabolically convoluted maze of illusions, lies, and their own incompetence in an attempt to uncover a terrible truth they — like you — would be better off not knowing.  Your first impulse will be to think that a story this gruesome — and, to be frank, stupid — cannot possibly be true. That is precisely the reaction “They” are hoping for.  Who are “They”?  What do “they” want…you’ll have to read the book to find out!  (Though that might be just what “They” want!)  Publisher’s Weekly gave this book a starred review, and noted, in their delightful, delighted review, that “While the story gleefully wallows in absurdity, thoughtful themes of addiction, perception, and the drive to do the right thing quickly emerge beneath the vivid and convoluted imagery. The plot’s rapid pace holds the reader’s attention to the truly bitter end.”

The Apparitionists: In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized America’s imagination. A “spirit photographer,” William Mumler took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of a lost loved one alongside the living subject. Mumler was a sensation: The affluent and influential came calling, including Mary Todd Lincoln, who arrived at his studio in disguise amidst rumors of séances in the White House.  Peter Manseau brilliantly captures a nation wracked with grief and hungry for proof of the existence of ghosts and for contact with their dead husbands and sons. It took a circus-like trial of Mumler on fraud charges, starring P. T. Barnum for the prosecution, to expose a fault line of doubt and manipulation. And even then, the judge sided with the defense—nobody ever solved the mystery of his spirit photography. This forgotten puzzle offers a vivid snapshot of America at a crossroads in its history, a nation in thrall to new technology while clinging desperately to belief.  Kirkus also gave this book a glowing review, which reads, in part: “Written like a novel but researched with academic rigor, this account of a photographer whose work seemed to incorporate images from the spirit realm stops short of either endorsing the veracity of the photographer’s claim or debunking his work as a scam…A well-paced nonfiction work that reads more like a historical novel than an academic study.”

Until next week, beloved patrons….happy reading!