Staff Picks

  • Aurora’s Anticipated New Nonfiction: May

    May 11, 2023Aurora's Anticipated New Nonfiction: May
    Mushrooming: An Illustrated Guide to the Fantastic, Delicious, Deadly and Strange World of Fungi, by Diane Borsato It seems everyone is embracing their inner mycophile these days, and though I retain a contrarian teenager’s aversion to trends, I’m totally on board with the mushroom craze. Because mushrooms are magical. And marvelous sautéed with garlic. And wonderfully, fascinatingly ...
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  • Aurora’s Anticipated New Nonfiction: Poetry

    April 20, 2023Aurora's  Anticipated New Nonfiction: Poetry
    Wail Song, by Chaun Webster Wail Song, released this month, submerges readers in the belly of the whale at the bottom of the ocean at the end of our world: the abyssal zone of what it means to be human, or mammal, born beneath dark water far from any safe shore, yet still drawing breath. Chaun ...
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  • The Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnell

    April 12, 2023The Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnell
    It is fitting that April is the month of poetry, when poems burst out of dormant minds and flower our consciousness. A celebration of words, a celebration of life. Poetry feels to me like a first language, when atomic particles of words fuse into strings of meaning and we know at once that something has ...
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  • Staff Pick: African Town by Charles Waters and Irene Latham

    April 5, 2023Staff Pick: African Town by Charles Waters and Irene Latham
    African Town: Inspired by the True Story of the Last American Slave Ship by Charles Waters and Irene Latham In 1859, over 100 free residents of the area now known as Benin were kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic in appalling conditions aboard the Clotilda. When they arrived in Alabama, they were sold into slavery by ...
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  • Staff Picks: What We’re Reading

    March 30, 2023Staff Picks: What We're Reading
    PFL Staff have been busy reading this week!  Check out our extensive list below, and don’t forget to place your holds!   Carnegie’s Maid by Marie Benedict The Wicked King by Holly Black The Anchoress by Robyn Cadwallader Cici’s Journal: The Adventures of a Writer-in-Training by Joris Chamblain & Aurélie Neyret, translated by Carol Klio Burrell The Aztec Heresy by Paul Christopher The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising ...
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  • Staff Picks: Lungfish by Meghan Gillis

    March 23, 2023
    Someone recently recommended Lungfish by Meghan Gillis to me, so I grabbed it and dove right in. I really loved it! I thought the writing was extraordinary literary prose. It made me feel a lot of things with lots of beautiful, and also harrowing, Maine coast imagery. I learned a lot about what drug addiction ...
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  • Staff Picks: Aurora’s Anticipated Non-Fiction: March

    March 16, 2023Staff Picks: Aurora's Anticipated Non-Fiction: March
    Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles In this scathing anti-automobile polemic, Economist journalist Daniel Knowles argues that cars have taken over the world, and gone a long way towards ruining it in the process. As the miracle invention that drove 20th-century modernization, cars promised freedom, convenience, and the ...
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  • Staff Pick: The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty

    March 9, 2023Staff Pick: The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty
    The residents of The Rabbit Hutch are a diverse cast of characters; a mother secretly afraid of her newborn’s eyes, an elderly couple bent on revenge, an online obituary writer, a trio of former foster children all in love with the same girl. Weaving throughout their stories is Blandine, a strange and luminescent girl obsessed ...
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  • Staff Picks: 33 1/3 and BFI Film Classics Series

    March 2, 2023
    Bloomsbury Publishing has created two hyper-focused book series and I can’t stop reading them. The first is the 33 1/3 series, which includes 168 books, each one a deep-dive into a specific album. Each book has a separate author and each author, passionate about the album of his or her choice, chooses the direction they ...
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  • What We’re Reading on February Break

    February 23, 2023What We're Reading on February Break
    We’ve had Presidents’ Day, a snow day, and February Break all in the same week, which means there has been a lot of time for books!  Check out the list below to see what PFL staff has been reading this week.   The Thing by Anne Billson All the Broken Places by John Boyne Before I Do by Sophie ...
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