- August 3, 2023
A wealthy family, a private island, unreliable narrators, and secrets, secrets, secrets! The perfect summer read.
The Sinclair family has summered on their private island off the coast of Massachusetts for generations. The cousins swim, eat, and adventure in what used to seem like paradise. But this summer, everything is different. Ever since Cady’s accident two ...
Read more… - July 20, 2023
Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic, by Emily Monosson
Several summers ago, I developed an earache that dragged on for weeks until one day whilst at work blood began dripping from my ear, at which time I conceded that it might be prudent to seek medical attention. As it happened, a fungus had taken shelter in ...
Read more… - July 13, 2023
The Exile Reviewed by Sarah Maciejewski.
If you enjoy westerns and/or Viking revenge stories, I recommend checking out our new graphic novel, The Exile, by Erik Kriek.
When Hallstein Thordsson returns to Iceland after having been banished for seven years, he is alarmed to find that things haven’t changed all that much. He is determined to defend ...
Read more… - June 8, 2023
Shut Up and Play the Hits!
Reviewed by Sarah Maciejewski.
In honor of Talking Heads’ seminal music documentary Stop Making Sense being re-released in theaters later this year, I would like to recommend another concert film by another band, LCD Soundsystem. (But, also, if you have never seen Stop Making Sense, or even if you have, go ...
Read more… - April 20, 2023
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 ...
Read more… - April 12, 2023
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 ...
Read more… - April 5, 2023
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 ...
Read more… - March 30, 2023
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 ...
Read more… - 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 ...
Read more… - March 16, 2023
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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