Small-town librarian Amanda Jones has been called a groomer, a pedo and a porn-pusher. She has faced death threats and attacks from strangers and friends alike. When she stood up for diverse perspectives at a public library board meeting, she became a target for extremists using book-banning campaigns --- funded by dark money organizations and advanced by hard right politicians --- in a crusade to make America more white, straight and “Christian.” But Amanda Jones wouldn't give up without a fight. She sued her harassers for defamation and urged others to join her in the resistance. Mapping the book-banning crisis occurring all across the nation, THAT LIBRARIAN draws the battle lines in the war against intellectual freedom, calling book lovers everywhere to rise in defense of our readers.

It is 1486, and Venice is a wealthy, opulent center for trade. Orsola Rosso is the eldest daughter in a family of glassblowers on Murano, the island revered for the craft. As a woman, she is not meant to work with glass --- but she has the hands for it, the heart and a vision. When her father dies, she teaches herself to make glass beads in secret, and her work supports the Rosso family fortunes. Skipping like a stone through the centuries, in a Venice where time moves as slowly as molten glass, we follow Orsola and her family as they live through creative triumph and heartbreaking loss --- from a plague devastating Venice to Continental soldiers stripping its palazzos bare, from the domination of Murano and its maestros to the transformation of the city of trade into a city of tourists.

In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an 18th-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there’s still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s PARADISE LOST to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth. But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams.

A VIEW FROM THE STARS features a range of short works from the past three decades of New York Times bestselling author Cixin Liu's prolific career, putting his nonfiction essays and short stories side-by-side for the first time. This collection includes essays and interviews that shed light on Liu's experiences as a reader, writer and lover of science fiction throughout his life, as well as short fiction that gives glimpses into the evolution of his imaginative voice over the years.

On the morning of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was standing onstage at the Chautauqua Institution, preparing to give a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm, when a man in black --- black clothes, black mask --- rushed down the aisle toward him, wielding a knife. His first thought: So it’s you. Here you are. What followed was a horrific act of violence that shook the literary world and beyond. Now, for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, Rushdie relives the traumatic events of that day and its aftermath, as well as his journey toward physical recovery and the healing that was made possible by the love and support of his wife, Eliza, his family, his army of doctors and physical therapists, and his community of readers worldwide.

In her time, Anna May Wong was a legendary beauty, witty conversationalist and fashion icon. Plucked from her family’s laundry business in Los Angeles, she rose to stardom in Douglas Fairbanks’ blockbuster, The Thief of Bagdad. Fans and the press clamored to see more of this unlikely actress, but when Hollywood repeatedly cast her in stereotypical roles, she headed abroad in protest. Anna May starred in acclaimed films in Berlin, Paris and London. She dazzled royalty and heads of state across several nations, leaving trails of suitors in her wake. She returned to challenge Hollywood at its own game by speaking out about the industry’s blatant racism. She used her new stature to move away from her typecasting as the China doll or dragon lady, and worked to reshape Asian American representation in film.

Clover Hendry hasn’t said “No” a day in her life. Until today. Normally a woman who tips her hairdresser even when the cut is hideous, is endlessly patient with her horrendous mother, and says “yes” every time her boss asks her to work late. Today, things are going to be very different. Because Clover is taking the day off. Today, she’s going to do and say whatever she likes, even if it means her whole life unravels. What made Clover change her ways? Why doesn’t she care anymore? There’s more to this day than meets the eye.

In SLOW NOODLES, Chantha Nguon recounts her life as a Cambodian refugee who loses everything and everyone --- her home, her family, her country --- all but the remembered tastes and aromas of her mother’s kitchen. She summons the quiet rhythms of 1960s Battambang, her provincial hometown, before the dictator Pol Pot tore her country apart and killed more than a million Cambodians, many of them ethnic Vietnamese like Nguon and her family. Then, as an immigrant in Saigon, Nguon loses her mother, brothers and sister and eventually flees to a refugee camp in Thailand. For two decades in exile, she survives by cooking in a brothel, serving drinks in a nightclub, making and selling street food, becoming a suture nurse and weaving silk.

In 1977, while she was in her 20s, Robyn Davidson set off with a dog and four camels to cross 1,700 miles of Australian desert to the sea. A life of almost constant traveling followed --- from the Outback to Sydney's underworld; from ’60s street life to the London literary scene; from migrating with nomads in India and Tibet to marrying an Indian prince. The only territory she avoided was the past. In UNFINISHED WOMAN, she ventures into that unknown, unearthing an ache for a lost but barely remembered mother and an unmet desire to feel at home in her freedom. Adventurous but guarded, fearless yet broken, Davidson asks: How can we live with pain and uncertainty to find beauty in the strangeness of being?

There are countless books on music with much analysis given to musicians, bands, eras and/or genres. But rarely does a book delve into what's going on inside us when we listen. Michel Faber explores two big questions: How do we listen to music, and why do we listen to music? To answer these questions, he considers a range of factors, which includes age, illness, the notion of "cool," commerce, the dichotomy between "good" and "bad" taste, and much more.