ODY New Books Collection

A Wilder Shore

"A portrait of the fascinating, unusual and fruitful creative partnership between Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson."-- Provided by publisher

Why Animals Talk

"From leading zoologist Arik Kershenbaum, a delightful and groundbreaking exploration of animal communication and its true meaning. Animal communication has forever seemed intelligible. We are surrounded by animals and the cacophony of sounds that they make--from the chirping of songbirds to the growls of lions on the savannah--but we have yet to fully understand why animals communicate the way they do. What are they saying? This is only part of the mystery. To go deeper, we must also ask, what is motivating them? Why Animals Talk is an exhilarating journey through the untamed world of animal communication. Following his international bestseller, The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy, acclaimed zoologist Arik Kershenbaum draws on extensive original research to reveal how many of the animal kingdom's most seemingly confusing or untranslatable signals are in fact logical and consistent--and not that different from our own. His fascinating deep dive into this timeless subject overturns decades of conventional wisdom, inviting readers to experience for the first time communication through the minds of animals themselves. From the majestic howls of wolves and the enchanting chatter of parrots to the melodic clicks of dolphins and the spirited grunts of chimpanzees, these often strange expressions are far from mere noise. In fact, they hold secrets that we are just beginning to decipher. It's one of the oldest mysteries that has haunted Homo sapiens for hundreds of thousands of years: Are animals talking just like us, or are we the only animals on the planet to have our own language?"-- Provided by publisher

The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians

"To be a bookseller or librarian... You have to play detective. Be a treasure hunter. A matchmaker. An advocate. A visionary. A person who creates "book joy" by pulling a book from a shelf, handing it to someone and saying, "You've got to read this. You're going to love it." Step inside The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians and enter a world where you can feed your curiosities, discover new voices, find whatever you want or require. This place has the magic of rainbows and unicorns, but it's also a business. The book business. Meet the smart and talented people who live between the pages--and who can't wait to help you find your next favorite book."-- Provided by publisher

The Salt of the Universe

"A book of mischief and improvisation that answers dogma and fundamentalism with rage, delight, Jesus, music, earth-worship, and wombats."-- Provided by publisher

A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit

"An intimate and searching account of the life and legacy of one of America's towering educators, a woman who dared to center the progress of Black women and girls in the larger struggle for political and social liberation When Mary MacLeod Bethune died, many of the tributes in newspapers around the country said the same thing: she should be on the "Mount Rushmore" of Black American achievement. Indeed, Bethune is the only Black American whose statue stands in the rotunda of the U.S. Capital, and yet for most Americans, she remains a marble figure from the dim past. Now, seventy years later, Noliwe Rooks turns Bethune from stone to flesh, showing her to have been a visionary leader with lessons to still teach us as we continue on our journey towards a freer and more just nation. Any serious effort to understand how the Black Civil Rights generation found role models, vision, and inspiration during their midcentury struggle for political power must place Bethune at its heart. Her success was unlikely: the 15th of 17 children and the first born into freedom, Bethune survived brutal poverty and caste subordination to become the first in her family to learn to read and to attend college. She gave that same gift to others when in 1904, at age 29, Bethune welcomed her first class of five girls to the Daytona, Florida school she herself had founded. In short order, the school enrolled hundreds of children and eventually would become the university that bears her name to this day. Bethune saw education as an essential dimension of the larger struggle for freedom, vitally connected to the vote and to economic self-sufficiency. She played a big game, and a long game, enrolling Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and many other powerful leaders in her cause. Rooks grew up in Florida, in Bethune's shadow: her grandparents trained to be teachers at Bethune-Cookman University, and her family vacationed at the all-Black beach that Bethune helped found in one of her many entrepreneurial projects for the community. The story of how-in a state with some of the highest lynching rates in the country-Bethune carved out so much space, and how she catapulted from there onto the national stage, is, in Rooks' hands, a moving and astonishing example of the power of a will and a vision that had few equals. Now, when the gains and losses in the long struggle for full Black equality in this country feel particularly near-and centered on the state of Florida-, it is an enormous gift to have this brilliant and lyrical reckoning with Bethune's journey from one of our own great educators and scholars of that same struggle."-- Provided by publisher

Paradise Bronx

"Ian Frazier's magnum opus: a love song to New York City's most various and alive borough."-- Provided by publisher

Another Day

"A companion to his beloved volume This Day and Wendell Berry's first new poetry collection since 2016, this new selection of Sabbath Poems are filled with spiritual longing and political extremity, memorials and celebrations, elegies and lyrics, alongside the occasional rants of the Mad Farmer, pushed to the edge yet again by his compatriots and elected officials."-- Provided by publisher

Hum

"After losing her job to artificial intelligence, May, in a city populated by intelligent robots called "hums," takes her family on a three-night respite to the Botanical Garden, a rare green refuge, where her children come under threat and she is forced to trust a hum to save them."-- Provided by publisher

By the Fire We Carry

"A powerful work of reportage and American history in the vein of Caste and How the Word Is Passed that braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation's earliest days, and a small-town murder in the '90s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land over a century later."-- Provided by publisher

Why We Die

"A groundbreaking exploration of the science of why and how we age and die-from Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Venki Ramakrishnan."-- Provided by publisher

Smothermoss

"In 1980s Appalachia, sisters Sheila and Angie couldn't be more different. While their mother works long shifts at the nearby asylum, Sheila does her best to care for their home and keeps to herself, even when enduring relentless bullying from classmates. Her rambunctious, fearless younger sister, Angie, is more focused on fighting imaginary zombies, and creating tarot-like cards that seem to have a mind of their own. When the brutal murder of two female hikers on the nearby Appalachian Trail stuns their small community, the sisters find themselves tangled in a dangerous game of cat and mouse. Angie discovers a ripped shirt, soaked in blood; money Sheila's been stashing away disappears; and a strange man shows up at a local store, trying to barter with a woman's watch. As the threat of violence looms larger, the mysterious, ancient mountain they live on-and their willingness to trust each other-might be the only things that can save them from the darkness consuming their home. In turns both terrifying and otherworldly, author Alisa Alering opens the door to the hidden world of Smothermoss-a mountain that sighs, monsters made of ink, rabbits both dead and alive, and ropes that just won't come undone. Unsettling, propulsive, and wonderfully atmospheric, Alering's stunning debut novel renegotiates what is seen and unseen, what is real and what is haunted."-- Provided by publisher

The Power of Going All-in

"Leadership is not about fancy titles and status symbols. It's not about taking all the credit when you win or blaming others when you lose. And it's not about micromanaging people's every move. Becoming a great manager and top-performing leader that others would follow no matter what takes skills you can learn. So what are these skills, and how do we learn them? What are the principles that build unstoppable teams? In this book, serial entrepreneur Brandon Bornancin, CEO & founder of Seamless. AI (one of the fastest-growing tech companies in the US worth billions in valuation), answers these questions and shares his secrets to building, leading, and managing a world-class remote company. This book will transform your understanding of leadership by sharing hundreds of tested and proven secrets that cover every aspect of management (from organization and project management to building a culture of accountability and predictable growth). With this book, readers can lead with empathy, tenacity, and a purposeful vision."-- Provided by publisher

The Lehman Trilogy

"On a cold September morning in 1844, a young man from Bavaria stands on a New York dockside dreaming of a new life in the new world. He is joined by his two brothers, and an American epic begins. 163 years later, the firm they establish - Lehman Brothers - spectacularly collapses into bankruptcy, triggering the largest financial crisis in history. Weaving together nearly two centuries of family history, this epic theatrical event charts the humble beginnings, outrageous successes, and devastating failure of the financial institution that would ultimately bring the global economy to its knees. The Lehman Trilogy is the quintessential story of western capitalism, rendered through the lens of a single immigrant family." -- Provided by publisher

I Was a Teenage Slasher

"1989, Lamesa, Texas. A small west Texas town driven by oil and cotton--and a place where everyone knows everyone else's business. So it goes for Tolly Driver, a good kid with more potential than application, seventeen, and about to be cursed to kill for revenge. Here Stephen Graham Jones explores the Texas he grew up in, the unfairness of being on the outside, through the slasher horror he lives but from the perspective of the killer, Tolly, writing his own autobiography. Find yourself rooting for a killer in this summer teen movie of a novel gone full blood-curdling tragic."-- Provided by publisher

A Gentleman and a Thief

"A captivating true-crime caper about Arthur Barry, a jewel thief who charmed celebrities and millionaires, stole from Rockefellers and royalty, and pulled off the most audacious and lucrative heists of the Jazz Age."-- Provided by publisher

Bright Objects

"A young widow grapples with the arrival of a once-in-a-lifetime comet and its tumultuous consequences, in a debut novel that blends mystery, astronomy, and romance, perfect for fans of Emma Cline's The Girls and Ottessa Moshfegh's Death in Her Hands."-- Provided by publisher

Black Pill

"A kaleidoscopic combination of deeply sourced, on-the-ground reporting and novelistic storytelling, detailing America at a crossroads as the battle between the right and left spills out from the dark corners of the internet into the real world."-- Provided by publisher

Beautiful Days

"From New Yorker and Paris Review contributor and Wallace Stegner Fellow Zach Williams comes a staggering debut story collection that confronts parenthood, mortality, and life's broken promises. Parents awaken in a home in the woods, again and again, to find themselves aging as their toddler remains unchanged. An employee is menaced by a conspiracy-minded security guard and accused of sending a sinister viral email. An aging tour guide leads a troublesome group to the site of a UFO, witnessing the slow social deterioration as the rules of decorum go out the window. In each of Williams' ten stories, time is as fallible as the characters, and reality is witnessed through the gauzy folds of a dream--or a nightmare. Bucolic scenes devolve into harrowing exercises in abandonment; the quotidian nature of office life raises serious questions of existential fortitude. Williams is keenly aware of the insidiousness lurking in the shadows of the everyday, ably spiking it with humor. He depicts the divided self of the parent, the distances necessary to protect our children, and the fallout of our deepest relationships. Williams sees the perversity in the mundane and dares readers to recognize the impact--and beauty--of time's relentless movement. With exquisite prose and a lacerating wit, Beautiful Days holds a mirror to the many absurdities of being human and refuses to let us look away."-- Provided by publisher

Banal Nightmare

""Margaret Anne ("Moddie") Yance had just returned to her native land in the Midwestern town of X, to mingle with the friends of her youth, to get back in touch with her roots, and to recover from a stressful decade of living in the city in a small apartment with a man she now believed to be a megalomaniac or perhaps a covert narcissist." So begins Banal Nightmare, Halle Butler's tour de force that follows Moddie as she throws herself at the mercy of her old friends who never left their hometown. Friends who all seemingly work at the local liberal arts college, who are all suddenly tipping toward middle age, going to parties, sizing each other up, obsessing over past slights, and dreaming of wild triumphs couched in elaborate revenge fantasies. When her friend Pam invites a mysterious New York artist to take up a winter residency in town, Moddie has no choice but to confront a trauma from her past and grapple with the reality of what her life has become. As the day of reckoning approaches, friends will become enemies, enemies will become mortal enemies, and the bonds forged in childhood will be tested to their extreme."-- Provided by publisher

Take Care of Them like My Own

"The founder of the Black Doctors Consortium highlights the devastating racial injustices in our healthcare system in this inspirational memoir and empowering call to action."-- Provided by publisher