ODY New Books Collection

Centroeuropa

"Revelations - and frozen corpses - multiply in a small, European village 'Male, Prussian, hussar soldier, frozen. That was the first body I found while digging in the frozen earth to bury my wife.' At the dawn of the nineteenth century, European feudalism is starting to crumble. Newly widowed, Redo Hauptshammer arrives in a small town far from home to claim a plot of arable land and the simple life of a farmer. But when Redo begins to dig up the field, the perfectly preserved, frozen corpse of a soldier emerges. The next day, Redo uncovers two more soldiers, dressed in uniforms of an earlier age. And then there are more. As bodies from past and future wars proliferate exponentially, Redo enlists the aid of eccentric villagers, but risks exposing a precious personal secret and the great love at the heart of it. What will be excavated and what will remain buried? Subtle, subversive, and full of surprises, this ingeniously structured novel heralds a talented writer whose experimentations in style are as dazzling as his humane, spirited story of oppression, erasure, and endurance."-- Provided by publisher

The Calamity Club

"Oxford, Mississippi, 1933. Abandoned by her mother one Christmas Eve, eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur has learned the hard way to rely on no one. Now one of the unadoptable 'big girls' at the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum, she fights each day to keep her spirit unbowed. Birdie Calhoun, unmarried and outspoken, has come to Oxford to ask her socialite sister to help the struggling family she's left behind. But as the Depression tightens its grip, Birdie discovers her sister's seemingly charmed life is a tapestry of lies. Then, Birdie encounters Charlie, a woman running low on luck with little left to lose. When their fates--and Meg's--converge, Charlie comes up with an audacious plan to claim what's rightfully theirs. But in a place and time where hypocrisy is rife and women's freedom is fragile, even the smallest act of defiance can have dangerous consequences."-- Dust jacket flap

A Bird's
IQ

In this work, animal behavior researcher Louis Lefebvre examines cognitive abilities, innovation, and learning in birds. Drawing on decades of scientific research and observations of species such as crows, parrots, finches, and tits, he explores how birds solve problems, adapt to changing environments, develop new behaviors, and transmit knowledge within populations. The book discusses the evolutionary and ecological factors associated with avian intelligence and reviews methods used to study and compare innovation among bird species.

Backtalker

"One of the most influential public intellectuals in the world and the architect of the two biggest ideas to reshape the American conversation about fairness offers the intimate story of how her life gave birth to these ideas. It is not very often that someone comes along and permanently reshapes the way Americans think about two of the most important issues of the day -- in this case, race and gender. But that is what Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw did when she articulated two concepts that would forever change national and global debates about equality: intersectionality and critical race theory. Backtalker is the powerful and intimate story of how a little girl from Canton, Ohio, came up with a new way to look at the world. Crenshaw's memoir traces the way her lived experience -- as the daughter of a strong-minded teacher and a pathbreaking public servant, and as the sister of a protective yet bullying older brother -- made her see things other don't. She started to talk back, and that backtalking has continued throughout her life. It happened when she was denied a role in the kindergarten school play; when she was escorted to the back door of a private club; when Anita Hill was exiled for testifying against Clarence Thomas; when O.J. Simpson went on trial; when President Barack Obama launched My Brother's Keeper, a movement focused on boys of color only; and when the movement against police violence overlooked Black women. Crenshaw has been there for all of it. In the vein of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Bryan Stevenson, Crenshaw evokes each time and place like a gifted novelist with extreme honesty and specificity, making her book a series of awe-inspiring, deep revelations. As a result of her work, Crenshaw has become a force to be reckoned with across the United States - at schools, in the workplace, at dinner tables, and, of course, in our public square." -- Dust jacket

Babylon, South Dakota

"When Saul Keng Hsiu and his wife, Mei Lee, move from China to the United States to take possession of a 160-acre homestead bequeathed to them by a distant relative, all they have are the possessions on their back, some hidden gold, and a pocketful of chrysanthemum seeds. After a rocky start and a long, harsh winter, the couple find themselves successfully raising chrysanthemums and livestock, and soon after, a daughter, Mara. But when representatives from the US Army Corps of Engineers buy an acre of the Hsiu's farmland and begin building a missile silo, the inexplicable starts to occur: Mara can commune with the animals on the farm, Mei develops a hidden talent for augury, and the chrysanthemums become impervious to everything. When the Hsius learn that the project on their farm is an effort to make America's nuclear deterrent invulnerable, they see firsthand the long arm of power and empire. In the years and generations that follow, increasingly impacted by the silo and its residue, the Hsius experience strange, wondrous, and tragic events on their farm."-- Provided by publisher

August, September, October

"August, September, October is a deep, touching meditation on fatherhood, time passing, and survival in a world reshaped by crisis. In two long, diaristic poems and a constellation of lyrical reflections, this collection traces the experiences of a poet--someone very much, though not exactly, like Craig Morgan Teicher--through the emotional and existential terrain of caregiving during the COVID-19 lockdown. In the title poem, 'August September October,' the speaker tends to his medically fragile son during a harrowing stretch of illness and hospitalization while pondering the deathbed book of Irish poet Ciaran Carson. The second extended poem, 'Midsummer Days,' takes off from Bernadette Mayer's classic Midwinter Day, following the speaker as he fails to write a memoir and climbs his way back to poetry and toward faith in a world overwhelmed by upheaval. Surrounding these central poems are shorter poems that meditate on grim games, the music of Sonny Rollins, memories of being a young writer, the tyranny of TV screens, and the insane politics of our time. August, September, October offers a deeply human snapshot of a family navigating disability, grief, and fleeting hope, all while trying to keep the imagination alive in an age of catastrophe." -- Provided by publisher

Attention-Seeking Behavior

"I have never told anyone about this before. There is no way to prove that it happened, but why would I lie? The narrator of this novel wants to tell you about Normal Ben, the man she's been seeing. She wants to tell you about the incorrect belief that tiny facial expressions betray a person's real feelings. She wants to tell you about the time she went to a therapist to try to cure her lying habit. She wants to tell you about the body she found on a walk through the park. She wants to tell you about lies she's told her demeaning, erratic boss. She wants to tell you about the history of police interrogation techniques, which use deception to extract false confessions. She wants to tell you that all lie-detection methods are phony. She wants to tell you what it's like to read opposing testimonies in a sexual assault case. She wants to tell you about her ex-boyfriend, who is a liar. But is she telling you the truth--or does she only want your attention?"--Page 4 of cover

Aside From My Heart, All Is Well

"Luis Cordóba leads an unconventional life. His vocation as a priest has not stopped him from becoming a film critic, teacher, and opera enthusiast. He lives in his childhood home in downtown Medellín with his fellow priest, Aurelio Sánchez, among an array of pets (a war-mongering fish, a toucan). It is Aurelio who details Luis'' life, writing across time to a day in 1996 when his friend's life changed. At fifty, Luis learns he heeds a heart transplant. Forbidden from climbing stairs, he moves into a makeshift household with a friend, her housekeeper, and their children. Aurelio's digressions, anecdotes, and confessions feel like a whispered phone call between friends. With the briskness of sunshine and mountain air drying out wet clothes, Aurelio reflects on Luis' new era of thinking and feeling, sketching a portrait of a luminous human being." -- Front jacket flap

Alito

"Through the lens of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's judicial career, Mollie Hemingway examines the political, social, and legal battles that have unsettled the Supreme Court and the nation. From mobs encamped outside the justices' homes to senators bellowing violent threats on the steps of the Court itself, Hemingway offers an account of the Supreme Court under unprecedented attack in a polarized age. Few would have predicted that the modest and reserved judge who joined the high court with little fanfare two decades ago would lead the originalists to their ascendancy, but Hemingway's portrait reveals an intellect and character that make such leadership seem inevitable." -- From the publisher's description

Trajectories of Neo-Marxism

"Reconstructing how Marxism responded to the transformations in society, politics, the economy and culture in the 20th century, Trajectories of Neo-Marxism begins with studies of the key figures in the 1920s - Bloch, Lukacs, Korsch and Gramsci - who began developing revisions of Marxism that responded to World War I, the revolutionary upheavals that emerged or followed the war in Russia and various European countries, and the subsequent rise of fascism. These revolutionary Marxian theorists were followed by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s, who responded to many of the same crises of Western capitalism and civilization that had engaged their neo-Marxian predecessors in the 1920s, but also fully engaged fascism which had taken over in Germany and Europe, driving the Frankfurt School to exile in the United States. These neo-Marxist theorists thinkers are analyzed through their biographies, written texts, politics and influence on contemporary critical social theory and politics. Consequently, this book provides a critically important overview of how a group of 20th century neo Marxists ditter from classical Marxism while trying to reinterpret that tradition during the contemporary myriad crises. Trajectories of Neo-Marxism will be a vital resource, accessible to both undergraduate and graduate students for a range of courses in sociology, social theory, political science, modern European and American history, philosophy, and studies of Marxism and Marxist social theory." -- back cover

Vermeer

This revelatory biography persuasively addresses the two great unresolved questions about Vermeer -- why did he paint his pictures, and what do they mean?

Exemplary Humans

"Ever since the unnamed threat took over, 100-year-old Natalia has been stuck inside her Rio de Janeiro apartment, alone. Well, not entirely alone - her loved ones may be gone but they never really left her, plus she's pretty sure there's a spy watching her every move through the window. As she waits for the daily call from her daughter who lives halfway across the world, the old woman revisits scenes from her life. There's her husband Vicente, who obsessively erased maps of Brazil; her best friend Sarah, the cookie seller; Jorge, who gave tarot readings for both humans and birds; and the comrades who joined her in resisting Brazil's dictatorship, at least until they were forced into hiding. An ambitious novel about the quirks of memory and the delights and horror of aging." -- Provided by publisher

Wolvers

"Broke, dispossessed, and angry at the government after losing his family's New Mexico ranch, Trace Temple is looking for revenge. He's living out of his truck when a shadowy militia movement hires him to take down the legendary she-wolf of the Dark Canyon pack, One-Eleven. But One-Eleven is no ordinary wolf. Cunning, fiercely protective of her young, and seasoned in the ways of men, she leads her pack deep into the forbidding desert peaks and canyons, always one step ahead of pursuit. After a harrowing brush with death in the backcountry, Trace has a change of heart--only to be replaced by a professional hunter and assassin named Murdoch, who ruthlessly pursues his animal quarry while stalking Trace himself. To survive, Trace must join forces with a pair of unlikely allies: a survivalist animal protector who deploys feral senses and deep wilderness skills to protect the wolves, and Imogen Cruz, a local rancher, childhood friend, and unrequited love of Trace's early years. Together, they must fight to protect not only themselves and the Dark Canyon pack, but ultimately, the Gila Wilderness itself--the world's first designated wilderness area." -- Provided by publisher

This Vast Enterprise

"A major revisionist history of the Lewis and Clark expedition: For the first time in a generation, This Vast Enterprise offers a fresh and more accurate account of one of the most important episodes in American history, humanizing forgotten figures and shattering long-held myths." -- Provided by publisher

This Land Is Your Land

"Ride along with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Beverly Gage as she travels the country to see the museums, historic sites, roadside attractions, reenactments, and souvenir shops where Americans learn--and fight--about our history. From the birth of the nation in Philadelphia to Disneyland and the California dream, This Land Is Your Land offers a guided tour of thirteen places and thirteen key moments that define America's greatest successes and challenges."-- Provided by publisher

The Radiant Dark

"It's March 1980, and Carol Girard and her husband are living an ordinary life in a small town in the Adirondacks. They have just had their first child, and though Carol is struggling with the challenges of new motherhood, her future seems clear. Until something extraordinary happens: an inexplicable flickering of light in the sky, which is ultimately determined to be communication from intelligent life on another planet. But these beings are eleven light-years away, and nothing is known about them other than the fact that they seem to know we exist too. And so begins a decades-long exchange of messages with this mysterious, faraway civilization. As humanity reels from a shifting understanding of its place in the universe, we follow the stories of the Girard family: Carol, whose fascination with this other life sparks a desperate search for spiritual meaning; Michael, her loyal son, who finds solace not in the stars above his head but in the ground beneath his feet; and Ro, Carol's bright and ambitious daughter, whose childhood goal to work in interstellar communication will evolve into something far grander." -- Publisher's website

Nothing Random

"At midcentury, everyone knew Bennett Cerf: witty, beloved, middle-aged panelist on What's My Line?, whom TV brought into America's homes each week. They didn't know the handsome, driven young man of the 1920s who'd vowed to become a great publisher, and a decade later, was. By then, he'd signed Eugene O'Neill, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, and had fought the landmark censorship case that gave Americans the freedom to read James Joyce's Ulysses. With his best friend and lifelong business partner Donald Klopfer, and other young Jewish entrepreneurs like the Knopfs and Simon & Schuster, Cerf remade the book business: what was published, and how. In 1925, he and Klopfer had bought the Modern Library and turned it into an institution, then founded Random House, which eventually became a home to Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Ayn Rand, Dr. Seuss, Toni Morrison, and many more. Even before TV, Cerf was a bestselling author and columnist as well as publisher; the show super-charged his celebrity. A brilliant social networker and major influencer before such terms existed, he connected books-Broadway-TV-Hollywood-politics. A fervent democratizer, he published 'high,' 'low,' and wide, and from the roaring twenties to the swinging sixties collected an incredible array of friends, having a fabulous time along the way. For four decades, Gayle Feldman has reported on publishing for Publishers Weekly, The New York Times, The Bookseller, and others. Using new and deeply researched material from 200 interviews and many archives, she recalls Bennett Cerf to vibrant life, bringing booklovers into his world and time, and finally giving a true American original his due." -- Provided by publisher

Mollie Brumley's
Civil War

"Mollie Brumley, a thirteen-year-old orphan, was living on a farm in the mountainous Ozarks of northwest Arkansas when the Civil War broke out. In a borderland region on the northern periphery of slavery and the western edge of white settlement, her corner of Arkansas saw terrible destruction-but not primarily from fighting between opposing armies. Mollie Brumley's Civil War was one of guerrilla warfare and outlawry, shifting loyalties, betrayals real and imagined, and, for some, death by starvation. In telling Mollie's story, drawing largely upon her 1902 autobiography, Theodore Catton offers a rare, intimate look at the heroism and desperation of war conducted on the home front-all amidst the anything-but-ordinary romantic adventures of an adolescent who lived during an extraordinary time.In the course of this riveting narrative, Mollie-while still in her teens-falls in love with one Confederate soldier who is lost in battle, marries another who joins the Rebel guerrillas, and leaves the farm to become an army laundress during escalating guerrilla depredations against her home and family. Intertwined with Mollie's tale is that of Parthenia Hensley, an enslaved young woman living in the same rural community. The story of Parthenia and her white family of enslavers broadens Catton's portrait of a war-torn community of farmers on the edge of the Slave South.An unprecedented picture of the Civil War in the Trans-Mississippi West, Mollie Brumley's Civil War is also a remarkable coming-of-age story shaped by the fight against slavery-a fight that Mollie didn't choose but that finally influenced the person she became and the outcome of her life." -- Provided by publisher

How to Be a Dissident

"A guide to fighting back-part philosophy, part history, and part manual for living with integrity in an age of conformity and authoritarian drift." -- Provided by publisher

Haven

"A summer retreat to an elite island enclave owned by a Big Tech company becomes a mother's worst nightmare in this gripping thriller. After months of financial strain and escalating arguments, Caroline is relieved when her husband, Adam, secures a job at Corridor, a prestigious Big Tech company. Though his long hours on top-secret projects often leave Caroline alone with their newborn son, Gabriel, the life-changing income seems worth the sacrifice. When Adam suggests a summer retreat to Haven, the exclusive island community popular with Corridor employees, Caroline agrees, hoping the sun-soaked paradise will help Adam relax and bring their family closer. But she can't shake the feeling that something isn't quite right about the town. Though Adam assures her of their safety, the locals' behavior is oddly secretive and ritualistic-even cultish. It's clear that Corridor hasn't resolved tensions about the way the company is transforming the island. And it doesn't help that Adam's colleagues seem to have a few strange beliefs of their own. When Caroline wakes to discover that Gabriel is missing, her worst fears are confirmed. Desperate and unsure of whom to trust, she must race to find her son-and pull back the curtain on this elite enclave-before he is lost to the island forever. Tensely plotted and terrifyingly prescient, Haven is a taut, darkly compelling exploration of the costs of innovation, the far limits of human progress, and the risks we're willing to take for a brighter future"--Provided by publisher