Looking for the perfect read? You’re in luck! Look no further than our list of most anticipated book releases in March for your next epic read. 🍀
El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory by Jazmine Ulloa | NONFICTION
El Paso has been called the “Ellis Island” of America’s southern border, a mountain pass cum border town cum bifurcated metropolis where past meets future, and disadvantage meets opportunity, or so the promise goes.
El Paso is an extraordinary, can’t-look-away reported history; it uses deep research and dozens of new interviews to blow away the myth of this place, where Mexico’s Juarez and America’s El Paso intertwine. It charts the history of El Paso through five families. From the Mexican Revolution and the Mexican Repatriation, to the shifting immigration laws under Reagan and Trump and the violence and bloodshed brought on by the drug war, El Paso captures a place often misunderstood or forgotten by the rest of the country, and the world.
El Paso is a brave new work of narrative nonfiction that gives new voice and perspective to history that has long been checked at the border, or told through the lens of white men alone. Ulloa draws upon meticulous research and reporting and stunning historical detail to craft the intimate narratives of an unforgettable cast of characters.
Diorama by Carol Bensimon | Translated by Zoë Perry & Julia Sanches | FICTION
In 1988, shortly after Brazil reestablishes democratic rule, a state congressman is shot and killed in Porto Alegre. The main suspect: a close friend and colleague in congress, Representative Raul Matzenbacher.
Many years later, Cecília Matzenbacher, his daughter, migrates from Southern Brazil to California, where she finds work as a taxidermist. Her temperament is ideally suited to this type of restoration and the careful reconstruction of a world frozen in time. But as Cecília confronts her own history and the memories of the investigation surrounding her father, her knack for composition frays.
When news arrives that Raul has suffered a stroke and Cecília’s chances to see him again may be limited, her past can no longer stay put, posed like a specimen behind glass. Her story emerges, the past stalking her present, threatening to derail the life she’s made for herself in the United States.
In sleek, arresting prose imbued with the suspense-filled edge of a true-crime thriller, Diorama cements Carol Bensimon’s status as one of the most dynamic voices in contemporary Brazilian literature and demonstrates her narrative gifts at their apex. Fusing police procedural, coming-of-age story, and family drama, Diorama is a moving mystery about how we remember what’s passed, endangering our notions of what is or isn’t still alive inside all of us.
Estela, Undrowning by René Peña-Govea | YOUNG ADULT
Estela Morales is one of the only Latinas who tested into San Francisco’s most exclusive public high school. In her senior year, Estela just wants to keep her head down, eke out a passing grade from her racist Spanish teacher, and get into her dream college.
But after placing second in the Latiné Heritage Poetry Contest behind a non-Latino student, Estela is thrust into citywide debates about merit, identity, and diversity.
Things only get messier when her family is threatened with eviction. As Estela’s friends organize against bigotry and her landlady increases the pressure, Estela is suffocating and finds release only in poetry and in a breathless new romance. When tensions finally reach their breaking point, Estela must find a way to undrown the community she loves—and herself.
Now I Surrender by Álvaro Enrigue | Translated by Natasha Wimmer | FICTION
Orchestrated with a stunningly imagined cast of characters, both historical and purely fictional, Now I Surrender radically recasts the story of how the West was “won.” In the contested borderlands between Mexico and the United States, a woman flees into the desert after a devastating raid on her dead husband’s ranch. A lieutenant colonel in service to the fledgling Republic, sent in pursuit of cattle rustlers, discovers he’s on the trail of a more dramatic abduction. Decades later, with political ambitions on the line, the American and Mexican militaries try to maneuver Geronimo, the most legendary of Apache warriors, into surrender. In our own day, a family travels through the region in search of a truer version of the past.
Part epic, part alt-Western, Now I Surrender is Álvaro Enrigue’s most expansive and impassioned novel yet. It weaves past and present, myth and history into a searing elegy for a way of life that was an incarnation of true liberty—and an homage to the spark in us that still thrills to its memory.
Could You Ever Smile with Axolotls!? by Sandra Markle | Illustrated by Vanessa Morales | CHILDREN’S
What if you could spend a day with your favorite animals? What would you eat? How would you play? Would you ever want to leave?
Get ready to smile with axolotls in the fourth book in the Could You Ever... series! Learn all about this unusual animal -- what it eats, where it lives, and more! This innovative book places kids right into the action as they learn all about these amazing creatures.
With imaginative, interactive text from bestselling author Sandra Markle and engaging art from Vanessa Morales, this book is sure to be a kid favorite!
The Starter Ex by Mia Sosa | FICTION
Vanessa Cordero used to run a profitable side gig: For a reasonable fee, she’d date your crush . . . and make his life miserable. Too clingy? Check. Jealous? Check. A parent's worst nightmare? Triple check. By the time Vanessa was done with him, your guy was practically begging for you.
Enter Jason Torres, a certified commitment-phobe who doesn't plan on getting married anytime soon, much to his mother’s dismay. What he needs is a temporary girlfriend. A totally inappropriate girlfriend. Someone his mother will hate, so she'll finally abandon her dream of getting him to the altar.
Vanessa's younger sister, Lisa, has her eye on Jason, and convinces Vanessa to come out of retirement for one last starter ex engagement. The rules are simple: no touching, no fooling around, and definitely no falling in love. But nothing's going according to plan. Because Vanessa can't ditch Jason no matter how hard she tries to scare him away. And the longer they're around each other, the more neither of them wants to be apart.
Mazzy Star's So Tonight That I Might See by Anthony Gomez III | NONFICTION
Mazzy Star's So Tonight That I Might See was a slow, reluctant success. Pushed by Capitol Records as an album for teenagers to make out during, as a record about girlhood, and as music for those uninterested in the era's male aggression, the album's reputation has been plagued by these forced connections ever since.
Not that the band's Hope Sandoval or David Roback ever publicly cared to dispel these notions. They preferred to disdain publicity and offer their art without introduction. But there is far more to the Mazzy Star story than media-reluctant musicians and corporate-generated narratives.
By tracing the hurried development of their second record, this book revisits how imposed mythologies have contributed to the marginalization of Hope Sandoval's Mexican American background, and the band's place in the larger tradition of Chicano music. It combs through the histories of musicians involved in Sandoval and Roback's prior projects to highlight how Mazzy Star formed partly in response to the rising violence and gentrification of their hometown Los Angeles. Along the way, it ascertains the band's interest in the American Southwest, 1960s psychedelia, and a surrealism which conjures the strange, dark shadows of everyday life in the US.
