On Sale February 3
Carnival Fantástico by Angela Montoya | YOUNG ADULT
Welcome to the Carnival Fantástico, a spectacle of magic and mischief, and the perfect haven for a runaway. Using her tricks and razor-sharp wit, Esmeralda becomes the carnival's resident fortune-teller, aiming for the lead role in the Big Top Show. Success would mean freedom from her former employer, the commander of the King’s army.
Ignacio has defected from the army and is on the hunt for evidence of his father’s corruption. But the last thing he expects to find on his father’s trail of lies is the only girl he's ever loved, spinning false fortunes at a traveling carnival.
Perhaps fortune has thrown them together for a reason. They strike a deal: she’ll help him expose his father if he helps her secure the main act. But old feelings don’t die easily, and the commander’s secret isn’t the only thing they'll need to confront.
Few Blue Skies by Carolina Ixta | YOUNG ADULT
Paloma Vistamontes is heartbroken. A year ago, her ex-boyfriend, Julio Ramos, broke up with her after his father’s death, a tragedy that drove Paloma and him apart. Ever since then, the mountains have felt flatter, the sky farther away.
Now, her hometown of San Fermín, a place where honest people work on farms and in factories, is in danger. Selva, a massive e-commerce conglomerate, threatens to open one of their warehouses beside her high school.
This isn’t the first time they’ve done this. Since Selva arrived, they’ve opened warehouses everywhere where there used to be green spaces. Because of them, the air pollution is so bad that school is often canceled. Many people, including Paloma’s ever-practical Ma, want to leave.
But Paloma wants nothing more than to stay. Because when the smog clears, there is still hope. That hope drives Paloma to reconnect with Julio to expose and challenge the dangers that Selva introduces to communities like their own. Can they stop Selva from destroying everything they know? Is there still a chance for their budding romance?
Autobiography of Cotton by Cristina Rivera Garza | Translated by Christina MacSweeney | FICTION
In 1934, a young José Revueltas traveled to Tamaulipas to support the cotton workers’ strike in Estación Camarón, which became the basis of his landmark novel Human Mourning. In her own groundbreaking novel, Autobiography of Cotton, Cristina Rivera Garza recounts her grandparents’ journey from mining towns to those same cotton fields as it intersects with Revueltas’s life in a vivid and evocative history of cotton cultivation along the Mexico-US border.
Through archival research and personal narrative, Rivera Garza chronicles the way cotton transformed the borderlands by reconstructing the cotton workers’ strike and reveals how cycles of deprivation and ecocide persist across generations. Deeply personal and politically acute, Rivera Garza crafts a new kind of border novel that tells how a brittle land radically altered her grandparents’ lives and the territories they helped develop. An intimate fictionalization, Autobiography of Cotton reveals a rich social history of agricultural colonization, labor activism, environmental degradation, and cross-border migration.
Sink or Burn by Cristy Road Carrera | FICTION
In Sink Or Burn, the year is 2121, and fascism has overthrown a once-thriving utopia. Amid the ashes of a fallen nation, Cheap Glitter—a queer, punk rock band—becomes the voice of resistance. As they tour across a fractured America, raising funds for the fight against a brutal regime, they navigate wildfires, sunken landscapes, and the terrifying laws of a collapsing society.
At the heart of their journey is CT, a lovelorn survivor whose romantic entanglement with a fellow bandmate—a survivor of a different war—complicates their quest for both personal healing and social revolution. As the band balances the weight of trauma with the urgency of their fight, they discover that love, however chaotic, may be their greatest weapon.
A punk rock anthem and a manifesto for the broken-hearted, Sink Or Burn tells the story of a tortured artist’s evolution into a divine healer. Cristy Road Carrera, a punk rock icon and Latinx artist, weaves together individual survival with the broader struggle for liberation.
I'm So Happy You're Here: A Celebration of Library Joy by Mychal Threets | Illustrated by Lorraine Nam | CHILDREN’S
Welcome to the library!
It’s a place just for you! There are activities, movies, games, and SO. MANY. STORIES. Best of all, it’s a place where you will always belong.
Take a tour of the library with the internet’s favorite librarian, Mychal Threets! This heartwarming debut picture book from Mychal extends an invitation to anyone who could use a little library joy and a reminder that libraries are for everyone.
On Sale February 10
Lithium by Malén Denis | Laura Hatry & John Wronoski | FICTION
Malén Denis's Lithium is a novel about what cannot be fully named or pinned down. "Language in this book," the author notes, "acts as a pharmakon--both poison and remedy--inviting the reader to navigate its ambivalence. I wrote it by following the golden thread of poetry and the echoes of psychoanalysis, letting the images lead rather than the plot." Lithium employs an especially potent, poetic language to convey love found and love lost (I'm waiting for news from you). It is a book blazing with bruised perceptions of the precarity of a life lived between jobs and between homes; it's a feverish work swinging from hope to despair, about trying drugs both prescribed and not, about migration, about cat-sitting, and about isolation, about the search for meaning and for happiness when both prove so elusive, and it is about summoning the strength to wrench oneself from indecision to action.
Only Friends by Lydia San Andres | FICTION
After being fired from her day job, unceremoniously ghosted, and facing a bad case of writer’s block, twenty-six-year-old aspiring screenwriter Mariel Rivera is one spilled coffee away from crying on the subway. When she’s rescued from a Times Square kerfuffle by a very handsome model dressed in regency costume, Mariel has no idea her life is about to change.
Dashwood Bennet has been modeling for years, though recently, his current portfolio includes some more risqué shots. However, he never imagined that after his encounter with Mariel, he’d be putting on his regency breeches just to take them off again…in front of the camera.
Dash is the answer to Mariel’s prayers in more ways than one. First, he saved her from an unruly mob. Second, he’s the perfect person to play the Duke of Harding, a character she’s created that captured her attention and won’t let go. Third, he’s more than game to be the face of her spicy historical shorts. And last but not least, he’s her perfect partner both in business and in the bedroom. But being work-partners-with-benefits can complicate things. Will their partnership survive or are Mariel and Dash doomed to not have their happily ever after?
Maria the Wanted by V. Castro | FICTION
Maria is a wanted woman. She’s wanted by an Aztec trafficker, a cartel boss, the people she fights for, and now the devil she can’t resist. A would-be immigrant turned vampire, Maria is forced to leave her home and family and embark on a journey across Mexico. She learns to fight, becoming an unlikely bad-ass enforcer of justice. Then an encounter with a violent, ruthless vampire boss leads her to find her creator. Drawn into a world of ancient vampires, deadly conspiracies and a dangerously seductive devil, Maria must find a way to fight for herself and all humankind.
On Sale February 17
Devout: Losing My Faith to Find Myself by David Archuleta| NONFICTION
At just seventeen, David Archuleta rose to national fame as the runner-up on American Idol season seven, captivating millions with his angelic voice. Behind the scenes, however, he was struggling with a truth he feared would destroy everything: he was attracted to men—and a devout member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
In Devout, David takes you inside his deeply personal journey as a closeted Mormon teen turned international pop star, torn between faith, fame, and identity. From dealing with the pressures of being on a hit television show to a domineering father who controlled every aspect of his career—even being banned from the show’s set—David reveals the emotional abuse and inner turmoil that he says plagued his childhood.
This searing memoir reflects on David’s ventures with American Idol, a tour with Demi Lovato, and a two year sabbatical as a missionary in South America, charting his path through heartbreak, estrangement, three engagements, thoughts of suicide, and finally, his courageous decision to leave the Mormon Church in order to live authentically as a queer man. Featuring never-before-seen photos, Devout is a must-read for fans of pop culture, American Idol, and anyone deconstructing their religious upbringing, or who’s ever wrestled with who they are versus who they’re told to be.
The Ex-Perimento by Maria J. Morillo | FICTION
Maria “Marianto” Camacho is a planner. At twenty-seven, she has her life perfectly mapped out. Her long-term boyfriend, Alejandro, is perfect on paper, and she's expecting a proposal any day now. She has a stable job as a lifestyle columnist at Ellas, one of Latin America's biggest digital magazines. Her future is set; she's sure of it.
Until everything falls apart overnight: Marianto loses her boyfriend and her job. But she's determined to get them both back with an idea that is either delusional or ingenious—a juicy new article for Ellas that documents a series of romantic experiments to get her ex back. Thus begins The Ex-Perimento. With her bank account dwindling, however, Marianto lands a temporary gig on Venezuela's hottest new singing competition show. Her job? Personal assistant to Simón Arreaza, the lead singer of her favorite indie band.
It's only her second day on the job when Simón discovers Marianto's list of romantic experiments, striking her ideas and replacing them with his own better ones. Out of desperation, she offers a proposition: Help her win back Alejandro, and she'll give Simón's band a profile in the magazine once she returns to Ellas. But between the close quarters on set and the blurred lines of a budding friendship, Marianto and Simón find themselves irresistibly drawn to each other, caught in a whirlwind of unexpected romance.
On Sale February 24
A People's History of Portugal by Raquel Varela & Roberto Della Santa | NONFICTION
A People's History of Portugal reconstructs the last two hundred years of class struggle in Portugal. Raquel Varela and Roberto della Santa examine the material conditions of its people - examining the real causes of the revolutionary waves and counter-revolutionary backlash.
Starting in the early nineteenth century, the theme of colonialism and its antithesis runs through the narrative, as working-class life was closely entwined with Portuguese colonial exploitation. Despite relatively slow industrial development, Portuguese people spearheaded a surprisingly vigorous radical culture of dissent, eventually sparking a social and political revolution in 1974. More recently, Portugal's inclusion in the European Union has put its people in a neoliberal stranglehold that stifles democracy to this day. Are the working people of Portugal able to carry the memory of the revolutionary past into its future? This is a history of, and for, the people.
The Invisible Years by Rodrigo Hasbún | Translated by Lily Meyer | FICTION
Andrea and Julián haven't seen one another in twenty-one years--not since that tragic, fateful night their senior year of high school that marked their group of friends forever. A shocking phone call brings the two together again in Houston, where they begin to unravel the truth of that year, picking open long scabbed-over wounds from their upper-class adolescence in 1990s Bolivia and the scandal that ripped them apart.
A writer unhappy in his career and his marriage, Julián has been novelizing the past for his next book, trying to make meaning out of the events that changed the course of their lives forever. "I'd thought that writing about that time would free me, relieve the burden of the invisible years," he writes, "but often it seems that it's done the reverse." Juxtaposing the naïve invincibility of adolescence with the grasping uncertainties of adulthood, The Invisible Years deftly weaves a coming-of-age tale that leaves the reader hanging on every word, even as they know how the cards fall in the end.
La Golondrina by Sonia De Los Santos | Illustrated by Teresa Martínez | CHILDREN’S
Based on Sonia De Los Santos's popular song "La Golondrina," this joyful story captures a young girl's fascination with the migratory swallow that sings in the trees outside her grandmother's home in Mexico. With dreamlike wistfulness, she speaks to the bird about the long journey northward that it is about to undertake to find food and a new home--much like the one her own father is making, and the one she will someday make too.
La Golondrina captures Sonia De Los Santos's signature spirit and joy and celebrates love, family, migration, and belonging. Bilingual English-Spanish text is complemented by Teresa Martínez's vibrant and accessible artwork to create an unforgettable celebration of the journeys that shape our lives and our communities.
I Give You My Silence by Mario Vargas Llosa | Translated by Adrian Nathan West | FICTION
Toño Azpilcueta, writer of sundry articles, aspirant to the now defunct professorship of Peruvian studies, is an expert in the vals, a genre of music descended from the European waltz but rooted in New World Creole culture. When he hears a performance by the solitary and elusive guitarist Lalo Molfino, he is convinced not only that he is in the presence of the country’s finest musician, but that his own love for Peruvian music, as he has long suspected, has a profound social function. If he could just write the biography of the man before him and tell the story of both the vals and its attendant inspiring ethos, huachafería (Peru’s most important contribution to world culture, according to Toño), he might capture his country’s soul and inspire his fellow citizens remember the ties that bind them. Through music, the populace might unite and lay down their arms and embrace a harmonious and unified Peruvian culture.
Tumbleweed Underworld: A Saga of Morphine and Mayhem in the Arizona Territory by Eduardo Obregón Pagán | NONFICTION
Georgie Clifford appears briefly in the annals of American history as an 1894 inmate of the Yuma Territorial Prison, one of two female prisoners among hundreds of hardened, violent men. A denizen of an Old West underworld of prostitution and narcotics, she had been convicted of murder for giving a lethal dose of morphine to a client. Telling Georgie's story in Tumbleweed Underworld, Eduardo Obregón Pagán exposes a dark underside of the turn-of-the-century American West, where attorneys, soldiers, doctors, miners, well-off women, and Chinese immigrants were caught up in the country's first opioid epidemic.
Georgie Clifford began life as Minnie Eichler in the small mining town of Clifton, Arizona Territory. After being raped by her mother's boyfriend and testifying in the subsequent trial, Minnie fled Clifton, taking with her a taste for the morphine given her for her trauma. Tumbleweed Underworld follows Minnie through brothels, mining camps, and logging towns, through shifting personas and deeper dependency, to the trial in Flagstaff, Arizona that ultimately landed her in prison. The story continues after her release and sees Georgie descend into a true addiction hell--in and out of jail cells, cribs, ditches, and the state asylum--before finally recovering and finding a measure of redemption in reconnecting with her family.
