Fortune's Picks
Confessions in B-flat
Hill, Donna (Donna O.), author.
2020
"The year is 1963. In Harlem, the epicenter of Black culture, the fight for equality has never been stronger. The time is now. Enough is enough Harlen within ranks, a different kind of battle rages. Love thy neighbor? Or rise up against your oppressors? Jason Tanner has just arrived in New York to help spread the message of his mentor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., of passive resistance, while beat poet Anita Hopkins believes the teachings of Malcolm X with all her heart: that the way to true freedom is "by any means necessary." When Jason sees Anita perform her poetry at the iconic B-Flat lounge, he's transfixed. And Anita has never met anyone who can match her wit for wit like this... One movement, two warring ideologies--can love be enough to unite them?"--Page 4 of cover.
Just kids
Smith, Patti
2010
In this memoir, singer-songwriter Patti Smith shares tales of New York City : the denizens of Max's Kansas City, the Hotel Chelsea, Scribner's, Brentano's and Strand bookstores and her new life in Brooklyn with a young man named Robert Mapplethorpe--the man who changed her life with his love, friendship, and genius.
The mercies
Hargrave, Kiran Millwood, 1990- author
2020
Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Bergensdatter watches the sea break into a sudden and reckless storm. Forty fishermen, including her brother and father, are drowned and left broken on the rocks below. With the menfolk wiped out, the women of the tiny Northern town of Vardø must fend for themselves. Three years later, a sinister figure arrives. Absalom Cornet comes from Scotland, where he burned witches in the northern isles. Absalom sees only a place untouched by God and flooded with a mighty evil. Inspired by the real events of the Vardø storm and the 1620 witch trials.
My dark Vanessa
Russell, Kate Elizabeth author
2020
2000. Fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful forty-two-year-old English teacher. 2017. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, and now Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past. Thought-provoking, this is a masterful portrayal of troubled adolescence and its repercussions that raises vital questions about agency, consent, complicity, and victimhood
My sister, the serial killer
Braithwaite, Oyinkan, author
2018
Satire meets slasher in this short, darkly funny hand grenade of a novel about a Nigerian woman whose younger sister has a very inconvenient habit of killing her boyfriends. "Femi makes three, you know. Three and they label you a serial killer." Korede is bitter. How could she not be? Her sister, Ayoola, is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola's third boyfriend in a row is dead.
She wanted to be haunted
Ewert, Marcus, author
2020
Clarisa, an adorable pink cottage, wants nothing more than to be haunted, but her attempts only make her cuter until she tries being herself and is pleasantly surprised.
The Sun Down Motel
St. James, Simone, author
2020
Upstate New York, 1982. Viv Delaney wants to move to New York City, and to help pay for it she takes a job as the night clerk at the Sun Down Motel in Fell, New York. But something isn't right at the motel, something haunting and scary. Upstate New York, 2017. Carly Kirk has never been able to let go of the story of her aunt Viv, who mysteriously disappeared from the Sun Down Motel. She decides to visit the motel, where she quickly learns that nothing has changed since 1982. And she soon finds herself ensnared in the same mysteries that claimed her aunt.
Unicorns are the worst
Willan, Alex, author, illustrator
2020
A grumpy goblin hates having unicorns as neighbors, but when dragons threaten his home and the unicorns come to the rescue, he has to admit that maybe unicorns are not so bad after all.
When no one is watching : a thriller
Cole, Alyssa, author
2020
Sydney Green is Brooklyn born and raised, but her beloved neighborhood seems to change every time she blinks. Condos are sprouting like weeds, FOR SALE signs are popping up overnight, and the neighbors she's known all her life are disappearing. To hold onto her community's past and present, Sydney channels her frustration into a walking tour and finds an unlikely and unwanted assistant in one of the new arrivals to the block -- her neighbor Theo. But Sydney and Theo's deep dive into history quickly becomes a dizzying descent into paranoia and fear. Their neighbors may not have moved to the suburbs after all, and the push to revitalize the community may be more deadly than advertised. Where do people go when gentrification pushes them out?
Year of the monkey
Smith, Patti, author
2019
Following a run of New Year's concerts at San Francisco's legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to embark on a year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland with no design, yet heeding signs--including a talking sign that looms above her, prodding and sparring like the Cheshire Cat. In February, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing with it unexpected turns, heightened mischief, and inescapable sorrow. In a stranger's words, "Anything is possible: after all, it's the Year of the Monkey." For Smith--inveterately curious, always exploring, tracking thoughts, writing--the year evolves as one of reckoning with the changes in life's gyre: with loss, aging, and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America.