Open Book Club

Hailed by The New York Times for “redefining songs about coming of age, and the aftermath, with bluntness and crafty intelligence,” Marina delves even further into trauma, youth, and the highs and lows of relationships in these profound, autobiographical poems to form a collection that transcends the boundaries of music and literature. 

Irreverent, witty, full of surprises, and based on a fabulous true story, this dynamic new series debut reveals what happens when three very different, very talented, fat women break all the rules, go viral—and discover life’s most breathtaking moves. 

Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries is a true story of contagious deception. It’s the story of a doomed romance and a vengeful celebrity. Of a lazy press and a public mob. Of two suicidal teenagers, and their exploitation by a literary vampire. 

The great German lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke published his first collection of poems in 1898 and went on to become renowned for his delicate depiction of the workings of the human heart. Drawn by some sympathetic note in his poems, young people often wrote to Rilke with their problems and hopes. From 1903 to 1908 Rilke wrote a series of remarkable responses to a young, would-be poet on poetry and on surviving as a sensitive observer in a harsh world. Those letters, still a fresh source of inspiration and insight, are accompanied here by a chronicle of Rilke’s life that shows what he was experiencing in his own relationship to life and work when he wrote them.

Kirsten Miller, author of The Change, brings us a bracing, wildly entertaining satire about a small Southern town, a pitched battle over banned books, and a little lending library that changes everything. 

(All Iowa Reads Book Discussion: Only one discussion – 5 pm at Aalfs Downtown Library). By the New York Times bestselling author of Descent and The Current, an absorbing new work of literary suspense about two young working men who forge a friendship despite secrets in their past, and whose actions ignite the passions and violence of a small Wisconsin town still haunted by the unsolved disappearance of three boys in the 1970s. 

There is only one Cher, and for seven decades she has been showing us why. Cher holds the attention of the world with her voice, her acting, her style, her wit and her unstoppable spirit. Now, for the first time, she tells her story in her own voice – as honest as it is hilarious, as powerful as it is perceptive. 

From a marine biologist and co-founder of Minorities in Shark Sciences, a powerful debut about the uplifting story of a young Black scientist’s challenging journey to flourish outside the traditional confines of academia, inspired by her innate connection to nature’s most misunderstood animal—the shark. 

With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Originally published in 1953, Baldwin said of his first novel, ” Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else.” 

The New York Times best-selling author of The Nix is back with a poignant and witty novel about a modern marriage and the bonds that keep people together. Mining the absurdities of contemporary society, Wellness reimagines the love story with a healthy dose of insight, irony, and heart.

From a wry, insightful, and very funny new voice, here is one woman’s peripatetic search for home, from Kashmir to England to Saudi Arabia to Michigan to Rome and, finally, to Los Angeles.