| Programming note: we’ll be off next Tuesday after Thanksgiving, so look for the Library Express back in your inbox on December 9. Thanks!— Jordan
| |
Hot News This Week
November 25, 2025
| |
| Two Palestine Book Award Winners
El-Kurd won the Counter Current Award (alongside Omar El Akkad), and Aljamal won the Creative Award. If I Must Die will be available in paperback next month.
| |
| Consortium Corner with Michael Croy
In the latest Consortium Corner, we’re CC’ing Michael Croy, our sales manager for Barnes & Noble and Amazon. Read the full interview here, which features:
- Michael’s excellent recs for Jim Harrison and novels with an art history mystery and a gentleman thief
- A private Prince concert at BEA
- Cooper, the best dog ever
Consortium Corner is a Q&A series with staff and reps to celebrate Consortium’s 40 years of independent book distribution.
| |
| | Little Big Sister
by Eoin Colfer, illus. Celia Ivey
Little Island Books • June 2025 • 9781915071781
“I loved this story about dwarfism, and appreciate how it may be used as a jumping off point for conversations about disabilities. I also want to see more little people in children’s literature in general!” — Robin S., Santa Clara City Library
| | |
| | A Holy Dread
by R. A. Villanueva
Alice James Books • February 2026 • 9781949944860
★ “Intellectually rigorous and emotionally piercing, Villanueva’s sophomore collection threads Greek myth, Christian iconography, and family history into a frank exploration of mortality.” — Publishers Weekly
| | |
| | Terry Dactyl
by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Coffee House Press • November 2025 • 9781566897419
“Exhilerating. . . . One of the delights of the novel is Sycamore’s portrait of the equal parts glamorous and grotesque Club Kid era. Terry’s adventures are vibrant and enticing for the general reader, but her story is filled with cameos that are a particular treat for anyone who is familiar with this time and milieu.” — New York Times Book Review
| | |
| | Perfect Happiness
by You-jeong Jeong, trans. Sean Lin Halbert
Creature Publishing • September 2025 • 9781951971335
“Perfect Happiness [has] a near-constant frisson, a sense of something unsettlingly strange, bordering on terrifying. Jeong, an author of crime novels and psychological thrillers, has been called the Stephen King of South Korea, and this latest book of hers available in English confirms her status as an important figure in genre fiction.” — World Literature Today
| | |
| | Happy New Years
by Maya Arad, trans. Jessica Cohen
New Vessel Press • August 2025 • 9781954404342
“A delightful epistolary novel. . . . This book will be popular in any Jewish and public library, as well as making a fabulous book club selection.” — Association of Jewish Libraries
| | |
| | Perverts
by Kay Gabriel
Nightboat Books • September 2025 • 9781643622941
“Gabriel’s perverts yearn for sex, sex change, and socialist revolution in equal measure. It is a plenary session on acid. . . . Hedonism is politically neutral; Gabriel imagines how it might help enact something beyond itself.” — The Baffler
| | |
| |
“Adorably cozy, both books are perfect bedtime stories, either alone or together. . . . Babymoni—an even younger iteration of the author’s character Minimoni—goes through her nightly routines in these two books. The straightforward plots will be realistic and familiar to kids and their grown-ups.” — School Library Journal
| | |
| |
“Promises hours of creative, interactive diversion. . . . Kulesza’s tale satisfies the universal seek-and-find desire, the human curiosity to know what goes on behind closed doors and in other people’s lives, as well as the creative pleasure of constructing narratives that piece together the connections among characters.” — Kirkus Reviews
| | |
| |
“In this Spanish edition of There Are Cats in This Book, the cats seem to be speaking directly to readers. . . . This is a fun title that parents and children can read and enjoy together. A general purchase for picture book shelves.” — School Library Journal
| | |
| | The Very Fine Clock
by Muriel Spark, illus. Edward Gorey
Transit Children’s Editions • September 2025 • 9798893380262
“This stands as [Muriel Spark’s] only children’s book. It’s utterly enhanced by classic illustrations by Gorey. . . . The scenes are full of tiny details and overwhelming personality. It’s delightful to see Gorey go wholly whimsical, with barely a whisper of the macabre.” — School Library Journal
| | |
|
ABA, PNBA, MPIBA, NAIBA, SIBA, MIBA, SCIBA, GLIBA, and NCIBA Bestseller
I Who Have Never Known Men
by Jacqueline Harpman, trans. Ros Schwartz
Transit Books • May 2022 • 9781945492600
| |
In this political fantasy novel, the first installment in a new series, storytelling is combat magic and ordinary people must fight against exploitation and environmental destruction.
| |
Nightshade
by Lynn Hutchinson Lee
Assembly Press • March 2026 • 9781998336272
A coming-of-age story about a Romany girl whose family works the tobacco fields of 1980s Ontario, this debut novel features a dash of magic realism, intrigue, longing—and an heirloom puppet.
| |
Event Horizon
by Balsam Karam, trans. Saskia Vogel
Feminist Press • March 2026 • 9781558613546
From the author of The Singularity comes a saga of one girl’s resistance and exile in the stars and soil of galactic empire.
| |
Three lives—those of a grieving ornithologist, an ex-con who’s slipped parole, and a girl on the run (with a dog and two llamas)—are drawn together by fate, flight, and the healing power of nature.
| |
|
