New Materials - January 4, 2022

A biweekly selection from our shelves, as curated by your favorite SPL librarians!


For the week of January 4, 2022:  Fiction | Nonfiction | Graphic Novels | Movies/TV, Music & More


Fiction

The Cabinet The Cabinet by Un-su Kim

Cabinet 13 looks like a normal filing cabinet, but it's filled with files on "symptomers"--people with weird abilities and bizarre experiences. And harried Mr. Kong, who is the office worker responsible for the cabinet, must deal with all the symptomers who call the office looking for help.

How to Marry Keanu Reeves in 90 Days How to Marry Keanu Reeves in 90 Days by K.M. Jackson

Bethany Lu Carlisle is devastated when the tabloids report actor Keanu Reeves is about to tie the knot. What?! How could the world's perfect boyfriend and forever bachelor, Keanu not realize that making a move like this could potentially be devastating to the equilibrium of...well...everything! Desperate to convince Keanu to call off the wedding, Lu and her ride-or-die BFF Truman Erikson take a wild road trip to search for the elusive Keanu so that Lu can fulfill her dream of meeting her forever crush and confess her undying love.

Radiant Fugitives Radiant Fugitives by Nawaaz Ahmed

In the last weeks of her pregnancy, a Muslim Indian lesbian living in San Francisco receives a visit from her estranged mother and sister that surfaces long held secrets and betrayals in this "sweeping family saga . . . with the beautiful specificity of real lives lived, loved, and fought for" (Entertainment Weekly).

Reasons for Avoiding Friends Reasons for Avoiding Friends by Megan Leavell

Growing up, Gwen and Iris were the best of friends, even if they couldn't have been more different. Now Gwen is living her hometown dream, or so she reminds herself while juggling endless parenting drama, an unemployed husband, and a neighborhood pyramid scheme. Iris was never destined for the ordinary. When she moved to Manhattan, she shed her old life for a better one-but not without a cost. When Iris's past catches up with her, she turns to the one person she could always count on-but she isn't the only one keeping secrets, and as Gwen scrambles to preserve an illusion of domestic bliss, she finds herself wondering when they went from telling each other everything to sharing nothing.

Talk to Me Talk to Me by T. Coraghessan Boyle

When animal behaviorist Guy Schermerhorn demonstrates on a TV game show that he has taught Sam, his juvenile chimp, to speak in sign language, Aimee Villard, an undergraduate at Guy's university, is so taken with the performance that she applies to become his assistant. A romantic and intellectual attachment soon morphs into an interspecies love triangle that pushes hard at the boundaries of consciousness and the question of what we know and how we know it.

Three Rooms Three Rooms by Jo Hamya

"A woman must have money and a room of one's own." So said Virginia Woolf in her classic A Room of One's Own, but in this scrupulously observed, gorgeously wrought debut novel, Jo Hamya pushes that adage powerfully into the twenty-first century, to a generation of people living in rented rooms. What a woman needs now is an apartment of her own, the ultimate mark of financial stability, unattainable for many.

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Nonfiction

The End of Bias The End of Bias: A Beginning : The Science and Practice of Overcoming Unconscious Bias by Jessica Nordell

The End of Bias is a transformative, groundbreaking exploration into how we can eradicate unintentional bias and discrimination, the great challenge of our age.

Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson

This witty, entertaining, and fully illustrated book is an essential troubleshooting guide for the perplexing aspects of reality, big and small, from the invisible particles that make up your body to the identical version of you currently reading this exact sentence in the corner of some other galaxy. If the universe came with an FAQ, this would be it.

The Kaepernick Effect The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World by Dave Zirin

A veteran sportswriter interviews high school athletes, college athletes, pro athletes and others involved in the nationwide movement to "take a knee" in response to police brutality.

Pump Pump: A Natural History of the Heart by Bill Schutt

In this lively, unexpected look at the hearts of animals--from fish to bats to humans--American Museum of Natural History zoologist Bill Schutt tells an incredible story of evolution and scientific progress.

The Wisdom of Your Body The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection Through Embodied Living by Hillary L. McBride, PhD

A clinical psychologist and award-winning researcher explores the ways many of us inherit a broken and unhealthy understanding of the body and offers a more compassionate, healthy, and holistic perspective on embodied life

The Words That Made Us The Words That Made Us: America's Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840 by Akhil Reed Amar

In The Words that Made Us, Akhil Reed Amar unites history and law in a vivid narrative of the biggest constitutional questions early Americans confronted, and he expertly assesses the answers they offered. His account of the document's origins and consolidation is a guide for anyone seeking to properly understand America's Constitution today.

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Graphic Novels

Alberto Breccia's Dracula Alberto Breccia's Dracula by Alberto Breccia

Alberto Breccia's Dracula is composed of a series of brutally funny satirical misadventures starring the hapless eponymous antihero. Literally defanged (a humiliating trip to the dentist doesn't help), the protagonist's glory days are long behind him and other, more sinister villains (a corrupt government, overtly backed by American imperialism) are sickening and draining the life out of the villagers far more than one creature of the night ever could.

Cyclopedia Exotica Cyclopedia Exotica by Aminder Dhaliwal

In Cyclopedia Exotica, doctor's office waiting rooms, commercials, dog parks, and dating app screenshots capture the experiences and interior lives of the cyclops community; a largely immigrant population displaying physical differences from the majority... Through this parallel universe, Dhaliwal comments on race, difference, beauty, and belonging, touching on all of these issues with her distinctive deadpan humour steeped in millennial references.

I Walk with Monsters I Walk with Monsters by Paul Cornell

In her past, the Important Man took away Jacey's brother. Now Jacey has David, who is sometimes a monster. Together, they hunt those who prey on the vulnerable. But the Important Man is still out there.

The Middle Ages: A Graphic Guide The Middle Ages by Eleanor Janega

The Middle Ages: A Graphic Guide busts the myth of the 'Dark Ages', shedding light on the period's present-day relevance in a unique illustrated style. Join historian Eleanor Janega and illustrator Neil Max Emmanuel on a romp across continents and kingdoms as we discover the Middle Ages to be a time of huge change, inquiry and development - not unlike our own

Ultrawar Ultrawar by Grant Morrison

New York Times bestselling author Grant Morrison and world-renowned artist Liam Sharp are back at it with the next volume of The Green Lantern Season Two. The cliffhanger on The Green Lantern leads to this cataclysmic confrontation...war with the Anti-Matter World.

Wonderful Women of the World Wonderful Women of the World by Laurie Halse Anderson & Kristy Quinn

Women change the World, they've been doing it for centuries. Now New York Times bestselling author Laurie Halse Anderson has gathered female and nonbinary writers and artists to reveal the women making our world better day by day. Real-world heroes who exemplify the best of Wonder Woman herself- her strength, compassion, and commitment to truth, equality, and justice.

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Movies/TV, Music & More

Movies/TV

Alone with Her Dreams Alone with Her Dreams by Paolo Licata
Format: DVD

Lucia must stay behind under the care of her stern and overbearing grandmother in 1960's Sicily, while her parents and younger brother emigrate to France to find work. Lucia grows increasingly curious about her grandmother's hatred towards other members of the family on the island, and begins to befriend them behind her grandmother's back until one day she discovers the reason why and uncovers a terrible secret.

Four Good Days Four Good Days by Rodrigo Garcia
Format: DVD

Emerging from a detox clinic, a young addict must stay clean while living with her mother for the next four days.

Pearls of the Deep Pearls of the Deep
Format: DVD

Of all the cinematic New Waves that broke out over the world in the 1960s, the one in Czechoslovakia was among the most fruitful, fascinating, and radical. With a wicked sense of humor and a healthy streak of surrealism, a group of fearless directors began to use film to speak out about the hypocrisy and absurdity of the Communist state.

Music

Ch. 1 Vs. 1 Ch. 1 Vs. 1 by Cynthia Erivo
Format: CD

The first solo album from the star of The Color Purple's Broadway revival, Harriet, and Genius: Aretha offers highly emotional and polished adult pop that integrates a little gospel, blues, soul, and folk.

Un Canto por México Vol. 1 Un Canto por México Vol. 1 by Natalia Lafourcade
Format: CD

Un Canto por México, Vol. 1 (English: "A Song for México, Volume 1"), is the ninth studio album by Mexican recording artist Natalia Lafourcade, based on a concert made on November 4, 2019 called Un canto por México para la reconstrucción del Centro de Documentación del Son Jarocho

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The Heart Principle The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang
Format: Spoken CD

USA Today bestselling author Helen Hoang returns with a witty and sizzling new romance that shows how wrong a person can be about someone, and how right they can be for them.

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