The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society

by James Marriott

What a difference a few centuries can make. According to James Marriott, a journalist for the London Times and the author of the lively but heartbreaking jeremiad The New Dark Ages, "reading is dying." It wasn't always so. Johannes Gutenberg's printing press, invented in the 15th century, "opened the way for the mass circulation of books." By the 18th century, "everyone, everywhere, had started reading." Fast forward to the 21st, however, and English literature students at U.S. colleges have "struggled to

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Find Me Where It Ends

by Cassandra Khaw

A woman becomes attached to the dog-shaped psychopomp that presages her death in the allegorical, ultimately life-affirming fantasy novella Find Me Where It Ends by Cassandra Khaw (The Library at Hellebore).

The women in Antigone's family see their own deaths, "not in portents, nor in the patterns of the stars... but as dogs of varying shapes." The appearance of Antigone's death, a handsome German shepherd, brings up complicated memories of her grandmother's death and her mother's suicide. Antigone tries to

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Will and Attention: A Memoir

by Meghan O'Gieblyn

With God, Human, Animal, Machine, Meghan O'Gieblyn emerged as the rare tech writer willing to explore the intersections of religion, humanity, and artificial intelligence. In Will and Attention, she continues in that vein, this time turning her keen intelligence and earnest exploration on herself and the two devastating relapses in her life. "There are a million ways to sabotage one's life," she explains, "but I could not seem to come up with anything more original than the things that had ruined my life before:

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Puma Concolor: In Search of Patagonia's Wild Pumas

by René Araneda, trans. by Lawrence Schimel, illus. by Julio Antonio Blasco

Wildlife filmmaker René Araneda's breathtaking children's nonfiction picture book, Puma Concolor, translated from the Spanish by Lawrence Schimel (Newborns), features Patagonia puma Rupestre and her four adorable cubs. Stunning illustrations by artist Julio Antonio Blasco (The Great Big Animal Race) turn the fascinating story about filming in Torres del Paine National Park in Chilean Patagonia into an all-around artistic blockbuster that is certain to mesmerize middle-grade nature lovers.

Araneda emphasizes

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Robin and the Moon

by E.B. Goodale

E.B. Goodale (Good Night, Little Bookstore) continues the world of Robin and the Stick in the charming, unpretentious picture book Robin and the Moon, in which a child worries that the full moon has gotten "stuck" in a tree.

During an evening walk with Mama, Robin frames their hands so they appear to be "holding the moon." Robin releases the moon "with a skip and a toss" and bounds over to Mama. At bedtime Robin notices that the moon is "tangled up in the branches of a tree." Despite Mama's reassurances, the

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The House of Gardenias

by Isabel Cañas

In The House of Gardenias, an intoxicatingly macabre YA historical fantasy from The Hacienda author Isabel Cañas, a teen girl employed by an infighting political family collaborates with the ghost of a boy they wronged to dismantle their legacy.

Presidente Valbuena has ruled the Capital ever since his democratic regime overthrew the del Valle Viceroyalty. Sixteen-year-old Minerva, with "black hair and skin that turns deep in the sun," fled the Capital's slums to work for Señora Encarnación

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