In Search of the Movement: Civil Rights Then and Now (City Lights), by Benjamin Hedin, MFA Creative Writing '04 -- In March of 1965, Martin Luther King led thousands in an epic march from Selma, Alabama to the state capital in Montgomery, in what is often seen as the culminating moment of the Civil Rights movement. The Voting Rights Act was signed into law that year, and with Jim Crow eradicated, and schools being desegregated, the movement had supposedly come to an end. America would go on to record its story as an historic success.
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Confessions of a Serial Entertainer (Gibbs Smith) by Steven Stolman, BFA Fashion Design '80 -- Menus and anecdotes give away one man’s secrets for entertaining in style. Steven Stolman has a gregarious personality. He loves to entertain: cocktail parties in Palm Beach, football game-day gatherings in Wisconsin, family Passover Sedars in Connecticut, and dinner parties in his New York apartment. This book will give any novice party host ideas and confidence, and it will inspire seasoned hosts to simplify and enjoy the party.
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Arts & Entertainments (Ecco) by Christopher Beha, MFA Creative Writing ’05 -- Christopher Beha delivers a cutting send-up of our cultural obsession with celebrity—a deliciously witty, and ultimately tender, novel about the absurdity of fame and the complexity of love sure to appeal to fans of Maria Semple and Jess Walter. A sharp-edged satire with heart, Arts & Entertainments is the story of Handsome Eddie Hartley who, at thirty-three, has forgone dreams of an acting career for the reality of life as a drama teacher at a boys’ prep school.
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Binary Star (Two-Dollar Radio) by Sarah Gerard, MFA Creative Writing '12 -- The language of the stars is the language of the body. Like a star, the anorexic burns fuel that isn't replenished; she is held together by her own gravity. With luminous, lyrical prose, Binary Star is an impassioned account of a young woman struggling with anorexia and her long-distance, alcoholic boyfriend.
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The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing (Random House) by Mira Jacob, MFA Creative Writing '10 -- With depth, heart, and agility, debut novelist Mira Jacob takes us on a deftly plotted journey that ranges from 1970s India to suburban 1980s New Mexico to Seattle during the dot.com boom. The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing is an epic, irreverent testimony to the bonds of love, the pull of hope, and the power of making peace with life’s uncertainties.
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The Distance Between Lost and Found (HarperTeen) by Kathryn Holmes, MFA Creative Writing '10 -- Sophomore Hallie Calhoun has just endured the most excruciating six months of her life. Once the rumors about her and the preacher's son, Luke, made their way around school, her friends abandoned her, and Hallie has completely withdrawn.
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Doll Palace (Dock Street Press) by Sara Lippmann, MFA Creative Writing ’02 -- In this brilliantly rendered debut collection, Sara Lippmann draws the reader into the intimate lives of characters seeking connection beyond their scripted worlds. She captures the beguiling transformation from child to adult with humor, heartache, and desperation.
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The Girls from Corona del Mar (Knopf) by Rufi Thorpe, BA Liberal Arts '06 -- Best friends Mia and Lorrie Ann couldn’t be more different; where Mia is reckless and proudly hard-hearted, Lorrie Ann is kind, serenely beautiful, and seemingly immune to the kind of teenage mistakes that Mia can’t help but make. But within a few years, fortunes change. Suddenly, Mia is free to grow up and adventure, falling in and out of love while Lorrie Ann is weighed down by responsibilities at home. And when good, nice, brave Lorrie Ann stops being so good, Mia must question how well she ever really knew her best friend in the first place.
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Flings: Stories (Harper) by Justin Taylor, MFA Creative Writing '07 -- The acclaimed author of Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever and The Gospel of Anarchy makes his hardcover debut with a piercing collection of short fiction that illuminates our struggle to find love, comfort, and identity. In a new suite of powerful and incisive stories, Justin Taylor captures the lives of men and women unmoored from their pasts and uncertain of their futures.
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Crazy Love You (Touchstone) by Lisa Unger, BA Liberal Arts ’92 -- Darkness has a way of creeping up when Ian is with Priss. Even when they were kids, playing in the woods of their small Upstate New York town, he could feel it. Still, Priss was his best friend, his salvation from the bullies who called him “loser” and “fatboy”…and from his family’s deadly secrets.
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Volume 16: The Song of Belit (Penguin Random House) by Brian Wood, BFA Illustration '97 -- Brian Wood’s epic and acclaimed adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s Queen of the Black Coast reaches its heart-rending conclusion. When Conan and Bêlit intercept an invaluable religious artifact, ruthless zealots hunt them across a treacherous landscape. Then, when the couple seeks their fortune on the cursed banks of Zarkheba, they encounter a dark power that will shape their fate.
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To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (Simon & Schuster for Young Readers) by Jenny Han, MFA Creative Writing ’05 -- Lara Jean’s love life goes from imaginary to out of control in this heartfelt novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Summer I Turned Pretty series. What if all the crushes you ever had found out how you felt about them…all at once?
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Rabbit Punch! (DC Books) by Greg Santos, MFA Creative Writing ’09 -- In Rabbit Punch!, Marco Polo reminisces on his friendship with Kublai Khan over deli sandwiches, Wilfred Owen and Ernest Hemingway trade war stories at Hooters, and Senator John McCain remembers that fateful day when his father took him to eat bubble gum ice cream. With punchy poems that are intimate, dark, enigmatic, playful, and surreal, peppered with pop culture figures ranging from Batman, to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Paris Hilton to “Macho Man” Randy Savage, Rabbit Punch! delivers a poetic KO.
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They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full (Copper Canyon Press) by Mark Bibbins, MFA Creative Writing ’98 -- From his sardonic title onward, Mark Bibbins challenges readers with formally innovative and socially alert poems that lay bare the inherent discombobulation of social and individual existence.
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The Distance Between Lost and Found (HarperTeen) by Kathryn Holmes, MFA Creative Writing '10 -- Sophomore Hallie Calhoun has just endured the most excruciating six months of her life. Once the rumors about her and the preacher's son, Luke, made their way around school, her friends abandoned her, and Hallie has completely withdrawn.
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I Don’t Know Do You (Ampersand Books) by Roberto Montes, MFA Creative Writing '13 -- I Don’t Know Do You gives us 102 new ways to be brilliant in our failure. We also get love poems–to daytime fireworks, several feet of snow, and astonished frontiersmen. Montes’s poems unfold into unknowing, proving again and again that we can only underestimate our capacity for love and reinvention.
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Virgil & Owen (Bloomsbury USA Childrens) by Paulette Bogan, BFA Illustration '83 -- Every great friendship started somewhere, but here's a story of how not to make friends. When Virgil the penguin finds a lost polar bear, Owen, he wants Owen all to himself. He will be the only penguin with a polar bear as a best friend!
Summer Reading From Alumni Authors
Are you beach bound and in need of a good book?
Check out this list of recent publications by some of The New School’s most talented and entertaining alumni authors. From novels to short stories, from poetry to biographies, from graphic novels to children’s books, there is something for everyone.
Immerse yourself in these summer reads and be sure use the #newschoolalumni hashtag.