Overdrive Magazines are now available

We now have access to Overdrive Magazines! The full collection of magazines boasts fifty popular titles, including favorites like The Atlantic, Food Network Magazine, and O, The Oprah Magazine. These titles are always available with no limit to the number of checkouts, though titles are checked out for a limited time period (7, 14 or 21 days). Browse the new magazine collection now here.

And don’t forget, Overdrive features a wide array of popular eBooks and downloadable audio books for adults, teens, and children, including beginning readers.

Visit the Overdrive website or download the Libby app to your mobile device and log in with your Pratt Library card to start browsing!

 

Coming soon to our shelves: Fresh picks for August

Spend the last few weeks of summer with these exciting new additions to our collection. Click on the book cover to reserve your copy today.

Looking for more from your reading experience? Take the opportunity to meet authors Kimberla Lawson Roby and Alexia Arthurs at Enoch Pratt’s Writers LIVE series. Their new titles Better Late Than Never and How to Love a Jamaican: Stories hit shelves this month.

 

Author Kimberla Lawson Roby joins us Wednesday, August 8 at 6:30pm at the Central Library to discuss her new book Better Late Than Never. Roby is the New York Times bestselling author of the highly acclaimed Curtis Black series. In the 15th and final title of the series, Curtis must face buried secrets from his past as he struggles to understand and help his youngest daughter, twelve-year-old Curtina, who is quickly becoming a problem child. Who could have known that their deepest wounds would come from within?

 

Author Alexia Arthurs comes to Writers LIVE on Monday, August 6 at 6:00pm at the Waverly Branch to discuss her new book How to Love a Jamaican: Stories. Alexia Arthurs navigates tenderness and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret to extraordinary effect in her debut story collection about Jamaican immigrants and their families back home. Sweeping from close-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and midwestern university towns, these eleven stories form a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life.

Read on for more new titles!

New Fiction Titles

   

Click through the following links to see a full list of new fiction, mystery, and scifi & fantasy titles.

New Nonfiction Titles

See a full list of new nonfiction titles here.

New Young Adult Titles

See a full list of new young adult titles here.

New Graphic Novel Titles

New Children’s Titles

See a full list of new children’s titles here.

 

Rockin’ Reads, Part 6: More Reviews from Adult Summer Challenge Participants

Here’s another taste of what our Adult Summer Challenge participants have been reading:

Lucie F. on The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware: A chillingly atmospheric modern take on the classic Agatha Christie family-inheritance-murder plot. I loved that I was able to guess some of the mystery but as I puzzled over it, Ware stayed one step ahead of me!

Laura R. on Pachinko by Min Jin Lee: Great family saga dealing with issues of immigration and discrimination is perfect for our times. I didn’t know anything about the Korean/Japanese history so it was interesting history as well. A good read.

Sarah B. on The Thousandth Floor by Katharine McGee: The higher you rise, the farther you fall, and nowhere is this more true than in this book. Set in a vividly imagined 1000-floor skyscraper in the year 2118, it follows the lives of five teens from very different backgrounds and the ways their lives interlock, with exciting, romantic, surprising, and disastrous consequences. With a great prologue and a climax that left me scared about what a girl was wearing (the mark of ingenious writing), the story pulled me in and made me want to live among the well-developed and realistic characters. I look forward to reading the sequel and the release of book three next month!

Aaron B. on The Shape of Water by Guillermo del Toro and and Daniel Kraus : A novelization of a film should expand on that film’s concepts & themes. Kraus & del Toro achieved that with an equally moving & romantic companion piece to del Toro’s Oscar-winning (& deserving) motion picture. A brilliant piece of romanticism.

Julie J. on The Soul of America by Jon Meacham: Brilliant, historical review of our American history when citizens and presidents have come together, not without struggles, to fight and survive battles of integration, racism, immigration, hate, just as we still do present-day. Yet, just published in spring 2018, brings a timely reminder with calming wisdom, that Americans must keep the faith and hope in our heritage. Author is Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and writes beautifully.

Nayantara B. on Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi: Persepolis is the autobiographical story of the author’s coming of age in Iran after the Islamic Regime amidst the Iran-Iraq War. Though life in this time is very bleak, Satrapi’s use of the graphic novel genre is irreverent and ironic. It provides a window into a very different world while still highlighting the universal heartaches of losing innocence.

Howell B. on Hope Never Dies by Andrew Shaffer: This book with a preposterous premisethat an Amtrak conductor has died and Joe Biden and Barack Obama work together to figure out what happenedis funny and enjoyable. It will provoke many appreciative laughs.

Lucy J. on Death in Ecstasy by Ngaio Marsh: This Roderick Alleyn mystery surprised me a little with its relevance to today’s issuesheroin use in the 1930s? Always interesting to read Kiwi grande dame Ngaio Marsh’s books.

Join the fun! For a chance to win fabulous prizes in the Adult Summer Challenge, create a free Beanstack account and log each book you finish between June 13 and August 15.

Through The Eyes of Teens: Wide Angle Photography Workshop

by Alex Lawson, Young Adult Librarian

On Wednesday June 20, two educators from Wide Angle Youth Media, Eboni Sellers and Emma Bergman, came to the Roland Park Branch to lead a photography workshop for teens. Ms. Eboni and Ms. Emma began the workshop by talking about photographs as pieces of art that invite different interpretations. They challenged the teens to form their own interpretations of one particular photograph (Gordon Parks’ American Gothic), saying to “break it down, unpack it,” and then to “treat it like an equation–when you add all those pieces together, what do you get?” The beauty of photography is that, unlike math, anybody’s solution to that equation is valid.

Ms. Eboni and Ms. Emma then turned that idea on its head by showing the teens how to compose their own photographs by manipulating individual elements like light, angles, lines, focus, and reflection.
Then, after learning to operate Wide Angle Youth Media’s sophisticated cameras, the teens went outside to take their own photographs. They walked around the neighborhood for over an hour, snapping pictures and applying what they’d learned, before returning to the library.
There, over pizza, the entire group critiqued and complimented everybody’s photographs. Many of the pictures were beautiful, and it was easy to see that their quality improved over the course of the hour that the teens spent practicing their technique.
There’s still a chance to participate in future photography workshops #atthepratt. RSVP to a Wide Angle Photography Workshop in August.

What’s New: Fresh titles to dive into this summer

Want to get away? Travel far and wide with these new and forthcoming titles. Click on the book cover to reserve your copy today.

Don’t forget—it’s not too late to sign up for our Summer Challenge! It is FREE to sign up, is open to all ages and reading levels (including adults), and both kids and adults can earn awesome prizes. The challenge continues through August 15. Sign up now here.

New and Forthcoming Fiction Titles

New and Forthcoming Nonfiction Titles

New Young Adult Titles

New Overdrive Titles
(Many titles available in e-book & e-audio formats)

Click through these link to see complete lists of new and forthcoming Fiction, Nonfiction, Mystery, and Science Fiction & Fantasy.