There's a Book for That: National Library Week!
It’s time to share your love for libraries! National Library Week, an initiative of the American Library Association, runs from April 19th-25th. Honorary Chair, and Penguin Random House author, Mychal Threets invites us all to celebrate this year’s theme “Find Your Joy” saying, “celebrating libraries, thanking library workers, visiting libraries is how I find my joy.” Click here for ways to celebrate libraries and check out the following terrific fiction and nonfiction about the magic of libraries!
Dubbed “the Internet’s librarian”— and now host of the relaunched Reading Rainbow — Mychal Threets invites all to take a look and find themselves at the library! Perfect for little readers who are regular visitors and those who might be stepping into the stacks for the first time.
Welcome to the library! It’s a place just for you! There are activities, movies, games, and SO. MANY. STORIES. Best of all, it’s a place where you will always belong. Take a tour of the library with the internet’s favorite librarian, Mychal Threets! This heartwarming debut picture book from Mychal extends an invitation to anyone who could use a little library joy and a reminder that libraries are for everyone.
A Library Reads Pick!
In the leafy suburbs of Austin, Texas, a small branch library welcomes the public every day of the week. But the patrons who love the helpful, unobtrusive staff and leave rave reviews on Yelp don’t always realize that their librarians are human, too. When two patrons turn up dead after the library’s inaugural murder mystery–themed game night, the librarians’ quiet routines come crashing down. Something sinister has stirred, something that threatens every single one of them. And the only way the librarians can save the library—and themselves—is to let go of their secrets, trust one another, and band together….
A librarian with a knack for solving murders realizes there is something decidedly supernatural afoot in her little town in this cozy fantasy mystery. This riotous mix of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Murder, She Wrote is a lesson for demons and murderers alike: Never mess with a librarian.
A Library Reads Pick!
Lonely librarian June Jones has never left the sleepy English village where she grew up. Shy and reclusive, the thirty-year-old would rather spend her time buried in books than venture out into the world. But when her library is threatened with closure, June is forced to emerge from behind the shelves to save the heart of her community and the place that holds the dearest memories of her mother.
From the bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World comes a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for these peculiar times.
A remarkable novel about J. P. Morgan’s personal librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, the Black American woman who was forced to hide her true identity and pass as white in order to leave a lasting legacy that enriched our nation.
Ancient libraries, grand baroque libraries, scientific libraries, memorial libraries, personal libraries, clandestine libraries: Stuart Kells tells the stories of their creators, their prizes, their secrets, and their fate. To research this book, Kells traveled around the world with his young family like modern–day “Library Tourists.” Kells discovered that all the world’s libraries are connected in beautiful and complex ways, that in the history of libraries, fascinating patterns are created and repeated over centuries. More important, he learned that stories about libraries are stories about people, containing every possible human drama.
The characters in the delightful stories collected here range all the way from the ink-stained medieval monks in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose to the book-besotted denizens of Ali Smith’s Public Library and Other Stories. In these pages readers are invited to enter the interior lives of librarians in Lorrie Moore’s “Community Life” and Elizabeth McCracken’s “Juliet” and are ushered into a host of unusual libraries, including the infinite rooms of Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel” and a secret library in Helen Oyeyemi’s “Books and Roses.”
FOR YOUNGER READERS
Since Grandpa died, Dally’s days are dull and restricted. She’s eleven and a half years old, and her exacting single mother is already preparing her to take over the family business. Starved for adventure and release, Dally rescues a mysterious envelope from her mother’s clutches, an envelope Grandpa had earmarked for her. The map she finds inside leads straight to an ancient vault, a library of secrets where each book is a portal to a precise moment in time. Equal parts mystery and adventure—with a biracial child puzzling out her identity alongside the legacy of the past—this masterful middle-grade fantasy rivets with crackling prose, playful plot twists, and timeless themes.
The New York Times bestselling, puzzle-packed sequel to the award-winning Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library is now adapted for graphic novel! It’s the first ever Library Olympics, but books are missing, and a mystery is afoot as the kids band together to solve it! Packed with puzzles, clues, and colorful art, this deliciously fun graphic novel adaptation invites kids to step right into the action and experience Mr. Lemoncello’s library in a whole new way! Let the games begin!
A fresh and fascinating picture book biography about the iconic magician Harry Houdini, an avid book collector who lived and breathed the idea that books are magic. As a young boy in Budapest, Harry learned to read at his father’s knee. After the family emigrated to America, Harry grew up to be the amazing Houdini–but never lost his love of reading. He spent the rest of his life collecting all kinds of rare and unusual books, almost entirely about magic. With warm, inviting text and astounding art with miniature models constructed from paper, this extraordinary book opens a new page on the story of Harry Houdini.
Night at the Museum meets The Land of Stories in this thrilling new graphic novel adventure series in which two siblings, a mysterious Night Librarian, and a motley cast of book characters try to save the New York Public Library.
From an award-winning author and illustrator comes this picture book biography about beloved librarian and storyteller Augusta Braxton Baker, the first Black coordinator of children’s services at all branches of the New York Public Library.
Amid the scholars, poets, authors, and artists of the Harlem Renaissance stood an Afro–Puerto Rican named Arturo Schomburg. This law clerk’s life’s passion was to collect books, letters, music, and art from Africa and the African diaspora and bring to light the achievements of people of African descent through the ages. When Schomburg’s collection became so big it began to overflow his house (and his wife threatened to mutiny), he turned to the New York Public Library, where he created and curated a collection that was the cornerstone of a new Negro Division. A century later, his groundbreaking collection, known as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, has become a beacon to scholars all over the world.
For more on these and many other library themed titles visit: Libraries and Librarians Lit
Click here to read letters from our authors to libraries/librarians that have made a difference to them.
There’s a Book for That! is brought to you by Penguin Random House’s Sales department.
Did you see something on the news or read about something on your commute? Perhaps you noticed something trending on social media? Did you think: “There’s a book for that!”? Then please, send it our way at theresabookforthat@penguinrandomhouse.com