| National Library Card Sign-up Month Our first example of what we would consider a library can be found in 2600BC when they were essentially massive archives of inch-thick clay tablets inscribed with one of the first forms of writing, cuneiform. In these archives, the tablets were stored much like our modern books, complete with a description of their contents inscribed upon the side. In Egypt, we'd find papyrus being used that contained temple and government records, and in these times both public and private archives were found. One of the greatest libraries of all time was the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, which functioned as both a storehouse of knowledge and a place of great scholarship until it was burned in 30 BC during the Roman conquest. This library also had one of the first organizational systems found. As the years moved on libraries were a part of every great culture, and in the modern world, they still serve an important role, with library cards tracking what we check out, when it should be returned, and when it's returned. Use your library card, or sign up for one to check out these hot September releases |
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| Books on the Air An overview of talked-about books and authors. This weekly update, published every Friday, provides descriptions of recent TV and radio appearances by authors and their recently released books. See the hot titles from the media this week. |
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| Mona Awad Mona Awad is the author of BUNNY, ALL'S WELL and 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A FAT GIRL. 13 WAYS won the Amazon Best First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Her second novel, BUNNY, was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Horror, the New England Book Award, and won the Ladies of Horror Fiction Best Novel Award. ALL'S WELL was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Horror. Her new novel, ROUGE, is forthcoming in September 2023 with Simon & Schuster. She earned an MFA from Brown University and an MScR in English from the University of Edinburgh where her dissertation was on fear in the fairy tale. In 2018, she completed a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literary Studies at the University of Denver. She currently teaches creative writing at Syracuse University and lives in Boston. Check out her books here. |
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| Kirkus Prize Finalists The finalists for the 2023 Kirkus Prize are out. This year's finalists were books published between November 1, 2022 and October 31, 2023. Each of them earned the Kirkus star-which Kirkus uses to mark “books of exceptional merit”-even before being nominated for the prize. Check them out here |
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| My alma mater was books, a good library.... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.-Malcolm X
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