Books
The very first statewide Father's Day celebration took place in 1910 in Washington but the holiday wasn't celebrated nationally until 1972. Make up some of that lost time and celebrate Dad with picture books like the following, which feature loving fathers and grandfathers.
It's graduation season, and time to congratulate friends and family who have finished high school or college. Though I always give graduates what they most want (a check!), I also like to include a book to mark their achievement. Here are some of my favorite choices.
Janet Mock's memoir, Redefining Realness (Atria, $16), captures Mock's experience growing up poor, multiracial and trans. She writes openly about her experience with coming out and transitioning, and the many ways she was accepted--and not--by those around her and by herself.
In her anthology Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives(Penguin Books, $17), editor Sarah Weinman collects short works of crime fiction by women about women. She credits the authors collected here with inspiring the contemporary generation of women crime writers, pushing forward a genre she calls domestic suspense.
In The Invisible Wall(Ballantine, $16), the first of three memoirs started when the author was 93 years old, Harry Bernstein details his childhood in England in the 1910s.
The 99th Children's Book Week begins in just a few days, starting Monday, April 30 and continuing through Sunday, May 6. This year's official poster is illustrated by Jillian Tamaki and inspired by the 2018 slogan, "One World, Many Stories," and there are exclusive bookmarks by children's book illustrators Sophie Blackall, Vashti Harrison, Don Tate, Leo Espinosa and Felicita Sala. Here's a look at some awesome works by the above illustrators to get you in the CBW spirit.
April 2018 marks the second annual Reading Without Walls program. Throughout the month of April, author Gene Luen Yang challenges readers, educators, librarians and booksellers to read outside of their walls by doing one (or all) of the following:
Baseball remains the sport nestled closest to our literary souls. In the preface to If God Invented Baseball: Poems (City Point Press), E. Ethelbert Miller writes: "There is no future without baseball. There is no past either.... Here are poems that celebrate and interpret the game. They are for everyone who has experienced the magic released when three holy things come together: bat, ball and glove."
