Newcomer Salma and friends cook up a heartwarming dish to cheer up Mama. All Salma wants is to make her mama smile again. Between English classes, job interviews, and missing Papa back in Syria, Mama always seems busy or sad. A homemade Syrian meal might cheer her up, but Salma doesn’t know the recipe, or what to call the vegetables in English, or where to find the right spices! Luckily, the staff and other newcomers at the Welcome Center are happy to lend a hand—and a sprinkle of sumac. With creativity, determination, and charm, Salma brings her new friends together to show Mama that even though things aren’t perfect, there is cause for hope and celebration. Syrian culture is beautifully represented through the meal Salma prepares and Anna Bron’s vibrant illustrations, while the diverse cast of characters speaks to the power of cultivating community in challenging circumstances.

Read Along or Enhanced eBook: Get in the game and use clues on the clotheslines to identify a slew of sports. Catchy rhymes and visual cues introduce young readers to sports in this companion to Clothesline Clues to Jobs People Do. The clues in each lively verse can be spotted hanging from the clotheslines. What athlete wears those items? Turn the page to discover the sport at hand—and the athlete in full gear! From baseball and soccer, to fencing and archery, there's something for everyone—including a surprise ending. A perfect choice for reading aloud and encouraging kids to join in the guessing and reveal. Andy Robert Davies's quirky illustrations build a separate story from the text. Close attention to the details will help young readers build their own storytelling skills and help them make visual connections.

WINNER OF THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FOR GAY FICTION Hussam and Wassim are teenage boys living in Syria during America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. When a surprise discovery results in tragedy, their lives, and those of their families, are shattered. Wassim promises Hussam his protection, but ten years into the future, he has failed to keep his promise. Wassim is on the streets, seeking shelter from both the city and the civil war storming his country. Meanwhile Hussam, now on the other side of the world, remains haunted by his own ghosts, doing his utmost to drown them out with every vice imaginable. Split between war-torn Damascus and unforgiving Vancouver, The Foghorn Echoes is a tragic love story about coping with shared traumatic experience and devastating separation. As Hussam and Wassim come to terms with the past, they begin to realise the secret that haunts them is not the only secret that formed them.

Is this the right book for you? Take the ANNOYING TEST and find out. 1) Do you ask `Are we there yet?' over and over on long car trips? 2) Do you like to drive people mad by copying everything they say and do? 3) Do you hog the shower and use up all the hot water? 4) Do you enjoy asking silly questions that have no real answers? 5) Do you swing on the clothesline whenever you get the chance? SCORE: One point for each 'yes' answer. 3-5 You are obviously a very annoying person. You will love this book. 1-2 You are a fairly annoying person. You will love this book. 0 You don't realise how much fun being annoying can be. You will love this book.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD “Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea,” writes John Updike in his Foreword to this collection of literary considerations. But the sailor doth protest too much: This collection begins somewhere near deep water, with a flotilla of short fiction, humor pieces, and personal essays, and even the least of the reviews here—those that “come about and draw even closer to the land with another nine-point quotation”—are distinguished by a novelist’s style, insight, and accuracy, not just surface sparkle. Indeed, as James Atlas commented, the most substantial critical articles, on Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman, go out as far as Updike’s fiction: They are “the sort of ambitious scholarly reappraisal not seen in this country since the death of Edmund Wilson.” With Hugging the Shore, Michiko Kakutani wrote, Updike established himself “as a major and enduring critical voice; indeed, as the pre-eminent critic of his generation.”

On her way home from a gay wedding, Sybil's eponymous protagonist is ambushed, beaten, and left for dead on the train tracks. Days later, Sybil awakens in a hospital and finds her skull has been reconstructed, but it quickly becomes clear that her version of "normal" and "reality" may have been permanently altered. When she falls in love with a very beautiful, but very married, actress, Sybil does what comes naturally: she presents the object of her affection with a homemade explosive device, and then abruptly leaves town. I've Got A Time Bomb chronicles her surrealistic journey living among the loners, losers, and leave-behinds in the dark corners of Amerika.

Ogadinma Or, Everything Will be All Right is a tale of departure, loss and adaptation; of mothers whose experience at the hands of controlling men leave them with burdens they find too much to bear. After an unwanted pregnancy leaves her exiled from her family in Kano, thwarting her plans to go to university, seventeen-year-old Ogadinma is sent to her aunt's in Lagos. When a whirlwind romance with an older man descends into indignity, she is forced to channel her strength and resourcefulness to escape a fate that appears all but inevitable. A feminist classic in the making, Ukamaka Olisakwe's sophomore novel introduces a heroine for whom it is impossible not to root and announces the author as a gifted chronicler of the patriarchal experience. Illuminates a fascinating time in Nigeria's recent past, as the novel's heroine struggles against the shackles of a Church-dominated patriarchal society amid rising political turmoil · Written by a rising star of Nigeria's vibrant literature scene, a finalist for the 2019 Brittle Paper Award for Creative Nonfiction and established screenwriter · An exquisitely written bildungsroman that will appeal equally to readers of literary fiction and a new adult audience