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Can't get enough of the Personal Librarian Project? Checkout PLP Fiction (But not just fiction!) is the newest podcast from Dallas Public Library. Hear your favorite personal librarians talk about books, movies, comics and even video games. Listen to us on SoundCloud, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Be a part of PLP Fiction by attending a live virtual recording!
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1 p.m. Your personal librarians are back, and this time it's all things Shakespeare. Twelfth Night of Quarantine, a Shakespeare celebration, continues with a thoughtful chat about books, Shakespeare, and books about Shakespeare with special guest, M. L. Rio, author of If We Were Villains.
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6:30 p.m. We go live with Brandy Colbert to discuss her book The Voting Booth, and why it's so important for young Black women to vote. This is a celebration of women winning the right to vote that you won't want to miss!
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2 p.m.We go live with Amber Lough! Listen and participate in this live podcast recording of PLP Fiction. Amber joins us for a celebration of women voting!
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Audrey's list: Ancestors, History & Healing Lately I've been reading a lot of books that all touch on the idea of our ancestors and personal histories. Regardless of whether we know the details of our personal histories or not, that history continues to impact us all in a very real, tangible way today. Below you will find titles that touch on this idea, and the healing we can find in the confrontation and acknowledgment of the past. |
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The Deep
by Rivers Solomon
The historian of the water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African slaves thrown overboard by slavers keeps all the memories of her people both painful and miraculous, until she discovers that their future lies in returning to the past.
The Deep is a short & powerful novella that explores themes of generational trauma and memory. This was the first book I was able to sink my teeth into since COVID-brain kicked in and definitely the best, most impactful story I've read this year. I highly recommend!
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Dig
by A. S. King
Five white teenage cousins who are struggling with the failures and racial ignorance of their dysfunctional parents and their wealthy grandparents, reunite for Easter.
A.S. King is a master at taking fragments of characters and slices of life, and having those fragments all come together to tell a story you can feel. Equal parts depressing and hopeful, this title is sure to impact.
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The Ocean at the End of the Lane
by Neil Gaiman
Presents a modern fantasy about fear, love, magic, and sacrifice in the story of a family at the mercy of dark forces, whose only defense is the three women who live on a farm at the end of the lane.
Neil Gaiman is a word magician who I love, though this little gem of a novel is my favorite and in a category all its own. It's a story told from memory, the memory of a child and the memory of him as a man. Is it magick, or the imagination of a young boy grappling with hard truths? This is a novel that I have revisited many times and always walk away with a different insight.
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Misty's list: Magical Houses These books are both centered around place, a house which is a central character in the story. Little Big is a dreamy, slow moving magical reality fantasy tale about a family living on the edge of the otherworld. An epic, complicated story, it is most comparable to Gabriel García Márquez' masterpiece of magical reality One Hundred Years of Solitude. Slade House, on the other hand, is a short but engaging fantasy about a magical door that appears every 9 years, and the people who never come back from visiting the house behind it. |
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Little, Big by John CrowleyThe story begins with Smoky Barnable, an anonymous young man who travels by foot from the City to a place called Edgewood, not found on any map, to marry Daily Alice Drinkwater, as was prophesied.
The author, John Crowley, brilliantly weaves magical realism into an epic story of four generations of a family and The Tale that binds them all together in ways both mundane and fantastical, beautiful and heartbreaking. This is a novel with secrets, and it asks big philosophical and metaphysical questions, without necessarily providing answers and leaving the reader to connect the dots of the plot.
I have to be honest, when I first picked up Little Big, I read the first chapter and put it down, lured away by easier and flashier stories that caught my attention. Months would go by, and the same process would happen. Again and again I tried to read this story, but it would lose my attention. It was too gentle and slow moving, and the cadences and style were difficult to get into - probably as difficult as finding Edgewood house itself. And yet something about this book kept calling me back. After several years of trying to read it I surrendered to the slow immersion into the story of the Drinkwater family in their singular house, Edgewood, that is many houses in one on the magical border of an otherworld and at some point, to my surprise, I found myself unable to put the book down. After years of trying, I read the entire novel in a few days, and it is now my favorite book.
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Slade House
by David Mitchell
Down the road from a working-class British pub, along the brick wall of a narrow alley, if the conditions are exactly right, you’ll find the entrance to Slade House. A stranger will greet you by name and invite you inside. At first, you won’t want to leave. Later, you’ll find that you can’t. But what really goes on inside Slade House? For those who find out, it’s already too late. . . .
Spanning five decades, from the last days of the 1970s to the present, leaping genres, and barreling toward an astonishing conclusion, this intricately woven novel will pull you into a reality-warping fantasy story as only David Mitchell could imagine it.
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