New items are available at the Hancock County Public Library.
The following items are available at the Hancock County Public Library, 900 W. McKenzie Road. For more information on the library’s collection or to reserve a title, visit hcplibrary.org.
Adult Fiction
“Good Citizens Need Not Fear,” by Maria Reva
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“A bureaucratic glitch omits an entire building, along with its residents, from municipal records.” So begins Maria Reva’s collection of intertwined narratives, nine stories that span the years leading up to and immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union. But even as the denizens of 1933 Ivansk Street weather the official neglect of the increasingly powerless authorities, they devise ingenious ways to survive. In “Bone Music,” an agoraphobic recluse survives by selling contraband LPs, mapping the vinyl grooves of illegal Western records into stolen X-ray film. A delusional secret service agent in “Letter of Apology” becomes convinced he’s being covertly recruited to guard Lenin’s tomb, just as his parents, not seen since he was a small child, supposedly were. Weaving the narratives together is Zaya: a cleft-lipped orphan in “Little Rabbit,” a beauty-pageant crasher in “Miss USSR,” a sadist-for-hire to the Eastern Bloc’s newly minted oligarchs in “Homecoming.” “Good Citizens Need Not Fear” tacks from moments of paranoia to tenderness and back again, exploring what it is to be an individual amid the roiling forces of history. Reva’s stories are inspired by her and her family’s own experiences in Ukraine.
Adult Nonfiction
“The Peanuts Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & the Gang, and the Meaning of Life: A Library of America Special Publication” by Andrew Blauner
Over the span of 50 years, Charles M. Schulz created a comic strip that is one of the indisputable glories of American popular culture — hilarious, poignant and inimitable. Some 20 years after the last strip appeared, the characters Schulz brought to life in “Peanuts” continue to resonate with millions of fans, their four-panel adventures and television escapades offering lessons about happiness, friendship, disappointment, childhood and life itself. In “The Peanuts Papers,” 33 writers and artists reflect on the deeper truths of Schulz’s deceptively simple comic and its impact on their lives and art and on the broader culture. These often personal essays show just how much “Peanuts” meant to its many admirers—and the ways it invites us to ponder, in the words of Sarah Boxer, “how to survive and still be a decent human being” in an often bewildering world. The collection features essays, memoirs, poems and two original comic strips.
