Wild Blue Wonder

"It's the rarest author who can pull off laugh-out-loud hilarious, profound, and breathlessly romantic, all in the most sparkling prose. That shortlist includes Rainbow Rowell, Nicola Yoon, and now, Carlie Sorosiak."—Jeff Zentner, Morris Award-winning author of The Serpent King and Goodbye Days Last June, the summer camp Quinn’s family owns in Winship, Maine, was still a magical place. A place where wild blueberries grew no matter the season, a legendary sea monster lurked in the waters, and Quinn fell in love with her best friend, Dylan. Then the accident happened. Now it’s winter, the magic has drained from Quinn’s life, and she knows it’s her fault. But the new boy in town, Alexander, doesn’t see her as the monster she believes herself to be. As Quinn lets herself open up again, she begins to understand the truth about love, loss, and monsters—real and imagined. Perfect for fans of Morgan Matson, Jenny Han, and Jandy Nelson, this wondrous novel was proclaimed “a striking examination of love—of friends, of family, of self—as well as of grief” by ALA Booklist in a starred review.

Take to the skies in this thrilling new action-adventure sci-fi tale. In the near future, mankind has destroyed the Earth, and the only refuge from radioactive pollution can be found in the skies. Unfortunately, dwindling supplies and bloodthirsty air pirates make life all the harder. Join the crew of the Dawn as they battle their way through the hazards of living in this dangerous new world.

It's all been building to this! The Judge has hunted down the Dawn, and now it's a desperate fight for survival. Cola and Tug are each faced with heart-breaking decisions. Will they act in time? It's the bloodiest, most grueling battle yet and the skies will rain with blood!

Allan T. Stein idolized his uncle, a pilot in the Great War. So in 1943, in the midst of the Second World War, he left Texas A&M University for Lackland Air Field to learn to fly. By the time he retired in 1969, Stein had flown everything from BT-13s and B-24s to B-52s and C-47s. During World War II, he flew missions over China and the Sea of Japan, and by V-J Day, he had participated in eight campaigns and logged 347 hours in combat. Stein later spent one year in Vietnam as operations officer for the 360 TEWS (Tactical Electronic Warfare Squadron), which used refitted C-47s to monitor and locate Vietcong units. He ended his career as inspector general of the Civil Air Patrol. Stein remembers drinking 10¢ beers in San Antonio and running an AT-17 into a dry lake bed outside Lubbock. He recalls a B-25 crashing into a stockade and a mission over the Atlantic that almost ended tragically due to bad weather and because his flight of B-47s could not refuel properly. During the 1940s, money was always short and the future uncertain, so he and his wife lived cheaply in cramped apartments and converted garages. Yet he recalls that the camaraderie among air force personnel and their families made those the best years of their lives. Stein considers himself to have been an ordinary airman, not a hero. But he was also a seasoned pilot and a conscientious officer with a strong sense of right and wrong. After a pilot he had trained and certified died in an accident, Stein made it a practice to fail all but the best candidates. He was just as disgusted with the corruption he encountered in the Civil Air Patrol as he was with the tendentious reporters he met in Saigon’s Hotel Caravelle. Although he met his share of cowards and scoundrels, Stein loved to fly and he loved the air force. He was the sort of officer his superiors trusted not to make mistakes, but he was not the sort to rise to high rank. What he offers here is an account of a typical career as an air force officer, complete with its frustrations, moral dilemmas, and the occasional harrowing experience.

Titled after the US Air Force song, this engaging debut explores the legacy of the Greatest Generation from the perspective of Generation Y, the fallout of war through the eyes of a pacifist, and the enduring human desire for love, adventure, truth, and understanding. Pensive in the wake of 9/11, a young man—our “correspondent between the past and the present”—launches a mission to reunite his beloved grandfather, an American bombardier, with Luddie, the woman who saved him during WWII. Armed only with the address on the back of an old photograph and his grandfather’s memories, the young man begins writing letters to Luddie. Undaunted by her lack of response, the narrator travels to Poland with his girlfriend and grandfather. As they come closer to finding the site where the bombardier was shot down, the letters to Luddie become more personal and the saga of a family with a long and storied history emerges. Beautifully orchestrated and eloquently original, each sentence slowly builds upon the next in a charming style both poetic and engrossing. A tale of soldiers and saviors, of burning and bombing, of fathers and sons and brothers and lovers, this is also the story of what we find when we dare to revisit the past. Born in Iowa in 1979, Travis Nichols now lives in Chicago. An editor at the Poetry Foundation, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Believer, Details, Paste, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and The Stranger. Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder is his first novel.

A sparkling debut about love, family, and the mysteries of the universe, perfect for fans of Jandy Nelson and Nicola Yoon. Linny has kept a journal of famous disappearances ever since her sister Grace ran away in the middle of the night. Sebastian is an aspiring astrophysicist with a working theory for everything—but the one thing he can’t figure out is the identity of his birth father. They haven’t met—yet—but Linny and Sebastian have one thing in common: an obsession with famous novelist and filmmaker Àlvaro Herrera, who who went missing three years ago and has just reappeared. As their lives converge around the mystery of Àlvaro, they begin to uncover the answers they’ve been looking for. With humor and heart, debut author Carlie Sorosiak weaves a story of searching for those who leave—and loving those who stay. "If Birds Fly Back feels like that last hazy, sun-drenched summer of high school, when you know you'll need to find your place in the world, but you're busy laughing and falling in love under starlit skies. It's the rarest author who can pull off laugh-out-loud hilarious, profound, and breathlessly romantic, all in the most sparkling prose. That shortlist includes Rainbow Rowell, Nicola Yoon, and now, Carlie Sorosiak."—Jeff Zentner, acclaimed author of The Serpent King and Goodbye Days

An intimate account of the beauty, mystery, and amazing science of the ocean. In The Blue Wonder, marine biologist and diver Frauke Bagusche brings readers on a fascinating and beautiful deep-sea dive into the ocean. Drawing on scientific discoveries and her own research, she uses photographs and playful prose to reveal: deep-sea reefs that glitter like glass fish that converse with each other by singing––loudly an octopus that imitates more than fifteen other animals the secret behind why the sea glows at night “weddings” that happen amongst the coral underwater “drugstores” and even fish that clean her own teeth! Humans know more about the moon’s surface than we do about the ocean. There is so much to be discovered, under the sea. With the heart of a poet and the mind of a scientist, Frauke Bagusche re-awakens our love for the sea and ignites a desire to protect this vital habitat.

It's in this volume (featuring another two years worth of Pogo strips) that we meet one of Walt Kelly's boldest political caricatures. Folks across America had little trouble equating the insidious wildcat Simple J. Malarkey with the ascendant anti-Communist senator, Joseph McCarthy. The subject was sensitive enough that by the following year a Providence, Rhode Island newspaper threatened to drop the strip if Malarkey's face were to appear in it again. Kelly's response? He had Malarkey appear again but put a bag over the character's head for his next appearance. Ergo, his face did not appear. (Typical of Kelly's layers of verbal wit, the character Malarkey was hiding from was a Rhode Island Red hen, referencing both the source of his need to conceal Malarkey and the underlying political controversy.) The entirety of these sequences can be found in this book. But the Malarkey storyline is only a tiny portion of those rich, eventful two years, which include such classic sequences as con-man Seminole Sam's attempts to corner the market on water (which Porkypine's Uncle Baldwin tries to one-up by cornering the market on dirt); a return engagement of Pup Dog and Houndog's blank-eyed Little Orphan Annie parody Li'l Arf and Nonny; Churchy La Femme going in drag to deliver a love poem he wrote, Cyrano style, on Deacon Mush-rat's behalf to Sis Boombah (the aforementioned hen); P.T. Bridgeport's return to the swamp in search of new talent; and of course two rousing choruses of Deck Us All With Boston Charlie.