SCPL Reads: Quick Reads

When celebrated writer Alma Cruz inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, she turns it into a place to bury her untold stories--literally. She creates a graveyard for manuscript drafts and revisions and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her. Alma wants her characters to rest in peace, but they have other ideas, and the cemetery becomes a mysterious sanctuary for their true narratives.

Annie Bot was created to be the perfect girlfriend for her human owner Doug. Designed to satisfy his emotional and physical needs, she has dinner ready for him, wears the outfits he orders for her, and adjusts her libido to suit his moods. She’s trying to please him and trying hard. She’s learning, too. Doug says he loves that Annie’s AI makes her seem more like a real woman, so Annie explores human traits such as curiosity, secrecy, and longing. But becoming more human also means becoming less perfect, and as their relationship grows more intricate and difficult, she starts to wonder: Does Doug desire what he says he wants? And in such an impossible paradox, what does Annie owe herself?

Be a Triangle offers readers a way to create a sense of peace within themselves by becoming a “triangle” with a solid foundation that can be built-upon but not destroyed.

1972, Black River Falls, Wisconsin: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia’s psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.

Unabashedly sincere, clever, and full of questionable advice, Act Like a Lady explores the complexities surrounding topics like body image, breakups, navigating a career, and adult friendships through their own embarrassing experiences.