This collection of thought-provoking essays challenges librarians to consider the future of the profession, particularly as it relates to the Web, the library as place, delivering services to the desktop, certification, and the future of professional associations.

"A lightning bolt of a literary debut." ---Adam Johnson, Pulitzer Prize winner "Enchanting and so neatly planed they feel made by time, these stories mark the debut of a writer to watch." ---John Freeman, Literary Hub Last One Out Shut Off the Lights is an evocative portrait of the last-chance towns of southwest Louisiana, where oil development, industrial pollution, dying wetlands, and the ever-present threat of devastating hurricanes have eroded their inhabitants' sense of home. These eleven piercing stories feature indelible characters struggling to find a foothold in a world that is forever washing out from under them, people who must reckon with their ambivalence about belonging to a place so continually in flux. In a collection whose resonant echoes abound, we meet a reluctant teenage mother who stows her baby in a closet to steal a night out; a spiteful retiree who sabotages his neighbor in the wake of a hurricane; a Pentecostal singer in a children's theater company who confronts the cultish leader of her troupe; a community of elderly Cajuns who conspire with a family of Sudanese immigrants to hide an escaped cow from the authorities; and a desperate young woman who tries to drag her brother to Mexico for surgery, determined to save his life and her own. As Lauren Groff did for the state of Florida in her recent collection Florida, Stephanie Soileau demonstrates that Louisiana is as much a state of mind as it is a place on the map. A love letter to the Cajun language, life rhythms, and customs that still make the region unique, Last One Out Shut Off the Lights is also a powerful reminder of the treacherous escape routes that bedevil anyone longing to leave home, and the traps that remain for those who desire to return.

Expanding on his landmark Globe and Mail series in which he documented his travels down sixteen of Canada's great rivers, Roy MacGregor tells the story of our country through the stories of its original highways, and how they sustain our spirit, identity and economy—past, present and future. No country is more blessed with fresh water than Canada. From the mouth of the Fraser River in BC, to the Bow in Alberta, the Red in Manitoba, the Gatineau, the Saint John and the most historic of all Canada's rivers, the St. Lawrence, our beloved chronicler of Canadian life, Roy MacGregor, has paddled, sailed and traversed their lengths, learned their stories and secrets, and the tales of centuries lived on their rapids and riverbanks. He raises lost tales, like that of the Great Tax Revolt of the Gatineau River, and reconsiders histories like that of the Irish would-be settlers who died on Grosse Ile and the incredible resilience of settlers in the Red River Valley. Along the Grand, the Ottawa and others, he meets the successful conservationists behind the resuscitation of polluted wetlands, including Toronto's Don, the most abused river in Canada. In the Mackenzie River Valley he witnesses the Dehcho First Nation's effort to block a pipeline they worry endangers the region's lifeblood. Long before our national railroad was built, rivers held Canada together; in these sixteen portraits, filled with yesterday's adventures and tomorrow's promise, MacGregor weaves together a story of Canada and its ongoing relationship with its most precious resource.

- Take a step back and look into the experiences of a little girl growing up in Detroit with her two older sisters. - When the Shrine Circus was in town, her dad brought home clowns in costume, a bear trainer and a trapeze artist. - The adventures of the author and her sisters at boarding school. - The tragedy of losing her daughter Julie in a head-on collision, leaving a young husband and two little boys. - You'll laugh at the incident of the elephant on the roof, the wasp and the negligee, and the police almost arresting Santa Clause. - The happenings at their son Steve's wedding was so unusual and funny it could be an SNL skit. - The antics of a grandmother who seemed to have no filter when it came to her off-hand remarks. - You'll learn why this family loves Michigan and especially their beloved hometown, Detroit.

"As I Remember It" chronicles the authors adventures in the Philippines, Spain, South Africa, India, Norway, Ethiopia, Boston, Hartford, New York, Brazil, and California. It tells of the fascinating people she met and worked with in Ethiopia, at Expo 67 in Montreal, at CARE World Headquarters in New York, as the Director of Publications at Boston University, and as an Assistant Vice President at the University of Hartford. Her memoir includes apocryphal stories of her family, her grandmother and "the Memas," her best friends Agnes and Viki, advice on Places to Miss and a Beckett review.

In the midst of all these chaotic events, he discovers he has new enemies. He actually acquires a new ability when he destroyed this old enemy. This book is supernatural fiction, with a Cajun twist and adult language, featuring the ghost town Rudock, which is known to many folks in Louisiana. It also features a very unique town of Pass Manchac that reminds you of the fishing villages of New England, with only Cajun style. Lets not forget about New Orleans.

Germany is the most important and powerful country in Europe. And yet it remains strangely little understood - by itself, as much as by the rest of the world. It is in a state of remarkable flux, confronting the demons of the past, whilst also seeking to make the West and the East into one country - a much greater challenge than it seemed. The coming enlargement of the European Union, which will bring much of formerly communist Eastern Europe into the EU, will make Germany more pivotal than ever. So what makes this country tick? For decades after the Second World War, the country remained strongly polluted by the Nazi legacy; there was little attempt to confront the past. For today's younger generation, by contrast, Nazism was a weird aberration that they themselves have difficulty in understanding. The book will explore those changes, and how German society itself is still in the midst of enormous change. The story takes us through three periods: Before the Poison (pre-1933), The Poison (1933-45) and - the heart of the book - the period of Coming to Terms, and the changes that this period has brought to the shape of the country. The coming to terms with the past overlaps, from 1990 onwards, with the East-West story, where mutual misunderstanding has been rife.

The victories and failures of millennial socialism, as told by the writer who lived it. Amber A'Lee Frost came to New York City from her home state of Indiana as a working class activist (and member of then-unknown Cold War hold-out, Democratic Socialists of America), just before the first major movement for economic justice of the millennium, Occupy Wall Street. Of course, Occupy went bust, then Bernie Sanders went boom, and she threw herself into the campaign with everything she had. Frost has been one of the foremost evangelists of labor and socialist politics ever since, as a writer, activist, former staff and lifetime member of DSA, and cohost of the wildly popular Chapo Trap House podcast. Dirtbag is the much-anticipated debut from one of the most engaging and insightful writers of her generation. This book is more than a political memoir; it is a chapter in the story of the only movement that has a chance to reshape our world into something better. It captures an electric time of thrilling triumphs, stupid decisions, friendships and rivalries new and old, struggle, joy, setbacks, and heartbreak, all with magnetic prose, remarkable candor, and unflappable humor. Throughout it all, Frost burned the candle at both ends, relentlessly campaigning for socialism and the labor movement, from the American Midwest to the British rust belt, and rallying the troops with her brothers-in-arms as a self-described propagandist for the glorious cause of the workers movement (and somehow, always finding moments for plenty of reckless adventuring). The time was a brutal calamity of work and play, with all of the late nights, hard fights, and joyous camaraderie powered by the hope and the faith that maybe, somehow, this time, socialism could actually win.

“Latin America” is a concept firmly entrenched in its philosophical, moral, and historical meanings. And yet, Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo argues in this landmark book, it is an obsolescent racial-cultural idea that ought to have vanished long ago with the banishment of racial theory. Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea makes this case persuasively. Tenorio-Trillo builds the book on three interlocking steps: first, an intellectual history of the concept of Latin America in its natural historical habitat—mid-nineteenth-century redefinitions of empire and the cultural, political, and economic intellectualism; second, a serious and uncompromising critique of the current “Latin Americanism”—which circulates in United States–based humanities and social sciences; and, third, accepting that we might actually be stuck with “Latin America,” Tenorio-Trillo charts a path forward for the writing and teaching of Latin American history. Accessible and forceful, rich in historical research and specificity, the book offers a distinctive, conceptual history of Latin America and its many connections and intersections of political and intellectual significance. Tenorio-Trillo’s book is a masterpiece of interdisciplinary scholarship.