--- Library Gild Update ---

The Arden Library Catalog is back Online!
Click here, a new window will open and you can view and search the catalog.
To reserve a book, send an email to theardenlibrary@gmail.com

NEW! Public access computer and printer available during library hours.

We've got great new books for you this month, so stop by the Arden Library!
New hours:
Saturday 2:30 – 4
Sunday 2:30 – 4
Wednesday 7:30 – 9
Thursday 3 – 5
Friday: 3-5 (Effective Oct. 6, 2023)

Enjoy these recent additions to our collection!
Quantum Criminals

Quantum Criminals:
Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan
by Alex Pappademas, Joan LeMay

Steely Dan’s songs are exercises in fictional world-building. No one else in the classic-rock canon has conjured a more vivid cast of rogues and heroes, creeps and schmucks, lovers and dreamers and cold-blooded operators—or imbued their characters with so much humanity. Pulling from history, lived experience, pulp fiction, the lore of the counterculture, and their own darkly comic imaginations, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker summoned protagonists who seemed like fully formed people with complicated pasts, scars they don’t talk about, delusions and desires and memories they can’t shake. From Rikki to Dr. Wu, Hoops McCann to Kid Charlemagne, Franny from NYU to the Woolly Man without a Face, every name is a locked-room mystery, beguiling listeners and earning the band an exceptionally passionate and ever-growing cult fandom.

Quantum Criminals presents the world of Steely Dan as it has never been seen, much less heard. Artist Joan LeMay has crafted lively, color-saturated images of her favorite characters from the Daniverse to accompany writer Alex Pappademas’s explorations of the famous and obscure songs that inspired each painting, in short essays full of cultural context, wild speculation, inspired dot-connecting, and the occasional conspiracy theory. All of it is refracted through the perspectives of the characters themselves, making for a musical companion unlike any other. Funny, discerning, and visually stunning, Quantum Criminals is a singular celebration of Steely Dan’s musical cosmos.

"Having made several attempts to concoct a blurb that might display some of the thoughtfulness, cleverness, craft, wit, style, and strong point of view that are the hallmarks of both this book and of the band it so fannishly and lovingly analyzes, I'm just going to give up and write the simple truth--I adored it"-Michael Chabon

"The most fun I've had reading a book all year"- Steve Tanzer

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Call Us by What We Carry by Amanda Gorman

Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, the luminous poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning. Call Us What We Carry reveals that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.

Trust by Elly MacKay

Trust  – by Hernan Diaz

2023 Winner Of The Pulitzer Prize In Fiction
An unparalleled novel about money, power, intimacy, and perception

Even though the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

Hernan Diaz’s TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.

At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.

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The Last Castle: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nations Largest Home  – by Denise Keirnan

From the Gilded Age to the present, Kiernan (The Girls of Atomic City, 2013) traces the history of Biltmore, the estate of George Vanderbilt in what was then the sleepy town of Asheville, North Carolina. At a leisurely pace, Kiernan follows the lives of both Vanderbilt fortune heir George and his future wife, Edith Stuyvesant Dresser, who, after George’s death in 1914 from a pulmonary embolism, dealt with Biltmore through WWI and the Depression. Kiernan lavishes attention not
only on the house, made up of 250 rooms and covering four acres, but also on the forestry school designed to revive the over-logged landscape, the Arts and Crafts movement that grew up in Asheville under Edith’s influence, and the many visitors to the estate, including Edith Wharton and Henry James. The story of the house, which now survives on the money of tourists, may not be suspenseful, but the many diverting detours Kiernan takes make the book enticing for even those who will never set foot on Biltmore grounds.


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