New Nonfiction
August 2025
New and Recently Released
Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History
by Moudhy N. Al-Rashid

Thousands of years ago, in a part of the world we now call ancient Mesopotamia, people began writing things down for the very first time.
What they left behind, in a vast region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, preserves leaps in human ingenuity, like the earliest depiction of a wheel and the first approximation of pi. But they also capture breathtakingly intimate, raw, and relatable moments, like a dog's paw prints as it accidentally stepped into fresh clay, or the imprint of a child's teeth.
In Between Two Rivers, historian Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid reveals what these ancient people chose to record about their lives, allowing us to brush hands with them millennia later. We find a lullaby to soothe a baby, instructions for exorcising a ghost, countless receipts for beer, and the messy writing of preschoolers. We meet an enslaved person negotiating their freedom, an astronomer tracing the movement of the planets, a princess who may have created the world's first museum, and a working mother struggling with "the juggle" in 1900 BCE.
Millennia ago, Mesopotamians saw the world's first cities, the first writing system, early seeds of agriculture, and groundbreaking developments in medicine and astronomy. With breathtaking intimacy and grace, Al-Rashid brings their lives--with all their anxieties, aspirations, and intimacies--vividly close to our own.
The Quiet Ear: An Investigation of Missing Sound: a Memoir
by Raymond Antrobus

At the hospital where Raymond Antrobus was born, a midwife snapped her fingers by his ears and gauged his response. It was his first hearing test, and he passed. For years, Antrobus lived as a deaf person in the hearing world, before he was diagnosed at the age of six. This "in-betweenness" was a space he would occupy in other areas of his life too. The son of a Jamaican father and white British mother, growing up in East London, it was easy for him to fall through the cracks. Growing up, he was told that he wasn't smart enough, wasn't black enough, wasn't deaf enough. It was only when he was fitted with hearing aids at the age of seven, that he began to discover his missing sounds: the high pitches of whistles, birds, alarms, the "sh, ch, ba, th" sounds in speech--all of it missing. The Quiet Ear is an attempt to fill in those missing sounds in Antrobus' own life, and how they formed his hybrid deaf identity. It's a story of a journey of finding your path when there are no signs to show the way, and a testament to the people--his parents and teachers, artists, writers, and musicians--who helped form his language: spoken, written, and signed. It's also about becoming a father to a hearing son, and trying to know the ways in which they might understand and misunderstand one another.
The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-century America
by David Baron

This New York Times headline was no joke. In the early 1900s, many Americans actually believed we had discovered intelligent life on Mars, as best-selling science writer David Baron chronicles in The Martians, his truly bizarre tale of a nation swept up in Mars mania. At the center of Baron's historical drama is Percival Lowell, the Boston Brahmin and Harvard scion, who observed "canals" etched into the surface of Mars. Lowell devised a grand theory that the red planet was home to a utopian society that had built gargantuan ditches to funnel precious meltwater from the polar icecaps to desert farms and oasis cities. The public fell in love with the ambitious amateur astronomer who shared his findings in speeches and wildly popular books. While at first people treated the Martians whimsically--Martians headlining Broadway shows, biologists speculating whether they were winged or gilled--the discussion quickly became serious. Inventor Nikola Tesla announced he had received radio signals from Mars; Alexander Graham Bell agreed there was "no escape from the conviction" that intelligent beings inhabited the planet. Martian excitement reached its zenith when Lowell financed an expedition to photograph Mars from Chile's Atacama Desert, resulting in what newspapers hailed as proof of the Martian canals' existence. Triumph quickly yielded to tragedy. Those wild claims and highly speculative photographs emboldened Lowell's critics, whose withering attacks gathered steam and eventually wrecked the man and his theory--but not the fervor he had started. Although Lowell would die discredited and delusional in 1916, the Mars frenzy spurred a nascent literary genre called science fiction, and the world's sense of its place in the universe would never be the same. Today, the red planet maintains its grip on the public's imagination. Many see Mars as civilization's destiny--the first step toward our becoming an interplanetary species--but, as David Baron demonstrates, this tendency to project our hopes onto the world next door is hardly new. The Martians is a scintillating and necessary reminder that while we look to Mars for answers, what we often find are mirrors of ourselves. 
Baldwin: A Love Story
by Nicholas Boggs

Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer’s personal relationships shaped his life and work. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material and original research and interviews, this spellbinding book tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac, whose long-overlooked significance as Baldwin’s last great love is explored in these pages for the first time.

Nicholas Boggs shows how Baldwin drew on all the complex forces within these relationships—geographical, cultural, political, artistic, and erotic— and alchemized them into novels, essays, and plays that speak truth to power and had an indelible impact on the civil rights movement and on Black and queer literary history. Richly immersive, Baldwin: A Love Story follows the writer’s creative journey between Harlem, Paris, Switzerland, the southern United States, Istanbul, Africa, the South of France, and beyond. In so doing, it magnifies our understanding of the public and private lives of one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, whose contributions only continue to grow in influence.
Could Should Might Don't: How We Think About the Future
by Nick Foster

You might not know the name Nick Foster, but after just a moment of googling you'll realize he's been guiding the missions of companies that have been shaping the world you live in. From Sony, Nokia, and Dyson to Google itself, where he was the head of design at Google X, Foster has been at the forefront of innovation for over twenty-five years, but his name might be unfamiliar because until this point, he's been hidden behind countless NDAs. Could Should Might Don't is Foster's public debut, the first time this much-sought-after designer is free to share his perspectives, explore how other people approach the future, and suggest how we can all improve our thinking about what might lie ahead. But this isn't a book filled with predictions and prophecies, and it makes no assertions about what the future will hold. It's a book that unpacks how we think about the future. Foster has identified Could, Should, Might, and Don't as the four primary mindsets we all adopt when thinking about what's over the horizon, but he doesn't advocate for any one of them. Instead, he explores how humanity has grappled with the concept of the future throughout history, tracing the emergence of distinct schools of thought and exploring the virtues, blind spots, and inevitable shortcomings of each. The book is, in some ways, about the history of the future and the history of the different futures that we have imagined, designed, or projected for ourselves. But most of all, Could Should Might Don't is a no-nonsense appeal to every one of us--whether we're busy creating future ideas or trying to understand them--to radically improve how we think about the future, so we can improve what we leave behind for those who will follow.
Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State
by Caleb Gayle

In this paradigm-shattering work of American history, Caleb Gayle recounts the extraordinary tale of Edward McCabe, a Black man who championed the audacious idea to create a state within the Union governed by and for Black people--and the racism, politics, and greed that thwarted him. As the sweeping changes and brief glimpses of hope brought by the Civil War and Reconstruction began to wither, anger at the opportunities available to newly freed Black people were on the rise. As a result, both Blacks and whites searched for new places to settle. That was when Edward McCabe, a Black businessman and a rising political star in the American West, set in motion his plans to found a state within the Union for Black people to live in and govern. His chosen site: Oklahoma, a place that the U.S. government had deeded to Indigenous people in the 1830s when it forced thousands of them to leave their homes under Indian Removal, which became known as the Trail of Tears. McCabe lobbied politicians in Washington, D.C., Kansas, and elsewhere as he exhorted Black people to move to Oklahoma to achieve their dreams of self-determination and land ownership. His rising profile as a leader and spokesman for Black people as well as his willingness to confront white politicians led him to become known as Black Moses. And like his biblical counterpart, McCabe nearly made it to the promised land but was ultimately foiled by politics, business interests, and the growing ambitions of white settlers who also wanted the land.
Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler
by Susana M. Morris

As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity--our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. Her fiction charts the rise and fall of the American project-- the nation's transformation from a provincial backwater to a capitalist juggernaut--made possible by chattel slavery--to a bloated imperialist superpower on the verge of implosion. In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler's story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her life: the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women's liberation, queer rights, Reaganomics. Morris reveals how these influences profoundly impacted Butler's personal and intellectual trajectory and shaped the ideas central to her writing. Her cautionary tales warn us about succumbing to fascism, gender-based violence, and climate chaos while offering alternate paradigms to religion, family, and understanding our relationships to ourselves. Butler envisioned futures with Black women at the center, raising our awareness of how those who are often dismissed have the knowledge to shift the landscape of our world. But her characters are no magical martyrs, they are tough, flawed, intelligent, and complicated, a reflection of Butler's stories.
Hotshot : A Life on Fire
by River Selby

From 2000 to 2010, River Selby was a wildland firefighter whose given name was Anastasia. This is a memoir of that time in their life--of Ana, the struggles she encountered, and the constraints of what it means to be female-bodied in a male-dominated industry. An illuminating debut from a fierce new voice, Hotshot is a timely reckoning with both the personal and environmental dangers of wildland firefighting. By the time they were nineteen, Selby had been homeless, addicted to drugs, and sexually assaulted more than once. In a last-ditch effort to find direction, they applied to be a wildland firefighter. Two years later, they joined an elite class of specially trained wildland firefighters known as hotshots. Over the course of five fire seasons, Selby delves into the world of the people--almost entirely men--who risk their lives to fight and sometimes prevent wildfires. Simultaneously hyper visible and invisible, Selby navigated an odd mix of camaraderie and rampant sexism on the job and, when they challenged it, a violent closing of ranks that excluded them from the work they'd come to love. Drawing on years of firsthand experience on the frontlines of fire and years of research, Selby examines how the collision of fire suppression policy, colonization, and climate change has led to fire seasons of unprecedented duration and severity. A work of rare intimacy, Hotshot provides new insight into fire, the people who fight it, and the diversity of ecosystems dependent on this elemental force.
Semi-Well-Adjusted Despite Literally Everything: A Memoir
by Alyson Stoner

Actor-dancer Alyson Stoner's revelatory and incisive memoir--from family violence and betrayal, to eating disorders and religious trauma--may begin in Hollywood, but its chilling relatability will resonate with anyone navigating identity, privacy, purpose, and mental health in a digital age. Raised on soundstages and studio lots from the time they were six, shuffling between auditions for Disney Channel, Cheaper by the Dozen, or a Missy Elliott music video, Alyson experienced their defining moments of childhood inside the bizarre fishbowl of Hollywood. From being eight with an 80-hour work week, differentiating fan inquiries from kidnapping plots, and TV execs telling them they're "not anorexic enough" to stop working and get help, they struggled to find stability and sanity in a chaotic world. In Semi-Well-Adjusted Despite Literally Everything, Alyson shares their powerful story for the first time, detailing a turbulent home life with addict parents, harrowing accounts from rehab, the messy process of discovering their sexuality in church, rebuilding a life after an early professional peak, and charting a path of self-discovery and advocacy. With striking introspection, Alyson connects the dots across the entertainment industry ecosystem, child development, and media culture, exposing the "toddler to trainwreck pipeline" of child stars and sparking timely conversations about success and society's enchantment with fame. Bold, entertaining, warm, and galvanizing all at once, Semi-Well-Adjusted Despite Literally Everything is more than a personal memoir: it's a beacon for industry reform, a roadmap for breaking the bonds of generational trauma, and a testament to the freedom and strength that come from finally trusting your own voice and power.
A Truce That is Not Peace
by Miriam Toews

“Why do you write?” the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews-all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer-surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister's suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy. Marking the first time Toews has written her own life in nonfiction, A Truce That Is Not Peace explores the uneasy pact a writer makes with memory. Wildly inventive yet masterfully controlled; slyly casual yet momentous; wrenching and joyful; hilarious and humane-this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her world and inventing an astonishing new literary form to contain it.
Washington-Centerville Public Library Centerville Library
111 W. Spring Valley Rd
Centerville, OH 45458
(937) 433-8091
Woodbourne Library
6060 Far Hills Ave
Centerville, OH 45459
(937) 435-3700
Creativity Commons
895 Miamisburg Centerville Rd
Centerville, OH 45459
(937) 610-4425