Two very gifted writers read from their new books. Both are available in paperback.

About Joanna:

Rakoff's mesmerizing debut opens with a wedding and closes with a funeral. In between, the novel provides a pitch perfect portrait of the generation that came of age in the 1990s. If this smart, thoroughly absorbing novel recalls The Group, it also recalls the seminal work of Anne Beattie in the seventies and Jay McInerney in the eighties. Like them, Rakoff captures a certain time and place with heartbreaking clarity.
-- Booklist (starred)

Joanna Smith Rakoff has written for The New York Times, Time Out New York, The Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Vogue, O: The Oprah Magazine, and other publications. She holds a B.A. from Oberlin College; an M.A. from University College, London; and an M.F.A. from Columbia University. She lives in New York with her husband and son.

About Justin:

"This spare, sharp book - Taylor's debut collection - documents a deep authority on the unavoidable confusion of being young, disaffected and human ... the most affecting stories in Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever are as unpredictable as a careening drunk. They leave us with the heavy residue of an unsettling strangeness, and a new voice that readers - and writers, too - might be seeking out for decades to come."

The Fidelco Guide dog Foundation is New England's only guide dog school and is dedicated to promoting increased independence for men and women who are blind by providing them with the highest quality German shepherd guide dogs possible. Fidelco's "breed within a breed" utilizes and enhances the German shepherd's superior traits and adapts them for correctly guiding human partners and keeping them safe. The organization pioneered the In-community Placement program in the U.S.; which allows clients to be trained to use their guide dogs in their own homes, workplaces, and neighborhoods instead of traveling to a guide dog school for training. 

The Beautiful Planet: Ours To Lose is an impassioned anit-war cartoon book by one of America's foremost illustrators. Marc Simont's drawings, taken from five decades of editorial cartooning, capture the essence of a brooding Nixon, a smiling Reagan, a bland Bush One, and a dumbfounded Bush Two as they prosecute their wars. Simont's fierce portrayals of the Military-Industrial Complex are intimately linked to his passionate indignity on behalf of all civilians, soldiers, and prisoners who have suffered. Continually struck by the majesty of the planet as it floats in space like a jewel, Simont asks, will it survive?
 
Born in Paris in 1915 to Catalonian parents, Marc Simont spent his childhood in France, Spain and the United States, where he settled in 1934. After serving time in the U.S. Army during World War II, Simont went on to illustrate over a hundred books working with such diverse authors as Margaret Wise Brown, Red Smith, and James Thurber.  Simont received the Caldecott Medal in 1957 for his illustrations to A Tree is Nice by Janice May Udry and a Caldecott Honor in 1950 for The Happy Day by Ruth Krauss.
 
He is the author/illustrator of seven books, most recently The Stray Dog (2001), which won a Caldecott Honor, was chosen by New York Times as one of the ten best illustrated books of the year, became an ALA Notable Children's Book and received the Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book Award.

Internationally acclaimed for its grace, humor and beauty, Marc Simont's art is in collections as far afield as the Kijo Picture Book Museum in Japan.  He was chosen as the 1997 Illustrator of the Year in his native Catalonia and received the Hunter College James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism in 2008.