New and Upcoming Books from North Carolina Authors
Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty
Outside of a classic mystery novel, being surrounded by death doesn’t make you a charming amateur detective, it makes you a suspect and a social pariah. So when Mallory gets the opportunity to take refuge on a sentient space station, she thinks she has the solution. Surely the murders will stop if her only company is alien beings. But when the station agrees to allow additional human guests, Mallory knows the break from her peculiar reality is over. After the first Earth shuttle arrives, and aliens and humans alike begin to die, the station is thrown into peril.
Second Bride Down by Ginny Baird
Aspiring artist Misty Delaney is not about to let her parents’ beloved café go under. Not when she can just merge the company by entering a quick marriage of convenience. But her sisters aren’t having it. To make sure Misty gives finding love a chance, they post a “Marry me: Misty!” billboard outside town. Watching Misty field marriage proposals from strangers is a big cup of nope for café manager Lucas. He and Misty have been friends for years, but it’s time he step up and make his romantic feelings for her known. And what better way to start than by sending her unwanted suitors packing with an announcement that she’s already in a relationship. With him.
Monster Kids : How Pokémon Taught a Generation to Catch Them All by Daniel Dockery
More than just a simple journey through the history of Pokémon, Daniel Dockery offers an in-depth look at the franchise’s many branches of impact and influence. With dozens of firsthand interviews, Monster Kids covers its beginnings as a Japanese video game created to recapture one man's love of bug-collecting as a child before diving into the decisions and conditions that would ultimately lead to that game's global domination. With its continued growth as television shows, spin-off video games, blockbuster movies, trading cards, and toys, Pokémon is a unique and special brand that manages to continue to capture the attention and adoration of its eager fanbase 25 years after its initial release.
Prove It: Exactly How Modern Marketers Earn Trust by Melanie Deziel
In Prove It, StoryFuel founder Melanie Deziel shows you how to leverage every content marketing tool in the box to blast through doubt and win the case with your customers. Using real-world examples from trusted brands across dozens of industries, they’ll walk you step-by-step through the process of identifying and categorizing your business promises—even the ones you don’t realize you’re making—gathering the right evidence, and backing up each style of claim. You’ll learn how to apply strategies like corroboration, demonstration, and education to a marketing context to show—not tell!—the convenience of your offerings, your comparability with the competition, your connection to your community, your competence in your industry, and your commitment to your values. And you’ll discover the right format and platform to deliver each type of evidence to make sure your “jury of consumers” connects with your case.
Malice House by Megan Shepherd
Of all the things aspiring artist Haven Marbury expected to find while clearing out her late father’s remote seaside house, Bedtime Stories for Monsters was not on the list. This secret handwritten manuscript is disturbingly different from his Pulitzer-winning works: its interweaving short stories crawl with horrific monsters and enigmatic humans that exist somewhere between this world and the next. The stories unsettle but also entice Haven, practically compelling her to illustrate them while she stays in the house that her father warned her was haunted. Clearly just dementia whispering in his ear . . . right? But when a monstrous creature appears under Haven’s bed right as grisly deaths are reported in the nearby woods, she must race to uncover dark, otherworldly family secrets—completely rewriting everything she ever knew about herself in the process.
Soulbroken : A Guidebook for Your Journey Through Ambiguous Grief by Stephanie Sarazin
Grief isn't always the result of something finite, marking a death or complete end. Soul-shattering grief can also be activated by a dramatic shift in an important relationship, such as a divorce or significant breakup, a life-changing medical diagnosis, or a broken connection with an addicted child. How do we grieve people who are still alive, but no longer who they once were to us? Most people will experience this type of traumatic event over the course of their lifetime, yet the complications of these situations often leave grievers feeling alienated or ashamed. Soulbroken is a guidebook that recognizes this often-misunderstood grief, validates the unique challenges posed by its ambiguity, and champions tools for healing.
The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop by Jonathan Abrams
The music that would come to be known as hip-hop was born at a party in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. Now, fifty years later, it’s the most popular music genre in America. Just as jazz did in the first half of the twentieth century, hip-hop and its groundbreaking DJs and artists—nearly all of them people of color from some of America’s most overlooked communities—pushed the boundaries of music to new frontiers, while transfixing the country’s youth and reshaping fashion, art, and even language. And yet, the stories of many hip-hop pioneers and their individual contributions in the pre-Internet days of mixtapes and word of mouth are rarely heard—and some are at risk of being lost forever. Now, in The Come Up, the New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Abrams offers the most comprehensive account so far of hip-hop’s rise, a multi-decade chronicle told in the voices of the people who made it happen.
