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Choose Your Days
 | Children's Picture Book written and illustrated by Paula S. Wallace April 12, 2016 Cinco Puntos Press Paperback, $8.95. ISBN: 9781941026380 Old Bear gives baby Corky the keys to her days. "Choose your days," he whispers. "Make them sunny or grey." "This is the kind of book that will stick with readers, a meditation that they may not understand now but that, if digested, could have magical results." -- Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review “Titles like this that remind me what a miraculous gift books are; to all of us. Choose Your Days is absolute treasure.” — Holly Myers, Elliot Bay Books (Seattle WA) |
“Choose Your Days is a picture book about living and about passing over. The illustrations alone bring smiles and tears. With the words it is a breath taking book experience that lends perspective to the day and becomes mystically comforting as the calendar progresses. It is truly unforgettable because the message is universal and we each are unique.” — Connie Griffin, Bookworks (Albuquerque NM)
| Will little Corky in the striped socks—that dear of a girl, so quirky and curious—live her life and her dreams to the fullest? Wise Old Bear is her guide. When Corky is just a baby, Old Bear gives her the keys to her days, and he gives her a list of things to do and a list of dreams to dream. As she grows and grows, she learns to live in wonderment, craning her eyes toward the starry heavens, racing along through the budding trees, watching the seasons pass by. But when her days grow short, she asks Old Bear for a few more days. She wants to make sure she has played all the play, sang all the songs to sing, done all the work that was hers to do. Old Bear reminds Corky that she holds the key to her days. She must do what needs to be done, and dream what needs to be dreamed. When she is ready, she will not be afraid to open the door to wonder. Yes, Old Bear is a wise old bear. |  |
Paula Wallace is a working artist, maintaining a studio at the Hot Shops Art Center in Omaha, Nebraska. In addition to fine art, Paula has worked as an illustrator and muralist, a curator and an arts facilitator. She has been involved in liturgical and public art, interior design and privately commissioned work. Paula also collaborates regularly with other artists, writers and musicians. She studied formally at Iowa State University and the University of Iowa, in addition to a smattering of coursework in Ireland, Chicago, and elsewhere.
To inquire about inviting Paula to your store, contact John Byrd at johnbyrd@cincopuntos.com or 915-838-1625.
Trespassing Across America: One Man's Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike Across the Heartland
 | Nonfiction by Ken Ilgunas April 19, 2016 Blue Rider Press (Penguin Group/PRH) Hardcover, $27.00. ISBN: 9780399175480 Told with sincerity, humor, and wit, Trespassing Across America is both a fascinating account of one man’s remarkable journey along the Keystone XL pipeline including stretches through South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas, and a meditation on climate change, the beauty of the natural world, and the extremes to which we can push ourselves—both physically and mentally. “When Ken Ilgunas sets out to walk the proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to Texas, he knows he is heading into the heartland of the debate about climate change. What he can’t yet know is that, by confronting the challenges of this epic journey, he will emerge renewed, emboldened and filled with hope. An exhilarating adventure.” “You could argue that a cross-country pipeline is itself a trespass—through watersheds, communities, lives—so moments when various authorities challenge Ilgunas’s route work as tiny cosmic jokes. But this is not heavy book. Trespassing Across America is a delight.” |
It started as a far-fetched idea—to hike the entire length of the proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline. But in the months that followed, it grew into something more for Ken Ilgunas. It became an irresistible adventure—an opportunity not only to draw attention to global warming but also to explore his personal limits. So in September 2012, he strapped on his backpack, stuck out his thumb on the interstate just north of Denver, and hitchhiked 1,500 miles to the Alberta tar sands. Once there, he turned around and began his 1,700-mile trek to the XL’s endpoint on the Gulf Coast of Texas, a journey he would complete entirely on foot, walking almost exclusively across private property.
| Both a travel memoir and a reflection on climate change, Trespassing Across America is filled with colorful characters, harrowing physical trials, and strange encounters with the weather, terrain, and animals of America’s plains. A tribute to the Great Plains and the people who live there, Ilgunas’s memoir grapples with difficult questions about our place in the world: What is our personal responsibility as stewards of the land? As members of a rapidly warming planet? As mere individuals up against something as powerful as the fossil fuel industry? Ultimately, Trespassing Across America is a call to embrace the belief that a life lived not half-wild is a life only half-lived. |  |
If you'd like to invite Ken to your store, contact Christina Hu at chu@penguinrandomhouse.com
Ken Ilgunas has worked as an elementary school tutor, an Alaskan tour guide, and a backcountry ranger at the Gates of the Arctic National Park. He’s hitchhiked 10,000 miles across North America and paddled 1,000 miles across Ontario, Canada, in a birch bark canoe. Ilgunas has a B.A. from SUNY Buffalo in history and English, and an M.A. in liberal studies from Duke University. He is the author of the travel memoir Walden on Wheels, He currently lives in Benedict, Nebraska.
The Excellent Lombards
 | A Novel by Jane Hamilton Grand Central Publishing April 19, 2016 Hardcover, $26. ISBN: 9781455564224 From the internationally bestselling author of The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World, a heartfelt coming-of-age story that Karen Joy Fowler calls "a timeless classic...a book you will read and reread." "This is the book Jane Hamilton was born to write, and it is a book that thrilled me to read. THE EXCELLENT LOMBARDS is, in fact, excellent."— Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder "What a beautiful book. Its style is a wonder of accuracy--one enters its world in the fullest possible way. At the center is a girl whose fate is linked to the fate of her family's struggling farm, a place whose rhythms and details are miraculously evoked. Jane Hamilton, whose work I have long admired, has brought us again to the juncture of innocence and chance."— Joan Silber, author or Fools, Ideas of Heaven, and The Size of the World "THE EXCELLENT LOMBARDS is everything you could ask for in a coming-of-age novel--funny, insightful, observant, saturated with hope and melancholy."— Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children and The Leftovers |
| Mary Frances "Frankie" Lombard is fiercely in love with her family's sprawling apple orchard and the tangled web of family members who inhabit it. Content to spend her days planning capers with her brother William, competing with her brainy cousin Amanda, and expertly tending the orchard with her father, Frankie desires nothing more than for the rhythm of life to continue undisturbed. But she cannot help being haunted by the historical fact that some family members end up staying on the farm and others must leave. Change is inevitable, and threats of urbanization, disinheritance, and college applications shake the foundation of Frankie's roots. As Frankie is forced to shed her childhood fantasies and face the possibility of losing the idyllic future she had envisioned for her family, she must decide whether loving something means clinging tightly or letting go. Jane Hamilton lives, works, and writes in an orchard farmhouse in Wisconsin. Her novels have won numerous awards, including the PEN Hemingway Award for Fiction, and The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World were both chosen as Oprah Book Club picks and made into movies. Her short stories have appeared in Harper's Magazine. |  |
