Celebrating Ohio Books and Authors Awards

With grace, acuity, and wry compassion, in Abundance, Amit Majmudar has written anew the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignant, the tangled ties between generations. When Mala and Ronak learn that their mother has only a few months to live, they are reluctantly pulled back into the Midwestern world of their Indian immigrant parents. In the brief time between diagnosis and deterioration, busy, efficient Mala commits to mastering her mother's slow art of Indian cooking. Perfecting the raita and the rotli, the two begin not only to work together but also to talk, confronting their deepest divisions and failures. But when Ronak hits upon the idea of selling their cooking-as-healing experience as a high-concept memoir, immigrant and native-born must find a way to cross this last divide.

P. L. Gaus's Blood of the Prodigal, a mystery in the tradition of Tony Hillerman, is back in a new edition, including an exclusive interview with the author, discussion questions for reading groups, and a detailed map and driving guide to Holmes County, Ohio, with everything one needs to visit the iconic scenes depicted in the story. In Holmes County, Ohio--home to the largest Amish and Mennonite settlements in the world--mystery and foreboding lurk in the quiet Old Order Amish community led by Bishop Eli Miller.The illusion of peace is shattered one early morning when a young Amish boy goes missing--abducted from his home and from Bishop Miller's care. At first, the bishop suspects the child's father, who was exiled from the Old Order ten years ago, but a murder soon casts doubt on the bishop's theory. With a strong distrust of law enforcement and the modern "English" ways, the bishop must put his faith in an unlikely partnership with Professor Michael Branden before it's too late. With the help of the peaceful pastor Cal Troyer and the reckless Sheriff Bruce Robertson, Branden plunges headlong into the closed culture to unravel the mystery of the missing child and uncover truths many would prefer to leave undisturbed.

Mary Doria Russell, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Sparrow, returns with Epitaph. An American Iliad, this richly detailed and meticulously researched historical novel continues the story she began in Doc, following Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday to Tombstone, Arizona, and to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. A deeply divided nation. Vicious politics. A shamelessly partisan media. A president loathed by half the populace. Smuggling and gang warfare along the Mexican border. Armed citizens willing to stand their ground and take law into their own hands. . . .  That was America in 1881. All those forces came to bear on the afternoon of October 26 when Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers faced off against the Clantons and the McLaurys in Tombstone, Arizona. It should have been a simple misdemeanor arrest. Thirty seconds and thirty bullets later, three officers were wounded and three citizens lay dead in the dirt. Wyatt Earp was the last man standing, the only one unscathed. The lies began before the smoke cleared, but the gunfight at the O.K. Corral would soon become central to American beliefs about the Old West. Epitaph tells Wyatt's real story, unearthing the Homeric tragedy buried under 130 years of mythology, misrepresentation, and sheer indifference to fact. Epic and intimate, this novel gives voice to the real men and women whose lives were changed forever by those fatal thirty seconds in Tombstone. At its heart is the woman behind the myth: Josephine Sarah Marcus, who loved Wyatt Earp for forty-nine years and who carefully chipped away at the truth until she had crafted the heroic legend that would become the epitaph her husband deserved.

Winner of the Ohioana Library's 2008 Ohio Legacy Citation 2014-2015 Choose to Read Ohio selection "A good place to be from." That's how some people might characterize the Buckeye State. The writings in Good Roots: Writers Reflect on Growing Up in Ohio, are testimony to the truth of that statement. By prominent writers such as P. J. O'Rourke, Susan Orlean, and Alix Kates Shulman, these contributions are alternately nostalgic, irreverent, and sincere, and offer us a personal sense of place. Their childhoods are as varied as their work. Some were raised in urban Cleveland, Akron, and Cincinnati, others in the small Ohio towns that typify the Midwest, and still others in the countryside. Yet what they have to tell us about their roots resonates with a shared heritage, a sense of what is universal and enduring about growing up in the heartland. Their collective résumé reads like a literary Who's Who, including four Pulitzer Prizes, several National Book Awards, and many prestigious fellowships. Good Roots is also plain good reading from some of our country's most accomplished contemporary writers. Contributors include: Jill Bialosky, Dan Cryer, Michael Dirda, Elizabeth Dodd, Anthony Doerr, Rita Dove, Ian Frazier, Dale Keiger, Andrea Louie, Kathleen Dean Moore, Mary Oliver, Susan Orlean, P. J. O'Rourke, Julie Salamon, Scott Russell Sanders, Alix Kates Shulman, Jeffery Smith, James Toedtman, and Mark Winegardner.

Lost Cleveland is the latest in the series from Pavilion Books that traces the cherished places in a city that time, progress and fashion swept aside before the National Register of Historic Places could save them from the wrecker's ball. As well as celebrating forgotten architectural treasures, Lost Cleveland looks at buildings that have changed use, vanished under a wave of new construction or been drastically transformed.   Beautiful archival photographs and informative text allows the reader to take a nostalgic journey back in time to visit some of the lost treasures that the city let slip through its grasp. Organised chronologically, starting with the earliest losses and ending with the latest, the book features much-loved Cleveland institutions that have been consigned to history.    Losses include: City Hall, Diebolt Brewing Co., Luna Park, Sheriff Street Market, Hotel Winton, League Park, Union Depot, Hotel Allerton, Leo's Casino, Cleveland Arena, Bond Store, The Hippodrome, Cuyahoga and Williamson buildings, Record Rendezvous, Standard Theatre, Hough Bakery, Cleveland Municipal Stadium, Memphis Drive-In, Parmatown Mall.

A dazzling new collection by the former Poet Laureate of the United States. In these brilliant poems, Rita Dove treats us to a panoply of human endeavor, shot through with the electrifying jazz of her lyric elegance. From the opening sequence, "Cameos", to the civil rights struggle of the final sequence, she explores the intersection of individual fate and history.

This is the graphic history of the 2001 Cincinnati riots, told for the first time from the perspective of the participants. When Timothy Thomas, a 19-year-old black man, was fatally shot by police, the city broke out into nonviolent civil disobedience that was met with further police violence. This was the first major uprising of the 21st Century, matched only by the LA riots a decade before and the protests in Ferguson over a decade later. Author and illustrator Dan Mendez Moore was 17 at the time when he participated in the six days of protests.

In time for the 75th anniversary of the Man of Steel, comes the first comprehensive literary biography of Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, creators of the DC Comics superhero Superman and the inspiration for Michael Chabon's Kavalier and Clay Drawing on ten years of research in the trenches of Cleveland libraries, boarded-up high schools, and secret, private collections, and a love of comic books, Brad Ricca's Super Boys is the first ever full biography about Superman's creators. Among scores of new discoveries, the book reveals the first stories and pictures ever published by the two, where the first Superman story really came from, the real inspiration for Lois Lane, the template for Superman's costume, and much, much more. Super Boys also tracks the boys' unknown, often mysterious lives after they left Superman, including Siegel's secret work during World War II and never-before-seen work from Shuster. Super Boys explains, finally, what exactly happened with the infamous check for $130 that pulled Superman away from his creators--and gave control of the character to the publisher. Ricca also uncovers the true nature of Jerry's father's death, a crime that has always remained a mystery. Super Boys is the story of a long friendship between boys who grew to be men and the standard that would be impossible for both of them to live up to.