"Annabelle Blake fully expects sixth grade to be the same as every other year: same teachers, same classmates, same, same, same. So no one is more shocked when the first day of school delivers a big surprise: a new kid named Bailey who has a cute smile and nice hands (how can someone even have nice hands!?). It turns out, sixth grade is going to be anything but the same. And when her father reveals that he and Bailey have something big-- and surprising-- in common, Annabelle begins to realize how labels she thought were fixed-- same, different, boy, girl, gay, straight, and even fruit and vegetable-- aren't so clear-cut after all."--

The oral history of a renowned Czech writer, whose optimism and faith in people survived grueling experiences under authoritarian regimes. Heda Margolius Kovály (1919-2010) was a renowned Czech writer and translator born to Jewish parents. Her bestselling memoir, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968 has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Her crime novel Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street --based on her own experiences living under Stalinist oppression--was named an NPR Best Book in 2015. In the tradition of Studs Terkel, Hitler, Stalin and I is based on interviews between Kovály and award-winning filmmaker Helena Trestíková. In it, Kovály recounts her family history in Czechoslovakia, starving in the deprivations of Lodz Ghetto, how she miraculously left Auschwitz, fled from a death march, failed to find sanctuary amongst former friends in Prague as a concentration camp escapee, and participated in the liberation of Prague. Later under Communist rule, she suffered extreme social isolation as a pariah after her first husband Rudolf Margolius was unjustly accused in the infamous Slánsky Trial and executed for treason. Remarkably, Kovály, exiled in the United States after the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, only had love for her country and continued to believe in its people. She returned to Prague in 1996. Heda had an enormous talent for expressing herself. She spoke with precision and was descriptive and witty in places. I admired her attitude and composure, even after she had such extremely difficult experiences. Nazism and Communism afflicted Heda's life directly with maximum intensity. Nevertheless, she remained an optimist. Helena Trestíková has made over fifty documentary films. Hitler, Stalin and I has garnered several awards in the Czech Republic and Japan.

"The Mexican Night" is the first of several travel journals, to be published over the next few years, which Ferlinghetti originally envisioned under the title of "Writing Across the Landscape." It is considerably more than a travel book, including as it does much pure prose-poetry, new poems, and drawings taken from the author's notebooks. This book is not only personal but political, white at times it would seem to be a kind of "travel novel" - with but one character - the wandering figure (somehow surrounded with solitude) of the poet himself. [From back cover]