By Johnathan Longo, Circulation Support Staff, Quinn Library

During this difficult and stressful time, it is important to find ways to vary the days. This is a perfect opportunity to check out an e-book from the Fordham Libraries. Listed below are some great options from several “best of” lists over the last few years. You can start reading right now! So take a break from writing that paper, turn off Netflix, and spend some time with a good book.

To find e-books, visit the library homepage and search for an item using the library catalog. To limit your results to e-books, make sure to use the advanced search function, and change the “Library” location to “Online Resources.” When you find a book you like, simply click on the URL and you can begin reading. All of Fordham’s electronic holdings can be accessed remotely by Fordham community members by entering your Fordham AccessIT ID username and password when prompted.

Need help searching for e-books? Follow this step-by-step guide or watch a quick tutorial video.

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The Revisioners (2019)
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

“In 1925, Josephine is the proud owner of a thriving farm. As a child, she channeled otherworldly power to free herself from slavery. Now, her new neighbor, a white woman named Charlotte, seeks her company, and an uneasy friendship grows between them. But Charlotte has also sought solace in the Ku Klux Klan, a relationship that jeopardizes Josephine’s family.

Nearly one hundred years later, Josephine’s descendant, Ava, is a single mother who has just lost her job. She moves in with her white grandmother Martha, a wealthy but lonely woman who pays her grandchild to be her companion. But Martha’s behavior soon becomes erratic, then even threatening, and Ava must escape before her story and Josephine’s converge.” – Read more on Goodreads

There There (2019)
Tommy Orange

“Tommy Orange’s wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle’s death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform a traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American–grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism. Hailed as an instant classic, there is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable.” – Read more on Goodreads

Praise Song for the Butterfly (2018)
Bernice McFadden

“Abeo Kata lives a comfortable, happy life in West Africa as the privileged nine-year-old daughter of a government employee and stay-at-home mother. But when the Katas’ idyllic lifestyle takes a turn for the worse, Abeo’s father, following his mother’s advice, places her in a religious shrine, hoping that the sacrifice of his daughter will serve as religious atonement for the crimes of his ancestors. Unspeakable acts befall Abeo for the fifteen years she is enslaved within the shrine. When she is finally rescued, broken and battered, she must struggle to overcome her past, endure the revelation of family secrets, and learn to trust and love again.” – Read more on Goodreads

Terrarium: New and Selected Stories (2018)
Valerie Trueblood

“It’s hard to describe any of Trueblood’s stories as “typical.” She does not write about people from a single class, or caste, or geographical area. She has not written a single story emblematic of her work. She does not write stories fantastical or eccentric. Ordinary life, her stories may be saying, is fantastical enough. She is more like Babel than Chekhov. In all her writing, it’s clear that Trueblood believes that the short story can carry both the lightest and heaviest of loads. Terrarium highlights the achievement of simply living, the stories within often unresolved but in a state of continuation, expansion. Trueblood’s stories aren’t merely about their subjects, they’re inside them.” – Read more on Goodreads

The Traitor’s Niche (2017)
Ismail Kadare

“At the heart of the Ottoman Empire, in the main square of Constantinople, a niche is carved into ancient stone. Here, the sultan displays the severed heads of his adversaries. People flock to see the latest head and gossip about the state of the empire: the province of Albania is demanding independence again, and the niche awaits a new trophy…

Tundj Hata, the imperial courier, is charged with transporting heads to the capital – a task he relishes and performs with fervour. But as he travels through obscure and impoverished territories, he makes money from illicit side-shows, offering villagers the spectacle of death. The head of the rebellious Albanian governor would fetch a very high price.” – Read more on Goodreads

Neon in Daylight (2018)
Hermione Hoby

“New York City in 2012, the sweltering summer before Hurricane Sandy hits. Kate, a young woman newly arrived from England, is staying in a Manhattan apartment while she tries to figure out her future. She has two unfortunate responsibilities during her time in America: to make regular Skype calls to her miserable boyfriend back home, and to cat-sit an indifferent feline named Joni Mitchell.

The city has other plans for her. In New York’s parks and bodegas, its galleries and performance spaces, its bars and clubs crowded with bodies, Kate encounters two strangers who will transform her stay: Bill, a charismatic but embittered writer made famous by the movie version of his only novel; and Inez, his daughter, a recent high school graduate who supplements her Bushwick café salary by enacting the fantasies of men she meets on Craigslist. Unmoored from her old life, Kate falls into an infatuation with both of them.” – Read more on Goodreads

Year of the Rat (2016)
Marc Anthony Richardson

“In Year of the Rat, an artist returns to the dystopian city of his birth to tend to his invalid mother only to find himself torn apart by memories and longings. Narrated by this nameless figure whose rants, reveries, and Rabelaisian escapades take him on a Dantesque descent into himself, the story follows him and his mother as they share a one-bedroom apartment over the course of a year.
Despite his mother’s precarious health, the lingering memories of a lost love, an incarcerated sibling, a repressed sexuality, and an anarchic inability to support himself, he pursues his dream of becoming an avant-garde artist. His prospects grow dim until a devastating death provides a painful and unforeseeable opportunity. With a voice that is poetic and profane, ethereal and irreverent, cyclical and succinct, he roams from vignette to vignette, creating a polyphonic patchwork quilt of a family portrait.” – Read more on Goodreads

Grace (2016)
Natashia Deón

“For a runaway slave in the 1840s south, life on the run can be just as dangerous as life under a sadistic Massa. That’s what fifteen-year-old Naomi learns after she escapes the brutal confines of life on an Alabama plantation. Striking out on her own, she takes refuge in a Georgia brothel run by a freewheeling, gun-toting Jewish madam named Cynthia. There, amidst a revolving door of gamblers, prostitutes, and drunks, Naomi falls into a star-crossed love affair with a smooth-talking white man named Jeremy who frequents the brothel’s dice tables all too often.

The product of this union is Josey, whose white skin and blonde hair mark her as different from the other slave children on the plantation. Having been taken in as an infant by a free slave named Charles, Josey has never known her mother, who was murdered at her birth. Grace is a sweeping, intergenerational saga featuring a group of outcast women during one of the most compelling eras in American history.” – Read more on Goodreads

The Road to Llorona Park (2016)
Christopher Carmona

“The Road to Llorona Park is a collection of short fiction about the changing world of la frontera/the borderlands of the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. The stories center around the current times when the political upheavals of Mexico began to [a]ffect people’s lives on both sides of the border.” – Read more on Goodreads

Here in Berlin (2017)
Cristina García

“Here in Berlin is a portrait of a city through snapshots, an excavation of the stories and ghosts of contemporary Berlin; its complex, troubled past still pulsing in the air as it was during the years of World War II. Critically acclaimed novelist Cristina Garcia brings the people of this famed city alive, their stories bristling with regret, desire, and longing.” – Read more on Goodreads

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We hope you find a new book you’ll love in our e-book collection. Remember, you can find e-books by searching the library catalog and limiting your results to ebooks by selecting “Online Resources” in the “Location” field. Enjoy, and be well!