Service Alert
CD service concludes July 31, 2025
CELA's audiobooks and magazines are available in Direct to Player and downloadable formats. We no longer mail out CDs. Please contact us for more information.
CELA's audiobooks and magazines are available in Direct to Player and downloadable formats. We no longer mail out CDs. Please contact us for more information.
Showing 1 - 4 of 4 items
By Avery Flynn. 2023
Sometimes you just need to bang it out ... Shy paleontologist Thea Pope just wants to get through her sister's…
'80s-themed monstrosity of a TV reality-show wedding so she can get to her summer field work. The only problem? Her sister has turned into the ultimate bridezilla—as in pink parasols, organza hats, forcing people to shave and dye their hair levels of over-the-top, it's-my-day antics—all while on location in a place literally called hell that reeks of sulfur and lost hopes. The only thing that can make it worse is when her sister declares that she never even wanted Thea in the wedding at all but that the producers insisted. Ouch doesn't begin to express how much it hurts that her own sister didn't even want her to be at her wedding. There's only one thing Thea can do after her sister finally pushes her too far—she picks the one man at the wedding her sister cannot stand—the groom's brother, Kade St. James—and has sex with him. Is it petty revenge that she'll be rubbing in her sister's face from now until eternity? Absolutely. Still, it seems like a great idea at the time, and really what could go wrong? Pretty much everything it turns outBy Ann Patchett. 2023
In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of…
America's finest writers. "Patchett leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature." —The Guardian In the spring of 2020, Lara's three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew. Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working todayBy Jenny Laden. 2023
In this heartbreaking multimedia debut—filled with drawings, poems, and journal entries—author Jenny Laden draws on her own experience to create…
a story of grief and transcendence, perfect for fans of Francesca Zappia and Jennifer Niven. Danielle Silver is a Philadelphia high school senior at the dawn of the '90s. Ever since her parents split up, she has known her father was gay, but she never expected to be hit with the bombshell that he is HIV positive. As he sickens, and AIDS starts to claim the lives of his friends, Danielle searches for silver linings while trying to balance paralyzing fear, grief, her social life, and schoolwork—capturing all the feelings as adolescence and some hard facts collideBy Jesse Q. Sutanto. 2023
Vera Wong is a lonely little old lady—ah, lady of a certain age—who lives above her forgotten tea shop in…
the middle of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Despite living alone, Vera is not needy, oh no. She likes nothing more than sipping on a good cup of Wulong and doing some healthy detective work on the Internet about what her Gen-Z son is up to. Then one morning, Vera trudges downstairs to find a curious thing—a dead man in the middle of her tea shop. In his outstretched hand, a flash drive. Vera doesn’t know what comes over her, but after calling the cops like any good citizen would, she sort of . . . swipes the flash drive from the body and tucks it safely into the pocket of her apron. Why? Because Vera is sure she would do a better job than the police possibly could, because nobody sniffs out a wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands. Vera knows the killer will be back for the flash drive; all she has to do is watch the increasing number of customers at her shop and figure out which one among them is the killer. What Vera does not expect is to form friendships with her customers and start to care for each and every one of them. As a protective mother hen, will she end up having to give one of her newfound chicks to the police?