Horseheads Free Library Closed Tuesday April 1, 2025

The Horseheads Free Library will be closed Tuesday April 1st due to a water shut off as the Village of Horseheads will be repairing a water leak in our neighborhood. 

Upcoming Events

This event is in the "Babies & Toddlers" group.
This event is in the "Children" group.
This event is in the "Tweens" group.
This event is in the "Teens" group.
This event is in the "Adults" group.
This event is in the "Everyone" group.

Create Kindness!

1:30pm - 2:00pm
Babies & Toddlers, Children, Tweens, Teens, Adults, Everyone
This event is in the "Babies & Toddlers" group.
This event is in the "Children" group.

Horseheads Take N Make

All Day 4/1 - 4/30
Babies & Toddlers, Children

New & Noteworthy

From the Blog

2023 is a big year for the Van Etten Library. Since 1923, Van Etten residents have been receiving library services, starting with a simple book station in a neighboring town, to the current location on Gee Street.

Staff Recommendations

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The One Device

The secret history of the invention that changed everything-and became the most profitable product in the world.
NATIONAL BESTSELLERShortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award
One of the Best Business Books of 2016 - CNBC, Bloomberg, 1-800-CEO-Read
"The One Device is a tour de force, with a fast-paced edge and heaps of analytical insight." -Ashlee Vance, New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk

"A stunning book. You will never look at your iPhone the same way again." -Dan Lyons, New York Times bestselling author of Disrupted
Odds are that as you read this, an iPhone is within reach. But before Steve Jobs introduced us to "the one device," as he called it, a cell phone was merely what you used to make calls on the go.
How did the iPhone transform our world and turn Apple into the most valuable company ever? Veteran technology journalist Brian Merchant reveals the inside story you won't hear from Cupertino-based on his exclusive interviews with the engineers, inventors, and developers who guided every stage of the iPhone's creation.
This deep dive takes you from inside One Infinite Loop to 19th century France to WWII America, from the driest place on earth to a Kenyan pit of toxic e-waste, and even deep inside Shenzhen's notorious "suicide factories." It's a firsthand look at how the cutting-edge tech that makes the world work-touch screens, motion trackers, and even AI-made their way into our pockets.
The One Device is a roadmap for design and engineering genius, an anthropology of the modern age, and an unprecedented view into one of the most secretive companies in history. This is the untold account, ten years in the making, of the device that changed everything.
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The Happy Writer

From #1 New York Times bestselling author and the creator and host of the popular podcast, The Happy Writer, comes the ultimate guide to writing with less stress and more JOY.

If you aren’t suffering, you aren’t creating. Right? 

Wrong! 

Writing can and should be joyful, fulfilling... even fun! Applicable to writers in all genres and disciplines—from screenwriters to novelists, journalists to picture book authors, aspiring to many-times published—The Happy Writer is a heartfelt and optimistic guide that will show you the way to a happier writing journey.

Part craft guide, part writing coach, and part cheerleader, this book offers useful advice on a slew of common writing and publishing ailments, such as how to end procrastination, how to build a social media platform that reflects your personality, how to get your imagination to overflow with new ideas, how to listen to your intuition when receiving a critique on your work, how to overcome impostor syndrome, what to do when you’re stuck in the query trenches, and so much more.

No matter where a writer might be on their creative journey, Meyer encourages them to tap into their own personal sources of joy and to celebrate every milestone, all while confronting challenges (writer’s block! rejection! burnout!) with a reservoir of resources for every temperament, budget, and career.

Known in writers’ circles as a generous mentor, Meyer shares stories from her own writing path to help every writer discover the ultimate joys of living their best writing life.

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Cursed Princess Club Volume Three

Just because you’re cursed doesn’t mean you’re not special.

Gwendolyn, the youngest of the king’s three daughters, is living proof that princesses don’t always have it all. She isn’t like a typical fairy-tale princess, or other princesses in the Pastel Kingdom. Gwendolyn, with her big heart and love of baking, isn’t particularly attractive. Unlike her sisters who have woodland creatures do their hair and makeup, or have flowers blossom wherever they sleep, Gwendolyn is a bit . . . different.

When her father proposes marriage for her and her sisters to make an alliance with the Plaid Kingdom, it breaks Gwendolyn’s heart to hear that Prince Frederick thinks she’s “really ugly.” Overwhelmed and ashamed, she runs away into the forest and encounters the twisted world of the Cursed Princess Club, where her life will never be the same.

The Cursed Princess Club are a ragtag band of outcasts, misfits and cursed princesses who have created an incredible friendship circle. It is among these friends where Gwendolyn learns to embrace her uniqueness and find her people.

In this third book of the series, collecting episodes 62-77 of the hit WEBTOON series, Gwen sits for her portrait painting, we realize Frederick is more complicated than we thought as his feelings for Gwen evolve, and we meet the mysterious Whitney of the Monochrome Kingdom, who is more than meets the eye!.

This volume includes 4 bonus shorts with irreverent retellings of classic fairytales!

Bonus 1 - Maria and Blaine in . . . Little Red Riding Hood
Bonus 2 - Lorena and Lance in . . . Jack and the Beanstalk
Bonus 3 - Gwendolyn and Frederick in . . . Hansel and Gretel
Bonus 4 - Frederick’s Favorite Story (The Man in the Hole and the Angel)

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(S)Kin

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection!

From award-winning, New York Times bestselling author Ibi Zoboi comes her groundbreaking contemporary fantasy debut--a novel in verse based on Caribbean folklore--about the power of inherited magic and the price we must pay to live the life we yearn for.

"Our new home with its

thick walls and locked doors

wants me to stay trapped in my skin--

but I am fury and flame."

Fifteen-year-old Marisol is the daughter of a soucouyant. Every new moon, she sheds her skin like the many women before her, shifting into a fireball witch who must fly into the night and slowly sip from the lives of others to sustain her own. But Brooklyn is no place for fireball witches with all its bright lights, shut windows, and bolt-locked doors.... While Marisol hoped they would leave their old traditions behind when they emigrated from the islands, she knows this will never happen while she remains ensnared by the one person who keeps her chained to her magical past--her mother.

Seventeen-year-old Genevieve is the daughter of a college professor and a newly minted older half sister of twins. Her worsening skin condition and the babies' constant wailing keep her up at night, when she stares at the dark sky with a deep longing to inhale it all. She hopes to quench the hunger that gnaws at her, one that seems to reach for some memory of her estranged mother. When a new nanny arrives to help with the twins, a family secret connecting her to Marisol is revealed, and Gen begins to find answers to questions she hasn't even thought to ask.

But the girls soon discover that the very skin keeping their flames locked beneath the surface may be more explosive to the relationships around them than any ancient magic.

White title text on a blue green background with a parrot wing appearing to flutter

The Parrot and the Igloo

The New York Times best-selling author explores how “anti-science” became so virulent in American life—through a history of climate denial and its consequences. 
 

In 1956, the New York Times prophesied that once global warming really kicked in, we could see parrots in the Antarctic. In 2010, when science deniers had control of the climate story, Senator James Inhofe and his family built an igloo on the Washington Mall and plunked a sign on top: AL GORE'S NEW HOME: HONK IF YOU ? CLIMATE CHANGE. In The Parrot and the Igloo, best-selling author David Lipsky tells the astonishing story of how we moved from one extreme (the correct one) to the other.

With narrative sweep and a superb eye for character, Lipsky unfolds the dramatic narrative of the long, strange march of climate science. The story begins with a tale of three inventors—Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla—who made our technological world, not knowing what they had set into motion. Then there are the scientists who sounded the alarm once they identified carbon dioxide as the culprit of our warming planet. And we meet the hucksters, zealots, and crackpots who lied about that science and misled the public in ever more outrageous ways. Lipsky masterfully traces the evolution of climate denial, exposing how it grew out of early efforts to build a network of untruth about products like aspirin and cigarettes.

Featuring an indelible cast of heroes and villains, mavericks and swindlers, The Parrot and the Igloo delivers a real-life tragicomedy—one that captures the extraordinary dance of science, money, and the American character.

19th Century illustration showing a school of fish on a reef

Sing Like Fish

A captivating exploration of how underwater animals tap into sound to survive, and a clarion call for humans to address the ways we invade these critical soundscapes—from an award-winning science writer

Sing Like Fish is that rare book that makes you see the world differently.”—Mark Kurlansky, New York Times bestselling author of Salt and Cod

LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION

For centuries, humans ignored sound in the “silent world” of the ocean, assuming that what we couldn’t perceive, didn’t exist. But we couldn’t have been more wrong. Marine scientists now have the technology to record and study the complex interplay of the myriad sounds in the sea. Finally, we can trace how sounds travel with the currents, bounce from the seafloor and surface, bend with the temperature and even saltiness; how sounds help marine life survive; and how human noise can transform entire marine ecosystems. 

In Sing Like Fish, award-winning science journalist Amorina Kingdon synthesizes historical discoveries with the latest scientific research in a clear and compelling portrait of this sonic undersea world. From plainfin midshipman fish, whose swim-bladder drumming is loud enough to keep houseboat-dwellers awake, to the syntax of whalesong; from the deafening crackle of snapping shrimp, to the seismic resonance of underwater earthquakes and volcanoes; sound plays a vital role in feeding, mating, parenting, navigating, and warning—even in animals that we never suspected of acoustic ability. 

Meanwhile, we jump in our motorboats and cruise ships, oblivious to the impact below us. Our lifestyle is fueled by oil in growling tankers and furnished by goods that travel in massive container ships. Our seas echo with human-made sound, but we are just learning of the repercussions of anthropogenic noise on the marine world’s delicate acoustic ecosystems—masking mating calls, chasing animals from their food, and even wounding creatures, from plankton to lobsters. 

With intimate and artful prose, Sing Like Fish tells a uniquely complete story of ocean animals’ submerged sounds, envisions a quieter future, and offers a profound new understanding of the world below the surface.