What is the Popular Reading Collection?
The Popular Reading Collection (POP) was created to provide leisure reading materials for students, faculty, and staff at Santa Clara University. The collection includes both fiction and nonfiction titles and is located on the 1st floor near the Library Help Desk.
Failure to Comply
"How far would you go to have real freedom? To have true autonomy of both mind and body? The narrator of Failure to Comply wants self-determination at all costs, and they want you to know what it did, in fact, cost them. Their story is just a little hard to convey, as they're not entirely sure where, or even when, they are. Set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic future, this literary sci-fi novel presents a world where humans have been unshackled from disease and their basest desires thanks to the genetic engineering and societal supervision of RSCH--an inscrutable entity with unimaginable power (including the ability to literally shape reality). In RSCH's march toward perfecting the species, however, there are "deviants" (including LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities) who are fighting for a different vision of humanity. But where can they find hope when horror abounds, projected into their own bodies and minds by RSCH?"
Looking Glass Sound
| "In a lonely cottage overlooking the windswept Maine coast, Wilder Harlow begins the last book he will ever write. It is the story of a sun-drenched summer of his youth, and of the killer that stalked the small New England town. And of the terrible tragedy that forever bonded him with his friends Nat and Harper in unknowable ways. Decades later, Wilder returns to the town in an attempt to recount that summer's events in his memoirs. But as he writes, Wilder begins to fear his grip on the truth is fading...and that the book may be writing itself." |
Kukum
"A Quebec bestseller based on the life of Michel Jean's great-grandmother that delivers an empathetic portrait of drastic change in an Innu community. Kukum recounts the story of Almanda Siméon, an orphan raised by her aunt and uncle, who falls in love with a young Innu man despite their cultural differences and goes on to share her life with the Pekuakami Innu community. They accept her as one of their own: Almanda learns their language, how to live a nomadic existence, and begins to break down the barriers imposed on Indigenous women. Unfolding over the course of a century, the novel details the end of traditional ways of life for the Innu, as Almanda and her family face the loss of their land and confinement to reserves, and the enduring violence of residential schools. Kukum intimately expresses the importance of Innu ancestral values and the need for freedom nomadic peoples feel to this day."
I'm a Fool to Want You
"These dazzling stories from the internationally acclaimed author of Bad Girls erase the fine line between fantasy and reality, and establish her as an impressive literary voice. In the 1990s, a woman makes a living as a rental girlfriend for gay men. In a Harlem den, a travesti gets to know none other than Billie Holiday. A group of rugby players haggle over the price of a night of sex, and in return they get what they deserve. Nuns, grandmothers, children, and dogs are never what they seem... These 9 stories are inhabited by extravagant and profoundly human characters who face an ominous reality in ways as strange as themselves. I'm a Fool to Want You confirms that Camila Sosa Villada is one of the most powerful and original voices in contemporary literature. With her daring imagination, she can speak the language of a victim of the Mexican Inquisition, or create a dystopian universe where travestis take their revenge. With her unique style, Sosa Villada blends everyday life and magic, honoring the oral tradition with unparalleled fluency"
How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water
"From the beloved author of Dominicana, a GMA Book Club Pick and Women's Prize Finalist, an electrifying and indelible new novel about a woman who has lost everything but the chance to finally tell her story. Write this down: Cara Romero wants to work. Cara Romero thought she would work at the factory of little lamps for the rest of her life. But when, in her mid-50s, she loses her job in the Great Recession, she is forced back into the job market for the first time in decades. Set up with a job counselor, Cara instead begins to narrate the story of her life. Over the course of twelve sessions, Cara recounts her tempestuous love affairs, her alternately biting and loving relationships with her neighbor Lulu and her sister Angela, her struggles with debt, gentrification and loss, and, eventually, what really happened between her and her estranged son, Fernando. As Cara confronts her darkest secrets and regrets, we see a woman buffeted by life but still full of fight. Structurally inventive and emotionally kaleidoscopic, How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water is Angie Cruz's most ambitious and moving novel yet, and Cara is a heroine for the ages"
Held
| "A breathtaking and ineffable new novel from the author of the international best sellers Fugitive Pieces and The Winter Vault-a novel of love and loyalty across generations, at once sweeping and intimate. 1917. On a battlefield near the River Aisne, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls-a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night. 1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near a different river. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts with messages he cannot understand. So begins a narrative that spans four generations of connections and consequences that ignite and re-ignite as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, and transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later. Held is affecting and intensely beautiful, full of mystery, wisdom, and compassion, a novel by a writer at the height of her powers" |
A Great Disorder
"The culture wars are pitting us against each other with a vitriol that is fueling outright violence. Slotkin looks to the foundational myths that have shaped American identity--the Frontier, the Founding, the Civil War (Emancipation and Lost Cause), and Good War--and reveals how and why they are bringing the United States to the brink of an existential crisis"
Grand Strategies of the Left
"Brings the progressive worldview into conversation with security studies and foreign policy practice to show that durable security prioritizes peace, democracy, and equality. By conceiving of grand strategy as worldmaking, American progressives see multiple ways of using foreign policy to make a more just and stable world"--
"Why are progressives often critical of US foreign policy and the national security state? What would a statecraft that pulls ideas from the American left look like? Grand Strategies of the Left brings the progressive worldview into conversation with security studies and foreign policy practice. It argues that American progressives think durable security will only come by prioritizing the interconnected conditions of peace, democracy, and equality. By conceiving of grand strategy as worldmaking, progressives see multiple ways of using foreign policy to make a more just and stable world. US statecraft -- including defense policy -- should be retooled not for primacy, endless power accumulation, or a political status quo that privileges elites, but rather to shape the context that gives rise to perpetual insecurity. Progressive worldmaking has its own risks and dilemmas but expands how we imagine what the world is and could be."
Ghostroots
| "In this beguiling collection of twelve imaginative stories set in Lagos, Nigeria, 'Pemi Aguda dramatizes the tension between our yearning to be individuals and the ways we are haunted by what came before. In 'Manifest,' a woman sees the ghost of her abusive mother in her daughter's face. Shortly after, the daughter is overtaken by wicked and destructive impulses. In 'Breastmilk,' a wife forgives her husband for his infidelity. Months later, when she is unable to produce milk for her newborn, she blames herself for failing to uphold her mother's feminist values and doubts her fitness for motherhood. In 'Things Boys Do,' a trio of fathers finds something unnatural and unnerving about their infant sons. As their lives rapidly fall to pieces, they begin to fear that their sons are the cause of their troubles. And in '24, Alhaji Williams Street,' a teenage boy lives in the shadow of a mysterious disease that's killing the boys on his street. These and other stories in Ghostroots map emotional and physical worlds that lay bare the forces of family, myth, tradition, gender, and modernity in Nigerian society. Powered by a deep empathy and glinting with humor, they announce a major new literary talent." |
Fire Exit
"From the porch of his home, Charles Lamosway has watched the life he might have had unfold across the river on Maine's Penobscot Reservation. On the far bank, he caught brief moments of his neighbor Elizabeth's life--from the day she came home from the hospital to her early twenties. But there's always been something deeper and more dangerous than the river that divides him from her and the rest of the tribal community. It's the secret that Elizabeth is his daughter, a secret Charles is no longer willing to keep. Now, it's been weeks since he's seen Elizabeth, and Charles is worried. As he attempts to hold on to and care for what he can--his home and property; his alcoholic, quick-tempered, and bighearted friend Bobby; and his mother, Louise, who is slipping ever deeper into dementia--he becomes increasingly haunted by his past. Forced to confront a lost childhood on the reservation, a love affair cut short, and the death of his beloved stepfather, Fredrick, in a hunting accident--a death he and Louise are at odds over as to where to lay blame--Charles contends with questions he's long been afraid to ask. Is his secret about Elizabeth his to share? And would his daughter want to know the truth, even if it could cost her everything she's ever known?"
Undiscovered
| "An award-winning Peruvian journalist and writer delivers her stunning English breakthrough in an autobiographical novel that explores colonialism through one woman's family ties to both the colonized and colonizer. Alone in a museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener confronts her complicated family heritage. She is visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artifacts, spoils of European colonialism, many stolen from her homeland of Peru. As she peers at countless sculptures of Indigenous faces, each resembling her own, she sees herself in them - but the man responsible for pillaging them was her own great-great-grandfather, Austrian colonial explorer Charles Wiener. In the wake of her father's death, Gabriela returns to Peru. In alternating strands, she begins to probe her father's infidelity, her own polyamorous relationship, and the history of her colonial ancestor, unpacking the legacy that is her birthright. From the eye-patched persona her father adopted to carry out his double life to the brutal racism she encounters in her ancestor Charles's book, she traces a cycle of abandonment, jealousy, and fraud, in turn reframing her own personal struggles with desire, love, and race. Probing wounds both personal and historical, Wiener's provocative novel embarks the reader on a quest to pick up the pieces of something shattered long ago in the hope of making it whole once again." |
Corey Fah Does Social Mobility
"This is the story of Corey Fah, a writer who has hit the literary jackpot: their novel has just won the prize for the Fictionalization of Social Evils. But the actual trophy, and with it the funds, hovers peskily out of reach. Neon-beige, with UFO-like qualities, the elusive trophy leads Corey, with their partner Drew and eight-legged companion Bambi Pavok, on a spectacular quest through their childhood in the Forest and an unlikely stint on reality TV. Navigating those twin horrors, along with wormholes and time loops, Corey learns--the hard way--the difference between a prize and a gift. Following the Goldsmiths Prize-winning Sterling Karat Gold, Isabel Waidner's bold and buoyant new novel is about coming into one's own, the labor of love, the tendency of history to repeat itself, and what ensues when a large amount of cultural capital is suddenly deposited in a place it has never been before"
Chími nu'am
In this sumptuous cookbook, Sara Calvosa Olson (Karuk) reimagines some of the oldest foods in California for home cooks today. Meaning "Let's eat!" in the Karuk language, Chími Nu'am shares the author's delicious and inventive takes on Native food styles from across California. Over seventy seasonal recipes centered on a rich array of Indigenous ingredients follow the year from Fall (elk chili beans, acorn crepes) to Winter (wild boar pozole, huckleberry hand pies) to Spring (wildflower spring rolls, peppernut mole chicken) to Summer (blackberry braised smoked salmon, acorn milk freezer pops). Special sections offer guidance on acorn preparation, traditional uses of proteins, and mindful ingredient sourcing. Calvosa Olson has spent many years connecting her family's foodways with a growing community, and these recipes, techniques, and insights invite everyone to Calvosa Olson's table. Designed as an accessible entry for people beginning their journey toward a decolonized diet, Chími Nu'am welcomes readers in with Calvosa Olson's politically perceptive and irresistibly funny writing. With more than 100 photographs, this cookbook is a culinary gift that will add warmth and mouthwatering aromas to any kitchen.
Cecelia
| "A surreal novella about the intensity and eroticism of girlhood friendships, the ecstasy of desire and disgust, and matriarchal mythmaking. Seven, who works as a cleaner at a chiropractor's office, reencounters Cecilia, a woman who has obsessed her since their school days. Their chance meeting spurs a series of intensely vivid and corporeal memories, and also leads to a bus ride during which each claims dubiously not to be following the other. In the defamiliarization that follows, the narrator begins to experience queerness as an alienation from normative time. Smart, subversive, and gripping, Cecilia is a novella about queerness, obsessive love, inextricable histories of desire and violence, diaspora, and bodily transformation." |
Bite by Bite
| "In Bite by Bite, poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil explores the way food and drink evoke our associations and remembrances--a subtext or layering, a flavor tinged with joy, shame, exuberance, grief, desire, or nostalgia. Nezhukumatathil restores our astonishment and wonder about food through her encounters with a range of foods and food traditions. From shave ice to lumpia, mangoes to pecans, rambutan to vanilla, she investigates how food marks our experiences and identities and explores the boundaries between heritage and memory. Bite by Bite offers a rich and textured kaleidoscope of vignettes and visions into the world of food and nature, drawn together by intimate and humorous personal reflections, with Fumi Nakamura's gorgeous imagery and illustration" |
Big Fan
"A political strategist, tainted by a scandalous ex, finds an unexpected career detour when her teenage boy band crush offers a second chance at the spotlight...and maybe something more."
Banyan Moon
"When Ann Tran gets the call that her fiercely beloved grandmother, Minh, has passed away, her life is already at a crossroads. In the years since she's last seen Minh, Ann has built a seemingly perfect life--a beautiful lake house, a charming professor boyfriend, and invites to elegant parties that bubble over with champagne and good taste--but it all crumbles with one positive pregnancy test. With both her relationship and carefully planned future now in question, Ann returns home to Florida to face her estranged mother, Huơng. Back in Florida, Huơng is simultaneously mourning her mother and resenting her for having the relationship with Ann that she never did. Then Ann and Huơng learn that Minh has left them both the Banyan House, the crumbling old manor that was Ann's childhood home, in all its strange, Gothic glory. Under the same roof for the first time in years, mother and daughter must face the simmering questions of their past and their uncertain futures, while trying to rebuild their relationship without the one person who's always held them together. Running parallel to this is Minh's story, as she goes from a lovestruck teenager living in the shadow of the Vietnam War to a determined young mother immigrating to America in search of a better life for her children. And when Ann makes a shocking discovery in the Banyan House's attic, long-buried secrets come to light as it becomes clear how decisions Minh made in her youth affected the rest of her life--and beyond. Spanning decades and continents, from 1960s Vietnam to the wild swamplands of the Florida coast, Banyan Moon is a stunning and deeply moving story of mothers and daughters, the things we inherit, and the lives we choose to make out of that inheritance."
The Anthropologists
| "From White on White author and frequent New Yorker contributor Aysegül Savas-a warm, elegant, and playful novel of home-hunting and life-building away from one's family of origin. Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? Can they create their own traditions and rituals? Whom can they consider family? As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, spends her days gathering footage from the neighborhood park like an anthropologist observing local customs. "Forget about daily life," chides her grandmother on the phone. "We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park." Life back in Asya and Manu's respective home countries continues-parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly beyond their reach. But the world they're making in their new city is growing, too, they hope, into something that will be distinctly theirs. As they open up the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release? Hailed by Lauren Groff and Marina Abramovic, Savas's fine, precise craft turns The Anthropologist's simple apartment search into a soulful, often funny, examination of modern coupledom, home-building, and expat life in the universal modern city" |
American Rapture
| "A virus is spreading across America, transforming the infected and making them feral with lust. Sophie, a good Catholic girl, must traverse the hellscape of the midwest to try to find her family while the world around her burns. Along the way she discovers there are far worse fates than dying a virgin... The end times are coming" |
The Abyss
"The novel tells about the demise of a crumbling house in Medellín, Colombia. Fernando, a writer, visits his brother Darío, who is dying of AIDS. Recounting their wild philandering and trying to come to terms with his be-loved brother's inevitable death, Fernando rants against the political forces that cause so much suffering. Vallejo is the heir to Céline, Thomas Paine, and Machado de Assis. He hurls vitriolic, savagely funny insults at his country ("I wipe my ass with the new Constitution of Colombia") and at his mother ("the Crazy Bitch") who has given birth to him and his many siblings. Within this firestorm of pain, Fernando manages to get across much beauty and truth: that all love is painful and washed in pure sorrow. He loves his sick brother and the family's Santa Anita farm (the lost paradise of his childhood where azaleas bloomed); and he even loves his country, now torn to shreds. Always, in this savage masterpiece about loss - as if in the eye of Vallejo's hurricane of talent - we are in the curiously comforting workings of memory and of the writing process itself, as, recollecting time, it offers immortality"
Monstress Book One
"Maika Halfwolf lives in a world gripped by war--an alternate, matriarchal 1900s Asia brimming with arcane dangers. As she struggles to overcome the trauma of violence and regain knowledge of her past, she becomes inextricably linked to an eldritch monster of tremendous power. This link will transform them both, and place them in the crosshairs of deadly powers both human and otherworldly.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts. Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.
Taiwan Travelogue
| "May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She's been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear. Soon a Taiwanese woman -- who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name -- is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko's travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It's only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the "something" is. Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan's highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships" |
Smoke Kings
"Nate Evers, a young black political activist, struggles with rage as his people are still being killed in the streets...When his little cousin is murdered, Nate shuns the graffiti murals, candlelight vigils, and Twitter hashtags that are commonplace after these senseless deaths. Instead, he leads 3 grief-stricken friends on a mission of retribution, kidnapping the descendants of long-ago perpetrators of hate crimes, confronting the targets with their racist lineages, and forcing them to pay reparations to a community fund. For 3 of the group members, the results mean justice; for Nate -- pure revenge. Not all targets go quietly into the night, though, and Nate and his friends' world spirals out of control when they confront the wrong man. Now the leader of a white supremacist group is hot on their tail as is a jaded lawman with some disturbingly racist views of his own. As the 4 vigilantes fight to thwart their ruthless pursuers, they're forced to accept an age-old truth: "Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves."
Shanghailanders
A dazzling and ambitious debut novel that follows a cosmopolitan Shanghai household backward in time--beginning in 2040 and moving through our present and the recent past--exploring their secrets, their losses, and the ways a family makes and remakes itself across the years.
Seed to Plate, Soil to Sky
| "Some food historians say that 1491 to 1493 are the years the world began in terms of food, that is. Prior to 1492, eight plants--corn, beans, squash, chile, tomato, potato, vanilla, and cacao--existed only in the Americans. Italy didn't have the tomato; Ireland didn't have the potato, nor Russia the vodka distilled from it; and there were no chiles in South Asia. When these ingredients crossed the ocean, they drastically transformed the way the Old World would eat and cook forever. Yet the average American, even those who cook with these foods regularly, doesn't know this history. Seed to Plate, Soil to Sky introduces the splendor and importance of Native culinary history and pairs it with delicious Native American-inspired dishes. Grounded in a primer on Native American cuisine and with a necessary discussion of food sovereignty and sustainability, Seed to Plate, Soil to Sky shares more than 100 nutritious, plant based recipes organized by each of the foundational ingredients. Grounded in Southwestern flavors, recipes like Blue Corn Hotcakes with Prickly Pear Syrup, Three Sisters Stew, and Green Chile Enchilada Lasagna, share the page--and plate--with essential basics like Corn Masa, Red and Green Chile Sauces, and Cacao Spice Rub for a thoughtful, delicious celebration of Native foods" |
The Seed Keeper
"Rosalie Iron Wing has grown up in the woods with her father, Ray, a former science teacher who tells her stories of plants, of the stars, of the origins of the Dakota people. Until, one morning, Ray doesn't return from checking his traps. Told she has no family, Rosalie is sent to live with a foster family in nearby Mankato - where the reserved, bookish teenager meets rebellious Gaby Makespeace, in a friendship that transcends the damaged legacies they've inherited. On a winter's day many years later, Rosalie returns to her childhood home. A widow and mother, she has spent the previous two decades on her white husband's farm, finding solace in her garden even as the farm is threatened first by drought and then by a predatory chemical company. Now, grieving, Rosalie begins to confront the past, on a search for family, identity, and a community where she can finally belong. In the process, she learns what it means to be descended from women with souls of iron - women who have protected their families, their traditions, and a precious cache of seeds through generations of hardship and loss, through war and the insidious trauma of boarding schools."
The Saint of Bright Doors
| "The Saint of Bright Doors sets the high drama of divine revolutionaries and transcendent cults against the mundane struggles of modern life, resulting in a novel that is revelatory and resonant. Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. This gave him plenty to talk about in therapy. He walked among invisible powers: devils and anti-gods that mock the mortal form. He learned a lethal catechism, lost his shadow, and gained a habit for secrecy. After a blood-soaked childhood, Fetter escaped his rural hometown for the big city, and fell into a broader world where divine destinies are a dime a dozen. Everything in Luriat is more than it seems. Group therapy is recruitment for a revolutionary cadre. Junk email hints at the arrival of a god. Every door is laden with potential, and once closed may never open again. The city is scattered with Bright Doors, looming portals through which a cold wind blows. In this unknowable metropolis, Fetter will discover what kind of man he is, and his discovery will rewrite the world." |
Rejection
| "The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet. In 'The Feminist,' a young man's passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn't getting him laid. A young woman's unrequited crush in 'Pics' spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in 'Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,' a shy late bloomer's flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other's dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection." |
Pink Slime
| In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea. Inland, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford--a revolting pink paste, made of an unknown substance. In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining relationships: with her difficult but vulnerable mother; with the ex-husband for whom she still harbors feelings; with the boy she nannies, whose parents sent him away even as terrible threats loomed. Yet as conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows--even if staying means being left behind. |
Not a River
| "It's not a river, it's this river. A hot, motionless afternoon. Enero and El Negro are fishing with Tilo, their dead friend's teenage son. After hours of struggling with a hooked stingray, Enero aims his revolver into the water and shoots it. They hang the ray's enormous corpse from a tree at their campsite and let it go to rot, drawing the attention of some local islanders and igniting a long-simmering fury toward outsiders and their carelessness. It's only the two sisters--the teenage nieces of one of the locals, Aguirre--with their hair black as cowbird feathers and giving off the scent of green grass, who are curious about the trio and invite them to a dance. But the girls are not quite as they seem. As night approaches and tensions rise, Enero and El Negro return to the charged memories of their friend who years ago drowned in this same river. As uneasy and saturated as a prophetic dream, Not a River is another extraordinary novel by Selva Almada about masculinity, guilt, and irrepressible desire, written in a style that is spare and timeless" |
Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird
| A collection of nineteen dark, wildly imaginative short stories from the author of the award-winning TikTok sensation Tender Is the Flesh. From celebrated author Agustina Bazterrica, this collection of nineteen brutal, darkly funny short stories takes into our deepest fears and through our most disturbing fantasies. Through stories about violence, alienation, and dystopia, Bazterrica's vision of the human experience emerges in complex, unexpected ways--often unsettling, sometimes thrilling, and always profound. In "Roberto," a girl claims to have a rabbit between her legs. A woman's neighbor jumps to his death in "A Light, Swift, and Monstrous Sound," and in "Candy Pink," a woman fails to contend with a difficult breakup in five easy steps. Written in Bazterrica's signature clever, vivid style, these stories question love, friendship, family relationships, and unspeakable desires. |
The Night Eaters Book 2
| "It's been four months since the night of gore, chaos, and the failed demonic summoning that revealed the Ting twins' unusual family background. Since then, Milly and Billy have tried to explore their new powers but their parents, Ipo and Keon, haven't been much help. Despite the lack of explanations, one thing is abundantly clear: the Ting family is part of a much larger supernatural world and something in that world is very, very wrong. As Ipo and Keon are reluctantly drawn back into the treacherous high society of supernatural elites, their children find that dealings with the spirit world comes at a steep price-when the dead have unfinished business with the living, only blood can balance the scales. To save humanity and themselves, the Tings will have to embrace their inner demons. Eisner Award-winning and bestselling author Marjorie Liu and illustrator Sana Takeda have done it again, spinning an epic tale of gods and monsters in Her Little Reapers that will leave readers hungry for more" |
New Native Kitchen
| "From Freddie Bitsoie, the former executive chef at Mitsitam Native Foods Café at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, and James Beard Award-winning author James O. Fraioli, New Native Kitchen is a celebration of Indigenous cuisine. Accompanied by original artwork by Gabriella Trujillo and offering delicious dishes like Cherrystone Clam Soup from the Northeastern Wampanoag and Spice-Rubbed Pork Tenderloin from the Pueblo peoples, Bitsoie showcases the variety of flavor and culinary history on offer from coast to coast, providing modern interpretations of 100 recipes that have long fed this country. Recipes like Chocolate Bison Chili, Prickly Pear Sweet Pork Chops, and Sumac Seared Trout with Onion and Bacon Sauce combine the old with the new, holding fast to traditions while also experimenting with modern methods. In this essential cookbook, Bitsoie shares his expertise and culinary insights into Native American cooking and suggests new approaches for every home cook. With recipes as varied as the peoples that inspired them, New Native Kitchen celebrates the Indigenous heritage of American cuisine." |
Mothballs
"In this moving family saga, a teenage woman uncovers the hushed history of sexual violence that shattered her grandmother's life"
Moon of the Turning Leaves
| "For the past twelve years, a community of Anishinaabe people have made the Northern Ontario bush their home in the wake of the power failure that brought about societal collapse. Since then they have survived and thrived the way their ancestors once did, but their natural food resources are dwindling, and the time has come to find a new home. Evan Whitesky volunteers to lead a mission south to explore the possibility of moving back to their original homeland, the "land where the birch trees grow by the big water" in the Great Lakes region. Accompanied by five others, including his daughter Nangohns, an expert archer, Evan begins a journey that will take him to where the Anishinaabe were once settled, near the devastated city of Gibson, a land now being reclaimed by nature. But it isn't just the wilderness that poses a threat: they encounter other survivors. Those who, like the Anishinaabe, live in harmony with the land, and those who use violence." |
Moon of the Crusted Snow
| "A daring post-apocalyptic novel from a powerful rising literary voice. With winter looming, a small northern Anishinaabe community goes dark. Cut off, people become passive and confused. Panic builds as the food supply dwindles. While the band council and a pocket of community members struggle to maintain order, an unexpected visitor arrives, escaping the crumbling society to the south. Soon after, others follow. The community leadearship loses its grip on power as the visitors manipulate the tired and hungry to take control of the reserve. Tensions rise and, as the months pass, so does the death toll due to sickness and despair. Frustrated by the building chaos, a group of young friends and their families turn to the land and Anishinaabe tradition in hopes of helping their community thrive again. Guided through the chaos by an unlikely leader named Evan Whitesky, they endeavor to restore order while grappling with a grave decision. Blending action and allegory, Moon of the Crusted Snow upends our expectations. Out of catastrophe comes resilience. And as one society collapses, another is reborn."- |
The Ministry of Time
| "In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she'll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering "expats" from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible--for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time. She is tasked with working as a "bridge": living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as "1847" or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he's a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as "washing machines," "Spotify," and "the collapse of the British Empire." But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts. Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry's project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how--and whether she believes--what she does next can change the future. An exquisitely original and feverishly fun fusion of genres and ideas, The Ministry of Time asks: What does it mean to defy history, when history is living in your house? Kaliane Bradley's answer is a blazing, unforgettable testament to what we owe each other in a changing world" |
Of Women and Salt
From 19th-century cigar factories to present-day detention centers, from Cuba to Mexico, Gabriela Garcia's Of Women and Salt is a kaleidoscopic portrait of betrayals--personal and political, self-inflicted and those done by others--that have shaped the lives of these extraordinary women. A haunting meditation on the choices of mothers, the legacy of the memories they carry, and the tenacity of women who choose to tell their stories despite those who wish to silence them, this is more than a diaspora story; it is a story of America's most tangled, honest, human roots-
Your Money or Your Life
"A riveting exposé of medical debt collection in America — and the profound financial and physical costs eroding patient trust in medicine
For the crime of falling sick without wealth, Americans today face lawsuits, wage garnishment, home foreclosure, and even jail time.
Yet who really profits from aggressive medical debt collection? And how does this predatory system affect patients and doctors responsible for their care?
Your Money or Your Life reveals how medical debt collection became a multibillion-dollar industry and how everyday Americans are made to pay the price. Emergency physician and historian Luke Messac weaves patient stories into a history of law, finance, and medicine to show how debt and debt collection are destroying the foundational trust between doctors and patients at the heart of American healthcare. The fight to stop aggressive collection tactics has brought together people from all corners of the political spectrum. But if we want to better protect the sick from financial ruin, we have to understand how we got here.
With wit and clarity, Your Money or Your Life asks us all to rethink the purpose of our modern healthcare system and consider whom it truly serves."
Woodworm
| "A granddaughter and grandmother, alienated from their community, live among various sombras, shadows of the dead with whom they alone can pray and commune. When the mysterious disappearance of a young boy draws the unwanted attention of locals, the women combine forces with the spirits that haunt them in pursuit of something that resembles justice" |
Women Money Power
"For centuries, women were denied equal access to money and the freedom and power that came with it. They were restricted from owning property or transacting in real estate. Even well into the 20th century, women could not take out their own loans or own bank accounts without their husband's permission. They could be fired for getting married or pregnant, and if they still had a job, they could be kept from certain roles, restricted from working longer hours, and paid less than men for equal work. It was a raw deal, and women weren't happy with it. So they pushed back. In Women Money Power, financial journalist Josie Cox tells the story of women's fight for financial freedom. This is an inspirational account of brave pioneers who took on social mores and the law, including the "Rosies" who filled industrial jobs vacated by men and helped win WWII, the heiress whose fortune helped create the birth control pill, the brassy investor who broke into the boys' club of the New York Stock Exchange, and the namesake of landmark equal pay legislation who refused to accept discrimination. But as any woman can tell you, the battle for equality--for money and power--is far from over. Cox delves deep into the challenges women face today and the culture and systems that hold them back. This is a fascinating narrative account of progress, women's lives, and the work still to be done"
Us Fools
| "Joanne and Bernadette Fareown are raised on their family farm in rural Illinois, keenly affected by their parents' volatile relationship and mounting financial debt, haunted by the cursed history of the women in their family. Largely left to their own devices, the sisters educate themselves on Greek mythology, feminism, and Virginia Woolf, realizing they must find unique ways to cope in these antagonistic conditions, questioning the American Dream as the rest of the country abandons their community in crisis. As Jo and Bernie's imaginative solutions for escape come up short against their parents' realities, the family leaves their farm for Chicago, where Joanne--free-spirited, reckless, and unable to tame her inner violence--rebels in increasingly desperate ways. After her worst breakdown yet, Jo goes into exile in Deadhorse, Alaska, and it is up to Bernadette to use all she's learned from her sister to revive a sense of hope against the backdrop of a failing world. With her debut novel, Nora Lange has crafted a rambunctious, ambitious, and heart-rending portrait of two idiosyncratic sisters, determined to persevere despite the worst that capitalism and their circumstances has to throw at them" |
The Silence of the Choir
| "Seventy-two men arrive in the middle of the Sicilian countryside. They are "immigrants," "refugees" or "migrants." But in Altino, they're called the ragazzi, the "guys" that the Santa Marta Association have taken responsibility for. In this small Sicilian town, their arrival changes life for everybody. While they wait to know their fate, the ragazzi encounter all kinds of people: a strange vicar who rewrites their pasts, a woman committed to ensuring them asylum, a man determined to fight against it, an older ragazzo who has become an interpreter, and a reclusive poet who no longer writes. Each character in this moving and important saga is forced to reflect on what it means to encounter people they know nothing about. They watch as a situation unfolds over which they have little control or insight. A story told through a growing symphony of voices that ends only when one final voice brings silence to the choir." |
Shred Sisters
"From Betsy Lerner, celebrated author of The Bridge Ladies, comes a wry and riveting debut novel about family, mental illness, and a hard-won path between two sisters. It is said that when one person in a family is unstable, the whole family is destabilized. Meet the Shreds. Olivia is the sister in the spotlight, but when her stunning confidence morphs into something erratic and unpredictable, she becomes a hurricane leaving the Shred family wrecked in her wake. Put simply, she has no brakes. Younger sister Amy, cautious and studious to the core, dreams of winning a Nobel Prize in science. Amy believes in facts, proof, and the empirical world. Except none of that can explain what's happening to Ollie, whose physical beauty and charisma mask the bipolar disorder that will shatter Amy's carefully constructed world. As Amy comes of age and seeks to find her place--first in academics, then New York publishing, and through a series of men--every step brings collisions with Ollie. For all that upends and unsettles these sisters, an inextricable bond always draws them back. Spanning two decades, Shred Sisters is an intimate and bittersweet story exploring the fierce complexities of sisterhood, mental health, loss and love. If anything is true it's what Amy learns on her road to self-acceptance: No one will love you or hurt you more than a sister"
A Reason to See You Again
"From New York Times bestselling author Jami Attenberg comes a dazzling novel of family, following a troubled mother and her two daughters over forty years and through a swiftly changing American landscape as they seek lives they can fully claim as their own"-
Praiseworthy
| "In a small town in the north of Australia, a mysterious cloud heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors. A crazed visionary looks to donkeys to solve the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife, seeking solace from his madness, follows the dance of butterflies and scours the internet to find out how her Aboriginal/Chinese family could be repatriated to China. One of their sons, named Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful. Praiseworthy is an epic which pushes allegory and language to their limit; a unique masterpiece that bends time and reality, opening new literary vistas; a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage; and a fable for the end of days" |
Practice
"Six o'clock in the morning, Sunday, at the worn-out end of January. In a small room, cold and dim and quiet, an undergraduate student works on an essay about Shakespeare's sonnets. Annabel has a meticulously planned routine for her day--work, yoga, meditation, long walks--but finds it repeatedly thrown off course. Despite her efforts, she cannot stop her thoughts from slipping off their intended track into the shadows of elaborate erotic fantasies. As the essay's deadline looms, so too does the irrepressible presence of other people: Annabel's boyfriend, Rich, keen to come visit her; her family and friends who demand her attention; and darker crises, obliquely glimpsed, all threatening to disturb the much-cherished quiet in her mind. Exquisitely crafted, wryly comic, and completely original, Rosalind Brown's "Practice" is a novel about the life of the mind and the life of the body, about the repercussions of a rigid routine and the deep pleasures of literature."
The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels of a mining ship out among the stars. His whole world changes--literally--when he is yanked "upstairs" and informed he has been given an opportunity to be educated at the ship's university alongside the elite. Overwhelmed and alone, the boy forms a bond with the woman he comes to know as "the professor," a weary idealist and descendant of the Chained who has spent her career striving for validation from her more senior colleagues, only to fall short at every turn. Together, the boy and the woman will embark on a transformative journey to grasp the design of the chains that fetter them both--and are the key to breaking free.
Parade
| "Midway through his life, the artist G begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success. In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas. At the age of twenty-two, the painter G leaves home for a new life in another country, far from the disapproval of her parents. Her paintings attract the disapproval of the man she later marries. When a mother dies, her children confront her legacy: the stories she told, the roles she assigned to them, the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom." |
Neighbors
"A bold and haunting debut story collection that follows various characters as they navigate the day-to-day perils of Jim Crow racism from Diane Oliver, a missing figure in the canon of twentieth-century African American literature, with an introduction by Tayari Jones."
The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels
"Everyone knows the story of the Alperton Angels: the cult who brainwashed a teenage girl into believing her baby was the Antichrist. When the girl came to her senses and called the police, the Angels committed suicide and the mother and baby disappeared. Now, true crime author Amanda Bailey is looking to revive her career by writing a book on the case. According to records, the Alperton baby has now turned eighteen; finding them both will be the true crime scoop of the year. But rival author Oliver Menzies is just as smart, better connected, and also on the mother and baby's trail. As Amanda and Oliver are forced to collaborate, they realize that the truth about the Angels is much darker and stranger than they'd ever imagined, and in pursuit of the story they risk becoming part of it."
Intermezzo
"Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties-- successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father's death, he's medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women-- his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined. For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude-- a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking."
The House on Via Gemito
| The modest apartment in Via Gemito smells of paint and white spirit. The living room furniture is pushed up against the wall to create a make-shift studio, and drying canvases must be moved off the beds each night. Federi, the father, a railway clerk, is convinced of possessing great artistic talent. If he didn't have a family to feed, he'd be a world-famous painter. Ambitious and frustrated, genuinely talented but full of arrogance and resentment, his life is marked by bitter disappointment. His long-suffering wife and their four sons bear the brunt. It's his first-born who, years later, will sift the lies from the truth to tell the story of a man he spent his whole life trying not to resemble. Narrated against the background of a Naples still marked by WWII and steeped in the city's language and imagery, The House on Via Gemito - first published 20 years ago - is a masterpiece of contemporary Italian literature. |
The Hammer
| "The thesis is simple: Inequality is America's biggest problem. Unions are the single strongest tool that working people have to fix this problem. But the labor movement of today has failed to enable enough individuals to join unions. Thus, organized labor's powerful potential is being wielded incompetently. And what is happening inside of organized labor will--far more than most people realize--determine the economic and social course of American life for years to come. In deeply reported chapters that span the country, Nolan shows readers how organized labor can and does wield power effectively--in spots--but also why it has long been unable to build itself into the powerful institution that the working class needs. These narratives both inspire by example and motivate by counter-example. Whether it's a union that has succeeded in a single city, and is trying to scale that effectiveness nationally, or the ins and outs of a historically large and transformative union campaign, or the human face of a strike, or a profile of the most anti-union state in America, Nolan highlights the actual mechanisms that connect labor to politics to real change. Throughout, Nolan follows Sara Nelson, the powerful and charismatic head of the flight attendants' union, as she struggles with how (and whether) to assert herself as a national leader of the labor movement, to try to fix what is broken about it. The Hammer draws the line from forgotten workplaces to Washington's halls of power, and shows how labor can utterly transform American politics--if it can first transform itself. Nolan is an expert who has covered labor and politics for more than a decade, and has helped to unionize his own industry. The time has come for his poignant and enlightening book as we prepare for the historic 2024 presidential election. The Hammer is a unique on-the-ground excavation of the present and the future of the labor movement. It is the story of what the labor movement can be, and why it isn't that...yet" |
The Garden Against Time
| "In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Clare's enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth. But the story of the garden doesn't always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It's also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change. The result is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden" |
The Familiar
"In a shabby house, on a shabby street, in the new capital of Madrid, Luzia Cotado uses scraps of magic to get through her days of endless toil as a scullion. But when her scheming mistress discovers the lump of a servant cowering in the kitchen is actually hiding a talent for little miracles, she demands Luzia use those gifts to better the family's social position. What begins as simple amusement for the bored nobility takes a perilous turn when Luzia garners the notice of Antonio Pérez, the disgraced secretary to Spain's king. Still reeling from the defeat of his armada, the king is desperate for any advantage in the war against England's heretic queen--and Pérez will stop at nothing to regain the king's favor. Determined to seize this one chance to better her fortunes, Luzia plunges into a world of seers and alchemists, holy men and hucksters, where the lines between magic, science, and fraud are never certain. But as her notoriety grows, so does the danger that her Jewish blood will doom her to the Inquisition's wrath. She will have to use every bit of her wit and will to survive--even if that means enlisting the help of Guillén Santangel, an embittered immortal familiar whose own secrets could prove deadly for them both"
Empresses of Seventh Avenue
"In the tradition of The Barbizon and The Girls of Atomic City, fashion historian and journalist Nancy MacDonell chronicles the untold story of how the Nazi invasion of France gave rise to the American fashion industry. Calvin Klein. Ralph Lauren. Donna Karan. Halston. Marc Jacobs. Tom Ford. Michael Kors. Tory Burch. Today, American designers are some of the biggest names in fashion, yet before World War II, they almost always worked anonymously. The industry, then centered on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, had always looked overseas for "inspiration" -- a polite phrase for what was often blatant copying -- because style, as all the world knew, came from Paris. But when the Nazis invaded France in 1940, the capital of fashion was cut off from the rest of the world. The story of the chaos and tragedy that followed has been told many times -- but how it directly affected American fashion is largely unknown. Defying the naysayers, New York-based designers, retailers, editors, and photographers met the moment, turning out clothes that were perfectly suited to the American way of life: sophisticated, modern, comfortable, and affordable. By the end of the war, "the American Look" had been firmly established as a fresh, easy elegance that combined function with style. But none of it would have happened without the influence and ingenuity of a small group of women who have largely been lost to history. Empresses of Seventh Avenue will tell the story of how these extraordinary women put American fashion on the world stage and created the template for modern style -- and how the nearly $500 billion American fashion industry, the largest in the world, could not have accrued its power and wealth without their farsightedness and determination"
Defying Displacement
| Cities around the world are in the midst of a profound transformation as the wealthy price out the remnants of the urban working class, especially people of color. Displacement is neither accidental or inevitable. It happens because a whole range of people and institutions profit handsomely. Defying Displacement, focused on the US but informed by global examples, investigates gentrification from the perspective of the people fighting it, members of communities whose survival is threatened by some of the most powerful institutions on the planet. Andrew Lee names the names and identifies the actual state and corporate forces that work together to enrich a very specific group of people: property developers and real estate investors who make a killing, politicians who watch their tax bases grow, banks that write profitable loans for new businesses and mortgages for new homeowners. Meanwhile, business districts are planned, tax abatements unveiled, redevelopment schemes dreamed up, corporate and university campuses expanded, and ordinary people are driven from their homes. The city has long served as the stage for political life and popular revolt. As mass displacement alters the composition of gentrifying cities, the avenues available for social change become unsettled as well, forcing us to reimagine our strategies for building a better world. Around the world communities are pushing the struggle against forced displacement in new directions, shutting down developments and evictions and bringing cities to a halt, fighting militarized police and the most powerful companies in the world. Activists and residents in struggle--dozens of whom are interviewed by Lee to inform his work--are charting the way forward to affordable and sustainable cities run by the people who inhabit them. |
Dead in Long Beach, California
Coral is the first person to discover her brother Jay's dead body in the wake of his suicide. There's no note, only a drably furnished bachelor pad in Long Beach, California, and a cell phone with a handful of numbers in it. Coral pockets the phone. And then she starts responding to texts as her dead brother. Over the course of one week, Coral, the successful yet lonely author of a hit dystopian novel, Wildfire , becomes increasingly untethered from reality. Blindsided by grief and operating with reckless determination, she doubles and triples down on posing as her brother, risking not only her own sanity but her relationship with her precocious niece, Khadijah. As Coral's swirl of lies slowly closes in on her, the quirky and mysterious alien world of Wildfire becomes enmeshed in her own reality, in the process pushing long-buried memories, traumas, and secrets dangerously into the present.
Catland
"In Catland, Kathryn Hughes chronicles the cat craze of the early twentieth century through the life and career of Louis Wain. Wain's anthropomorphic drawings of cats in top hats falling in love, sipping champagne, golfing, driving cars, and piloting planes are some of the most instantly recognizable images from the era. His round-faced fluffy characters established the prototype for the modern cat, which cat "fanciers" were busily trying to achieve using their newfound knowledge of the latest scientific breeding techniques. Despite being a household name, Wain endured multiple bankruptcies and mental breakdowns, spending his last fifteen years in an asylum, drawing abstract and multicolored felines. But it was his ubiquitous anthropomorphic cats that helped usher the formerly reviled creatures into homes across Europe."
All Things are Too Small
"A glorious call to throw off restraint and balance in favor of excess, abandon, and disproportion, in essays ranging from such topics as mindfulness, decluttering, Sally Rooney, David Cronenberg, and consent. In her debut essay collection, "brilliant and stylish" (The Washington Post) critic Becca Rothfeld takes on one of the most sacred cows of our time: the demand that we apply the virtues of equality and democracy to culture and aesthetics. The result is a culture that is flattened and sanitized, purged of ugliness, excess, and provocation. Our embrace of minimalism has left us spiritually impoverished. We see it in our homes, where we bring in Marie Kondo to rid them of their idiosyncrasies and darknesses. We take up mindfulness to do the same thing to our heads, emptying them of the musings, thoughts, and obsessions that make us who we are. In the bedroom, a new wave of puritanism has drained sex of its unpredictability and therefore true eroticism. In our fictions, the quest for balance has given us protagonists who aspire only to excise their appetites. We have flipped our values, Rothfeld argues: while the gap between rich and poor yawns hideously wide, we strive to compensate with egalitarianism in art, erotics, and taste, where it does not belong and where it quashes wild experiments and exuberance. Lush, provocative, and bitingly funny, All Things Are Too Small is a subversive soul cry to restore imbalance, obsession, gluttony, and ravishment to all domains of our lives."
The Age of Grievance
"An examination of the ways in which grievance has come to define our current culture and politics, on both the right and left. More and more Americans are convinced that they're losing because somebody else is winning. More and more tally their slights, measure their misfortune, and assign particular people responsibility for it. The blame game has become very popular. Grievance needn't be bad. But what happens when people take their grievances to lengths that they didn't before? A violent mob storms the US Capitol, rejecting the results of a presidential election. Conspiracy theories flourish. Fox News knowingly peddles lies in the service of profit. College students chase away speakers, and college administrators dismiss instructors for dissenting from progressive orthodoxy. Benign words are branded hurtful; benign gestures are deemed hostile. And there's a potentially devastating erosion of the civility, common ground, and compromise necessary for our democracy to survive. How did we get here? What does it say about us, and where does it leave us? The Age of Grievance examines these critical questions and charts a path forward."
Absolution
"When the Southern Reach trilogy was first published a decade ago, it was an instant sensation, celebrated in a front-page New York Times story before publication, hailed by Stephen King and many others. Each volume climbed the bestseller list; awards were won; the books made the rare transition from paperback original to hardcover; the movie adaptation became a cult classic. All told, the trilogy has sold more than a million copies and has secured its place in the pantheon of twenty-first-century literature. And yet for all this, for Jeff VanderMeer there was never full closure to the story of Area X. There were a few mysteries that had gone unsolved, some key points of view never aired. There were stories left to tell. There remained questions about who had been complicit in creating the conditions for Area X to take hold; the story of the first mission into the Forgotten Coast--before Area X was called Area X--had never been fully told; and what if someone had foreseen the world after Acceptance? How crazy would they seem? Structured in three parts, each recounting a new expedition, Absolution is a brilliant, beautiful, and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. There are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time."
Rise of Kyoshi
F. C. Yee's The Rise of Kyoshi delves into the story of Kyoshi, the Earth Kingdom-born Avatar. The longest-living Avatar in this beloved world's history, Kyoshi established the brave and respected Kyoshi Warriors, but also founded the secretive Dai Li, which led to the corruption, decline, and fall of her own nation. The first of two novels based on Kyoshi, The Rise of Kyoshi maps her journey from a girl of humble origins to the merciless pursuer of justice who is still feared and admired centuries after she became the Avatar. The discovery of Yun, a young Avatar, brought stability to the four nations until Earth Kingdom-born Kyoshi, Yun's friend and servant, demonstrated remarkable bending during a mission to the South Pole. When growing unrest among her allies turned to violence, Kyoshi was forced to flee the Avatar mansion with her fiery friend Rangi, taking little more than the metal war fans and headdress her parents left behind. Finding unlikely supporters in the criminals and outlaws living the shadows of the Earth Kingdom, Kyoshi and Rangi are torn between following the traditional paths of an Avatar, and seeking vengeance for those she has lost.
Beautiful Ugly
| "Author Grady Green is having the worst best day of his life. He calls his wife, Abby, to share some exciting news as she is driving home. He hears Abby slam on the brakes when she sees something in the road ahead. Over Grady's protests, Abby gets out of the car. When he eventually finds her car by the cliff edge, the headlights are on, the driver's door is open, her phone is still there... but his wife has disappeared. A year later, Grady is still overcome with grief and desperate to know what happened to Abby. He can't sleep, and he can't write, so he travels to a tiny, remote Scottish island to try and get his life back on track. And then he sees the impossible: a woman who looks exactly like his missing wife" |
None of This is True
| "Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summers crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins. A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix's children's school. Josie has been listening to Alix's podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life. Josie's life appears to be strange and complicated, and although Alix finds her unsettling, she can't quite resist the temptation to keep making the podcast. Slowly she starts to realize that Josie has been hiding some very dark secrets, and before she knows it, Josie has inveigled her way into Alix's life--and into her home. But, as quickly as she arrived, Josie disappears. Only then does Alix discover that Josie has left a terrible and terrifying legacy in her wake, and that Alix has become the subject of her own true crime podcast, with her life and her family's lives under mortal threat. Who is Josie Fair? And what has she done?"- |
The Berry Pickers
"July 1962. A Mi'kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family's youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister's disappearance for years to come. In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren't telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret. Peters presents a novel about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time."
Swim Home to the Vanished
When the river swallowed Kai, Damien's little brother didn't die so much as vanish. As the unbearable loss settles deeper into his bones, Damien, a small-town line cook, walks away from everything he has ever known. Driving as far south as his old truck and his legs allow, he lands in a fishing village beyond the reach of his past where he hopes he can finally forget. But the village has grief of its own. The same day that Damien arrives, a young woman from the community's most powerful family is being laid to rest. A stranger in town, Damien is the object of gossip and suspicion, ignored by all except the dead girl's mother, Ana Maria, who offers Damien a room and a job. Grateful for her kindness, Damien soon begins to fall under Ana Maria's charismatic spell. But how long can he resist the rumors swirling through town suggesting she might have had something to do with her daughter's death? Or deny his strange kinship with one of Ana Maria's surviving daughters, Marta, who knows too well the grief that follows the loss of a sibling--and who is driven by a fierce need for revenge? Swiftly, Damien finds himself caught in a power struggle between the brujas, a whirlwind battle that threatens to sweep the whole village out to sea. Resonant with the Diné creation story and the unshakeable weight of the Long Walk--the forced removal of the Navajo from their land--Swim Home to the Vanished explores the human capacity for grief and redemption, and the lasting effects it has on the soul.
Jonny Appleseed
Off the rez and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, becomes a cybersex worker who fetishizes himself in order to make a living. Jonny's world is a series of breakages, appendages, and linkages - and as he goes through the motions of preparing to return home for his step-father's funeral, he learns how to put together the pieces of his life. Jonny Appleseed is a unique, shattering vision of Indigenous life, full of grit, glitter, and dreams.
Family Abolition
| "For some of us, the family is a source of love and support. But for many others, the family is a place of private horror, coercion and personal domination. In capitalist society, the private family carries the impossible demands of interpersonal care and social reproductive labor. Can we imagine a different future? In Family abolition, author M.E. O'Brien uncovers the history of struggles to create radical alternatives to the private family. O'Brien traces the changing family politics of racial capitalism in the industrial cities of Europe and in the slave plantations and settler frontier of North America, explaining the rise and fall of the housewife-based family form. From early Marxists to Black and queer insurrectionists to today's mass protest movements, O'Brien finds revolutionaries seeking better ways of loving, caring, and living. Family Abolition takes us through the past and present of family politics into a speculative future of the commune, imagining how care could be organized in a free society" |
Naseej
| "Naseej, meaning "tapestry" in Arabic, is a book about the diversity and beauty of community, history, and continuity in Palestine. It compiles essays, short stories, poetry, interviews, and visual art to tell the story of how the vast web of Palestinian histories has been severed from its roots. Palestine has always been a precious patchwork of languages, ethnicities, cultures, religions, and practices, weaved into the fabric of an Arab and Islamic civilization that was a culmination of centuries of interchange and experimentation. Arriving at a moment of utter devastation, this collection celebrates life in Palestine. From the trajectories of Romani groups to religious communities like Druze and Ahmadiyya Muslims, to the political experience of Black Palestinians, Naseej asks what kind of threads remain of this tapestry after some 150 years of colonialism" |
Crooked Plow
"Deep in Brazil's neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother's bed and, momentarily mystified by its power, decide to taste its metal. The shuddering violence that follows marks their lives and binds them together forever. Heralded as a masterpiece, this fascinating and gripping story about the lives of subsistence farmers in Brazil's poorest region, three generations after the abolition of slavery, is at once fantastic and realist, covering themes of family, spirituality, and political struggle"
The Quinoa Bust
| "High in the Peruvian altiplano, 13,000 feet above sea level, quinoa's rise to global stardom was pitched as an unparalleled sustainable development opportunity that heralded a brighter future for rural communities devastated by decades of rural-urban migration, civil war, and state neglect. Based in a longitudinal ethnography centered around Puno, Peru, the main quinoa production area in the world's chief quinoa exporting country, The Quinoa Bust traces the social, ecological, technological, and political work that went into transforming a humble Andean grain into a development miracle crop, and highlights that project's unintended consequences. The Quinoa Bust shows how even efforts based in the best of intentions - to counteract the homogenization of global food supply, empower small-scale farmers, revalue local food cultures, and adapt agricultural systems to climate change - can generate new kinds of oppressions. At a time when so-called "forgotten foods" are increasingly positioned as sustainable development tools, The Quinoa Bust offers a cautionary tale of fleeting benefits and ambivalent results"- |
Love After the End
"A bold and breathtaking anthology of queer Indigenous speculative fiction, edited by the author of Jonny Appleseed. This exciting and groundbreaking fiction anthology showcases a number of new and emerging 2SQ (Two-Spirit and queer) Indigenous writers from across Turtle Island. These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through Utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness throughout its plight in the maw of settler colonialism's histories. Here, readers will discover bioengineered AI rats, transplanted trees in space, the rise of a 2SQ resistance camp, a primer on how to survive Indigiqueerly, virtual reality applications, mother ships at sea, and the very bending of space-time continuums queered through NDN time. Love after the End demonstrates the imaginatively queer Two-Spirit futurisms we have all been dreaming of since 1492. Contributors include Nathan Adler, Darcie Little Badger, Gabriel Castilloux Calderón, Adam Garnet Jones, Mari Kurisato, Kai Minosh Pyle, David Alexander Robertson, jaye simpson, and Nazbah Tom."
The Volcano Daughters
| "A saucy, searingly original debut about two sisters raised in the shadow of El Salvador's brutal dictator, El Gran Pendejo, and their flight from genocide, which takes them from Hollywood to Paris to cannery row, each followed by a chorus of furies, the ghosts of their murdered friends, who aren't yet done telling their stories. El Salvador, 1923. Graciela grows up on a volcano in a community of indigenous women indentured to coffee plantations owned by the country's wealthiest, until a messenger from the Capital comes to claim her: at nine years old she's been chosen to be an oracle for a rising dictator--a sinister, violent man wedded to the occult. She'll help foresee the future of the country. In the Capital she meets Consuelo, the sister she's never known, stolen away from their home before Graciela was born. The two are a small fortress within the dictator's regime, but they're no match for El Gran Pendejo's cruelty. Years pass and terror rises as the economy flatlines, and Graciela comes to understand the horrific vision that she's unwittingly helped shape just as genocide strikes the community that raised her. She and Consuelo barely escape, each believing the other to be dead. They run, crossing the globe, reinventing their lives, and ultimately reconnecting at the least likely moment. Endlessly surprising, vividly imaginative, bursting with lush life, The Volcano Daughters charts, through the stories of these sisters and the ghosts they carry with them, a new history and mythology of El Salvador, fiercely bringing forth voices that have been calling out for generations" |
They Bloom at Night
In Mercy, Louisiana, a town plagued by red algae and vanishing residents, Noon finds a reluctant ally in Covey and the two join forces to hunt a deadly creature in the dark waters as a storm looms.
The Automatic Fetish
"The Automatic Fetish traces Marx’s analysis of capital, step by step, through the material compiled posthumously as the third volume of Capital. Identifying the critique of value as the central through line of the entire work, Beverley Best elaborates a theory of movement through which the capital machine generates social forms of appearance as the inversion of its inner operating mechanisms. Neither a return to basics nor a new-fangled reconstruction, The Automatic Fetish eschews novelty to show once again that Marx rewards careful study."
A Banh Mi for Two
Told in alternating voices, while studying abroad in Saigon, Vivi falls for Lan, a street food vendor and food blogger, who is suffering from writer's block since her father's passing.
Magic for Liars
When a gruesome murder is discovered at The Osthorne Academy of Young Mages, where her estranged twin sister teaches Theoretical Magic, reluctant detective Ivy Gamble is pulled into the world of untold power and dangerous secrets. She will have to find a murderer and reclaim her sister without losing herself.
Compound Fracture
| "A queer Appalachian thriller that pulls no punches--following a trans autistic teen who's drawn into the generational struggle between the rural poor and those who exploit them. On the night Miles Abernathy--sixteen-year-old socialist and proud West Virginian--comes out as trans to his parents, he sneaks off to a party, carrying evidence that may finally turn the tide of the blood feud plaguing Twist Creek: Photos that prove the county's Sheriff Davies was responsible for the so-called "accident" that injured his dad, killed others, and crushed their grassroots efforts to unseat him. The feud began a hundred years ago when Miles's great-great-grandfather, Saint Abernathy, incited a miners' rebellion that ended with a public execution at the hands of law enforcement. Now, Miles becomes the feud's latest victim as the sheriff's son and his friends sniff out the evidence, follow him through the woods, and beat him nearly to death. In the hospital, the ghost of a soot-covered man hovers over Miles's bedside while Sheriff Davies threatens Miles into silence. But when Miles accidently kills one of the boys who hurt him, he learns of other folks in Twist Creek who want out from under the sheriff's heel. To free their families from this cycle of cruelty, they're willing to put everything on the line--is Miles? A visceral, unabashedly political page-turner that won't let you go until you've reached the end, Compound Fracture is not for the faint of heart, but it is for every reader who's ready to fight for a better world. Hand this story to teens pushing for radical change." |
Dead Girls Don't Dream
When seventeen-year-old Riley is murdered in an occult ritual, the witch's daughter Madelyn resurrects her in an attempt to break the cycle of violence and escape the horrors of Voynich Woods.
The Future of Another Timeline
| "1992: After a confrontation at a riot grrl concert, seventeen-year-old Beth finds herself in a car with her friend's abusive boyfriend dead in the backseat, agreeing to help her friends hide the body. This murder sets Beth and her friends on a path of escalating violence and vengeance as they realize many other young women in the world need protecting too. 2022: Determined to use time travel to create a safer future, Tess has dedicated her life to visiting key moments in history and fighting for change. But rewriting the timeline isn't as simple as editing one person or event. And just when Tess believes she's found a way to make an edit that actually sticks, she encounters a group of dangerous travelers bent on stopping her at any cost. Tess and Beth's lives intertwine as war breaks out across the timeline - a war that threatens to destroy time travel and leave only a small group of elites with the power to shape the past, present, and future. Against the vast and intricate forces of history and humanity, is it possible for a single person's actions to echo throughout the timeline?" |
Finna
Finna is a rambunctious, touching story that blends all the horrors the multiverse has to offer with the everyday awfulness of low-wage work. It explores queer relationships and queer feelings, capitalism and accountability, labor and love, all with a bouncing sense of humor and a commitment to the strange. When an elderly customer at a Swedish big box furniture store - but not that one - slips through a portal to another dimension, it's up to two minimum-wage employees to track her across the multiverse and protect their company's bottom line. Multi-dimensional swashbuckling would be hard enough, but those two unfortunate souls broke up a week ago. To find the missing granny, Ava and Jules will brave carnivorous furniture, swarms of identical furniture spokespeople, and the deep resentment simmering between them. Can friendship blossom from the ashes of their relationship? In infinite dimensions, all things are possible.
Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert
In an age of miracles where our greatest heroes from history have magically, unexplainably returned to shake us out of our confusion and hate, Harriet Tubman is back, and she has a lot to say. Harriet Tubman and four of the enslaved persons she led to freedom want to tell their story in a unique way--by following in the footsteps of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton. Harriet wants to put on a show about her life, and she needs a songwriter to help her. She calls upon Darnell Williams, a once successful hip-hop producer who was topping the charts before being outed by a rival at the BET Awards. Darnell has no idea what to expect when he steps into the studio with Harriet, only that they have one week to write a Broadway caliber musical she can take on the road. Over the course of their time together, they not only mount a show that will take the country by storm, but confront the horrors of both their pasts, and learn to find a way to a better future.
Mickey 7
| "Dying isn't any fun--but at least it's a living. Mickey7 is an Expendable: a disposable employee on a human expedition sent to colonize the ice world Niflheim. Whenever there's a mission that's too dangerous--even suicidal--the crew turns to Mickey. After one iteration dies, a new body is regenerated with most of his memories intact. After six deaths, Mickey7 understands the terms of his deal--and whyit was the only colonial position unfilled when he took it. On a fairly routine scouting mission, Mickey7 goes missing and is presumed dead. By the time he returns to the colony base, surprisingly helpedback by native life, Mickey7's fate has been sealed. There's a new clone, Mickey8, reporting for Expendable duties" |
Happy Ever After Playlist
"Sloan Monroe can't catch a break. Two years after losing her fiance, her life consists of cemetery visits, unorthodox art projects, and drinking sessions with her best friend, Kristen. So when a dog dashes in front of her car and gets her a ticket for obstructing traffic, Sloan is at her wits' end. But after meeting the ridiculously attractive and charming owner of the trouble-making retriever, she begins to think that maybe her luck has finally started to turn around... When Jason Larsen -- a.k.a. Jaxon Waters, rock n' roll's newest prodigy -- turns on his phone after a two-week hiking trip in Australia, he's shocked to find out that his beloved dog Tucker escaped his babysitter and is being held hostage by a beautiful woman. As Jason and Sloan begin to fall for each other, past traumas and rising tensions prove that their seemingly perfect match may just go to the dogs"-
The Apothecary Diaries v.1
After being sold into service to the emperor, whose consorts and serving women live in a sprawling complex known as the hougong, Maomao, an unassuming girl raised by her apothecary father makes the most of life with her curiosity and extensive knowledge of medicine.
Enemy Feminisms
"In recent years, "white feminism" and girlboss feminism have taken a justified beating. We know that leaning in won't make our jobs any more tolerable and that white women have proven to be, at best, unreliable allies. But in a time of rising fascism, ceaseless attacks on reproductive justice, and violent transphobia, we need to reckon with what Western feminism has wrought if we have any hope of building the feminist world we need. Sophie Lewis offers an unflinching tour of enemy feminisms, from 19th century imperial feminists and police officers to 20th century KKK feminists and pornophobes to today's anti-abortion and TERF feminists. Enemy feminisms exist. Feminism is not an inherent political good. Only when we acknowledge that can we finally reckon with the ways these feminisms have pushed us toward counterproductive and even violent ends. And only then can we finally engage in feminist strategizing that is truly antifascist. At once a left transfeminist battlecry against cisness, a decolonial takedown of nationalist womanhoods, and a sex-radical retort to femmephobia in all its guises, Enemy Feminisms is above all a fierce, brilliant love letter to feminism."
Deep End
"Scarlett Vandermeer is swimming upstream. A junior at Stanford and a student-athlete who specializes in platform diving, Scarlett prefers to keep her head down, concentrating on getting into med school and on recovering from the injury that almost ended her career. She has no time for relationships--at least, that's what she tells herself. Swim captain, world champion, all-around aquatics golden boy, Lukas Blomqvist thrives on discipline. It's how he wins gold medals and breaks records: complete focus, with every stroke. On the surface, Lukas and Scarlett have nothing in common. Until a well-guarded secret slips out, and everything changes. So they start an arrangement. And as the pressure leading to the Olympics heats up, so does their relationship. It was supposed to be just a temporary, mutually satisfying fling. But when staying away from Lukas becomes impossible, Scarlett realizes that her heart might be treading into dangerous water..."
The Cinnamon Bun Book Store
"When a secret message turns up hidden in a book in the Cinnamon Bun Book Store, Hazel can't understand it. As more secret codes appear between the pages, she decides to follow the trail of clues. She just need someone to help her out. Gorgeous and outgoing fisherman, Noah, is always up for an adventure. And a scavenger hunt sounds like a lot of fun. Even better that the cute bookseller he's been crushing on for months is the one who wants his help! Hazel didn't go looking for romance, but as the treasure hunt leads her and Noah around Dream Harbor, their undeniable chemistry might be just as hot as the fresh-out-of-the-oven cinnamon buns the bookstore sells..."
The Strawberry Patch Pancake House
| "Fall in love with the brand new spring romance set in Dream Harbor, from the bestselling author of The Pumpkin Spice Cafe and The Cinnamon Bun Book Store. As a world-renowned chef, single dad Archer never planned on moving to a small town, let alone running a pancake restaurant. But Dream Harbor needs a new chef, and Archer needs a community to help raise his daughter, Olive. Iris has never managed to hold down a job for more than a few months. So when it's suggested that Archer is looking for a live-in nanny, she almost runs in the opposite direction. Now, Iris finds herself in a whole new world. One where her gorgeous new boss lives right across the hall and likes to cook topless... Keeping everything strictly professional should be easy, right?" |
When the Moon Hatched
"As an assassin for the rebellion group Fíur du Ath, Raeve's job is to complete orders and never get caught. When a rival bounty hunter turns her world upside down, blood spills, hearts break, and Raeve finds herself imprisoned by the Guild of Nobles--a group of powerful fae who turn her into a political statement. Crushed by the loss of his great love, Kaan Vaegor took the head of a king and donned his melted crown. Now on a tireless quest to quell the never-ebbing ache in his chest, he is lured by a clue into the capitol's high-security prison where he stumbles upon the imprisoned Raeve ... Echoes of the past race between them. There's more to their story than meets the eye, but some truths are too poisonous to swallow"
Queen Bee
| "Lady Ela Dalvi knows the exact moment her life was forever changed--when her best friend, Poppy, betrayed her without qualm over a boy, the son of a duke. She was sent away in disgrace, her reputation ruined. Nearly three years later, eighteen-year-old Ela is consumed with bitterness and a desire for . . . revenge. Her enemy is quickly joining the crème de la crème of high society while she withers away in the English countryside. With an audacious plan to get even, Ela disguises herself as a mysterious heiress and infiltrates London's elite. But when Ela reunites with the only boy she's ever loved, she begins to question whether vengeance is still her greatest desire. In this complicated game of real-life chess, Ela must choose her next move: Finally bring down the queen or capture the king's heart?" |
I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I'm Trapped in a Rom-Com
| "A hilarious and sexy romance about a woman who gets dropped on a strange planet only to fall for not one, but two, aliens, from the author of I Got Drunk and Yeeted a Love Potion at a Werewolf. Dorothy Valentine is close to getting her PhD in wildlife biology when she's attacked by a lion. On the bright side, she's saved! On the not-so-bright side, it's because they're abducted by aliens. In her scramble to escape, Dory and the lion commandeer an escape pod and crash-land on an alien planet that has...dinosaurs? Dory and her new lion bestie, Toto, are saved in the nick of time by a mysterious and sexy alien, Sol. On their new adventure, they team up with the equally hot, equally dangerous Lok, who may or may not be a war criminal. Whether it be trauma, fate, or intrigue, Dory can't resist the attraction that's developing in their trio.... As this ragtag group of misfits explore their new planet, Dory learns more about how and why they've all ended up together, battles more prehistoric creatures than she imagined (she imagined...zero), and questions if she even wants to go back home to Earth in this hilarious and steamy alien romance adventure comedy romp" |
Legends and Lattes
| "The much-beloved BookTok sensation from Travis Baldree, Legends & Lattes is a novel of high fantasy and low stakes. The new paperback edition will include a very special, never-before-seen bonus story, Pages to Fill. Come take a load off at Viv's cafe, the first & only coffee shop in Thune. Grand opening! Worn out after decades of packing steel and raising hell, Viv, the orc barbarian, cashes out of the warrior's life with one final score. A forgotten legend, a fabled artifact, and an unreasonable amount of hope lead her to the streets of Thune, where she plans to open the first coffee shop the city has ever seen. However, her dreams of a fresh start filling mugs instead of swinging swords are hardly a sure bet. Old frenemies and Thune's shady underbelly may just upset her plans. To finally build something that will last, Viv will need some new partners, and a different kind of resolve." |
Heartless Hunter
In a world where witches face persecution, Rune leads a double life, masquerading as a socialite during the day and transforming into the vigilante known as the Crimson Moth by night, and forms a complicated alliance with the witch hunter Gideon Sharpe, blurring the lines between love and danger.
Rebel Witch
Betrayed by the boy she loved, Rune Winters allies herself with a dangerous witch to survive, while Gideon, torn between his lingering feelings for her and his duty to stop the witches, faces an impossible choice between love and saving the world he fought for.
Lady Knight
"The daughter of a duke defies the rules of high society in regency-era London with the help of friends, including the resident rake"
Phantasma
"In this spellbinding romantic fantasy, a young witch partners with a powerful ghost to save her sister--but when the competition turns deadly, his help may very well damn her instead. Phantasma only has two rules. Don't fall in love within its walls--and stay alive. When Ophelia and her sister find their mother brutally murdered, Ophelia has no time to grieve: not only has she inherited her family's magic but she is now responsible for her mother's debt. If the siblings don't come up with the money in one month, their childhood home will be demolished by the city. But when her sister recklessly tries to win the money by entering Phantasma, Ophelia cannot abandon her--even if most contestants never escape alive. No one knows how Phantasma started or who rules its terrors: the haunted competition travels from city to city, and winning is rumored to cost your soul. Ophelia, however, only wants to find her sister. But that's easier said than done. She's nowhere to be found and to Ophelia's horror, her OCD has become a new beast within the manor's haunted walls. Soon, she can't tell which terrors are her own mind and which are Phantasma's tricks to scare her away. When Ophelia meets Blackwell, she knows better than to trust him--the handsome ghost possesses powers no spirit should have. But when Blackwell offers Ophelia protection against the competition's magic in exchange for her help with a mysterious task, she has no choice but to accept. Only as Ophelia and Blackwell grow closer to gaining what they both desire, they also risk breaking Phantasma's cardinal rule . . . and soon Ophelia must decide if saving her family's legacy is worth the risk of losing herself"