Molly Dearborn and Karl Dean were high school friends who harbored crushes on each other. Nothing happened between them and then a big misunderstanding drove them apart, and they haven’t spoken in 22 years. Molly moved away and wound up married, while Karl stayed in their hometown of Harlot’s Bay, Maryland, and opened a bakery. […]
Emma Woodhouse Knightley has given up matchmaking for marriage and a peaceful life catering to the whims of her father, who imagines that sickness and death lurk around every corner. When Mr. Woodhouse announces that he’s marrying Miss Bates, it’s a major shock to Emma; her sister, Isabella; and their husbands, brothers George and John […]
“As a full-time evolutionary biologist, part-time botanist, recreational user, and more than likely a future medicinal user, I find cannabis one of the most fascinating of all plants on our planet,” writes DeSalle, a curator of molecular systematics at the American Museum of Natural History. It’s fascinating indeed: A flowering plant, cannabis is a distant […]
Chloe Fairway feels like things couldn’t get worse. At 31, she’s living with her parents in the London suburbs, working as an assistant rather than a screenwriter, and stuck in the dating trenches. But then an old colleague recommends a mysterious dating service called Perfect Partners. Chloe figures it can’t hurt to try, so she […]
Emma, depicted at the outset of the story as a polar bear cub, wakes one morning in her ice-cavern bedroom, her mother calling her to breakfast. Anticipating a feast of berries, seaweed, and fish, Emma sets out, following her nose up icy cliffs, down slippery slopes, across shimmering plains, and over jagged crevasses. Along the […]
Becky Alderton is nearly 30, and nothing in her life is going the way she’d always assumed it would. She’s single, perpetually going on terrible dates, and nursing an unrequited crush on her ex-boyfriend and current best friend, Max. She still lives with her mother, who actually gives her a curfew. Her job is a […]
The third memoir from Van Dyke covers similar ground as the previous two; now he is approaching 100 instead of 90, but before that, not much has changed. (That’s the thing about the past.) What’s new is the angle: the hundred chapters are titled for their takeaway: from “Don’t Act Your Age” and “Make Your […]
Working in western France, Slimak, author of The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature, discovered that a group of Homo sapiens had taken up residence in a Neanderthal cave 54,000 years ago and remained for 40 years. Neanderthals themselves did not vanish for another 12,000 years, according to the latest evidence. Also […]
Mason Kowalski is stuck in a dead-end job he hates, writing copy for his boss at a health-food company while taking care of his elderly grandmother in his free time. He regularly experiences stress, due to a generalized anxiety disorder, but he becomes alarmed when he also suffers vivid hallucinations and debilitating headaches. When Mason’s […]
A world where humans are descended from a variety of mammals endures its own equivalent of the U.S. Civil War—the northern, industrialized Parity arming against the southern, rural, and slave-owning Echelon. When a marauding Parity gang’s rampage in a frontier Echelon town kills otter-descended schoolteacher Martha Good, her lover, dog-descended fellow teacher Elizabeth Indigo Sandpiper, […]