In each of these 40 stories, family pulls at the characters in different ways. In “Mother, False,” it’s in a fantastical way, extra hands growing out of her body after her mother dies and she must take over that role in the household. In “There Are Places That Will Fill You Up,” a girl leaves […]
Rebecca Lee Crumpler was born in 1831 to free parents in Delaware. Little is known about her childhood except that, early on, she went to live with an aunt in Philadelphia who raised her. When Rebecca was 17, she enrolled in the West Newton English and Classical School in Massachusetts. In Boston, she worked as […]
Clementi spent much of her early 20s as a journalist in various European countries, dealing with sexual assault and harassment from a number of her supervisors before heading to Israel to live in a kibbutz to recover from a breakup with a boyfriend who had “an ego of steel, a heart of mud, and a […]
Sophronia “Noni” Reid is devastated when her mother makes her give up a dream internship in costume design to move to Magnolia, Virginia. Her mom, an esteemed researcher in the field of Black literature, is the new president at an elite liberal arts college in her small hometown, and frustrated Noni, who feels like she’s […]
When her aunt Cora goes missing, Quinn Cutheridge returns to the town of Wonderland, Wyoming, for the first time in a decade. Although Quinn’s line of work gives her a professional lens that might help get to the bottom of Cora’s disappearance, she’s ambivalent about taking on the case. She hasn’t seen or spoken to […]
On the first page of Trabucco Zerán’s novel, the narrator, Estela García, offers a deal to the people who may or may not be on the other side of a mirrored glass pane: “I’m going to tell you a story, and when I get to the end, when I stop talking, you’re going to let […]
The political crisis culminating in the deposition of Richard II in 1399 by his cousin, Henry of Bolingbroke, ignited the issue of sovereign legitimacy between the houses of York and Lancaster for the next 85 years. In her probing work in four parts, with chapters titled after lines from the Shakespeare plays, Castor delves into […]
Sir Kelton, Squire, and Shadow are escorting Cade to wizard school, but they keep returning to the same marked cairn. They encounter Sir Reynholm the Bold of Upper Claxtonbury, but the group is separated when a swarm of giant mosquitoes attack. Squire relies on his wits, survival skills, and flashback memories of a conversation with […]
In this second series entry, the Weirdoughs—werewolf Bram, Sheila the ghost, surly Mona the elf-witch, Skele-tony Le Bone, and fartmeister extraordinaire Bryan the Lion—immediately smell something rotten in Felix Frostbite, a charismatic if literally icy new instructor. The friends wind up in a good position to scupper his genuinely villainous scheme to destroy the Villains […]
Technology giants have long been known for an atmosphere of sexism, with the upper tiers looking like a boys-only club. Malone, head of the interaction design program at the California College of the Arts, argues that women have always been an essential part of the tech equation, even though men reserved the spotlight—and the high-paying […]