It’s June 2016. A group of friends gather in the courtyard of a New York City bar to discuss their days, their dates, their philosophies of art and life. In November there will be an election whose consequences can’t quite be imagined yet. The Brexit vote goes through in England. In Minnesota, Philando Castile is […]
Ralph Norton is the highly successful CFO at FASTRAK, America’s second-largest purveyor of Christian merchandise. Ralph is also the genius behind Word of God, an AI-based app that uses Scripture and religious doctrine to create a personalized spiritual experience in the form of counsel from “God” himself. The app has catapulted Houston-based FASTRAK into the […]
Told through the eyes of a sensitive child, Tower’s offbeat personal narrative immerses readers in the visceral confusion of a fractured family, rendered with vivid sensory details—the smell of apple juice and holding tight to a Winnie-the-Pooh stuffed animal. The child’s imagination serves as a coping mechanism, with recurring Star Wars and Hundred Acre Wood metaphors […]
“Thanksgiving is not just about gratitude,” the author writes in the book’s opening lines, continuing, “It’s about gravy, grudges, [and] group texts gone wrong.” With a chapter dedicated to each state (plus Washington, D.C.), Okine offers readers 51 short stories poking fun at America’s “most chaotic, carb-loaded, emotionally layered holiday.” None of the stories are […]
Glicksman, an American English professor and jewelry importer before his death in 2021, recaps three decades of periodic sojourns in the Middle and Far East starting in 1971. The author usually traveled on his own, in threadbare circumstances. His destinations included Turkey, where he encountered “hashish of a legendary quality” that made “the air…thick and […]
Glicksman, an American English professor and jewelry importer before his death in 2021, recaps three decades of periodic sojourns in the Middle and Far East starting in 1971. The author usually traveled on his own, in threadbare circumstances. His destinations included Turkey, where he encountered “hashish of a legendary quality” that made “the air…thick and […]
Ramona Sadler’s carefully curated life unravels after the loss of her professorship and her townhouse lands her in a mobile home at the Nearly Heaven RV Park in Jackalope, Texas— similar to the one she grew up in back in Snap Peas, New York. With her academic career in shambles due to apparent budget cuts […]
In 1950 a well-off married couple, Philip and Stephanie Barber, opened Music Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, a historically white area of deep cultural significance. They later fashioned a carriage house as a performance center for all kinds of music, lectures, and tutorials grounded in the Lenox School of Jazz. A “wellspring of […]
Assassin Erica Banks returns to New Orleans to execute a series of high-profile hits contracted by a Cuban drug ring. Banks is a highly experienced professional, and at first, the murders leave law enforcement baffled. Lawyer Harry Barnes, a fixer who doesn’t always stick to the right side of the law, gets involved when an […]
In the not-too-distant future, artificial intelligences and machine-minds handle most of humankind’s chores, including transportation, school admissions, and banking. Teenager Wyoming Plankston comes from a somewhat affluent family in the Washington, D.C., area (their fortune was largely lost in a poor investment in Crashlandia Airways). Wyoming is a good-natured, unmotivated third-year student at third-rate boarding […]