As the music industry has undergone a profound paradigm shift in the 21st century, it has left a lot of history behind: small labels that released seminal music, studios where those classics were recorded, sessions so significant that they established one Southern town as “the Birthplace of Country Music.” If a culture commemorates battlefields and […]
The book opens in 1995 with Yacoobi on a bus bound for Afghanistan; she was returning to the country for the first time in more than two decades. She knew that her mission to set up clandestine schools for girls would almost certainly lead to her being “arrested, tortured, or killed on the spot” if […]
This collection of some 40 pieces brought together by writer, translator, and filmmaker Valente offers up an eclectic, daunting overview of the life and career of the singular free-jazz composer, performer, and poet Cecil Taylor. As Gary Giddins puts it in his fine essay, “The Avant-Gardist Who Came in From the Cold,” Taylor inherited a […]
Stretching from the 1820s to the 1970s, this novel tells a sweeping story anchored by the matriarchs of two interconnected families in Oceania. The prologue, titled “Three Dreams of Grandmother,” introduces motifs that recur throughout: trees, song, water, the kingfisher bird. These images are the family inheritance and take on meaning only as the story […]
How does one become the CEO—or, as this book puts it, the “Chief Evolution Officer”—of their own life? This self-help book borrows themes from the business world to direct readers toward better balance in their lives. Each of 22 chapters contains explanations of the author’s ideas, which revolve around the concepts of “Vision,” “Purpose,” “Values,” […]
The author’s cousin Robert’s life reads like a cautionary tale, with many pages devoted to his yearslong involvement in criminal activity and after-hours gambling. As readers take in the stories of Robert’s shocking dealings with Irish gang members in New York City and his encounters with the law in the late 1960s and early ’70s, […]
Louna, a rising pop star on her first stadium tour in Marseille, is a famous face hiding a buried identity. Backstage after her set, an intruder startles her with words in Arabic: “I found you, Jamila”—revealing by the use of her birth name that someone from her past has tracked her down. Ten years earlier, […]
Seventh-grader Charlie Gold, at six feet two, would be perfect as center for the school basketball travel team, but at tryouts, the 13-year-old’s anger gets the better of him, and he’s subsequently cut. He and his older sister, Cecilia, who works and takes classes at St. Hildegarde’s University, are no strangers to hardship; they’ve lost […]
In Bethington, Ohio, “boys will be boys” is the rule of law. Ava Germaine learned that quickly. After publicly calling out the blatant misogyny she witnessed, she was silenced in a cruel, humiliating attack that she doesn’t remember—though two of her classmates do. Now an outcast, she spends her free time working alongside the gruff, […]
After he’s framed for the theft of the Scroll of Heaven, Li Jun, along with his former Iron Core school rival, Yin Yue, and the two Eastern Aspects, Water and Lure, vow to recover it and prevent a war between East and West Longhan. As they follow the thief’s trail, Jun experiences the reality of […]