Some thrillers whisper. This one walks in on six-inch heels, drops a body on the marble, and dares you to look away. Hot Girl Murder Club by Ashley Winstead takes the shiniest corner of Los Angeles, the world of rising singers and models and the powerful men who prey on them, and turns it into […]
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Cutting Loose by Aimee Zaring
An insightful memoir about compulsive behavior, self-discovery, and the enduring possibility of change Aimee Zaring’s Cutting Loose: My Journey from Survival Mode to Embodied Flow is part memoir and part exploration of somatic healing. In the book, Zaring recounts her struggle with trichotemnomania, a little-known compulsive disorder characterized by the repetitive cutting or shaving of […]
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Tear Here by Matthew Pitt
Content warnings: Sexual relationship with a minor A refined, edgy take on a rock & roll band’s attempts to break into the mainstream Tear Here follows the story of Some Assault, a group composed of recalcitrant high schoolers and their headstrong, charismatic drummer Liddy. The narrative is a bittersweet tale of an ensemble in transition […]
There is a particular ache that comes from loving someone you have quietly stopped seeing. You share a bed, a mortgage, a dog, and yet somewhere along the way the person becomes furniture. Always there, easy to walk past. The Romance Revival by Christina Lauren takes that small marital tragedy and does something audacious with […]
Journey to the Heartland thoughtfully merges the Chinese immigrant experience with the struggle to accept one’s sexual identity and find belonging. “‘Mom, if the Earth is round, what about the people in the southern hemisphere? How could they not fall off the Earth?’” Hanwei Zhou grows up in a Chinese factory town during the industrial […]
A touching, everyday love story and the past that shaped it When Michael meets Andrea in a cafe, he can’t help but reach out. Literally. Trying to sit at a nearby table, Andrea is greeted by a helping hand she didn’t ask for. And while it might be awkward and at least a little bit […]
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Pretty Dead Things by Kelsey Cox
There is a moment early in this novel when a teenage girl describes her own smile as a weapon, something she aims at customers to make them feel special. That single line tells you what kind of book you have picked up. In Pretty Dead Things, Kelsey Cox is not writing about a beauty pageant. […]
A thoughtful, intertextual memoir about learning to survive a grey world that always seemed written for someone else “I had already understood the only purpose of education was to fit me for adulthood in a mad world.” People often move through the world assuming that social rules and rituals are universal and intuitive. Yet much […]
Stories bouncing between reality and unreality, paired with abstract artworks, result in a unified, surprisingly accessible collection. This slim but consistently satisfying volume contains just five stories, making it viable to include a few words on each. It begins with a dignified alderman obliging an odd request that puts him in what might be deemed […]
“In the Wake of the Ruined” begins with its heroine crawling out of the sea on all fours, dragging a dead king’s sword and a dead king’s crown, with a hole in her middle packed with kelp and blood-soaked sand. She has kept herself alive by paying a price she does not fully understand yet. […]