Encompassing works published from 1975 to 2013, this collection by Murguía reflects a flinty but compassionate sensibility, focused on people struggling on society’s lower rungs, especially in the Bay Area. The title story exemplifies the approach, narrated by a San Francisco building inspector investigating a fatal Mission District fire; the story encompasses the narrator’s personal […]
Opening and closing with scenes from a gig as a 33-year-old burlesque dancer, Campbell shows off her experience as a stand-up comic with a quip-laden narrative in which she chronicles both her youth as a picky eater from childhood through college and a yearslong, riotously contentious, on-again, off-again relationship with a sometimes pushy, sometimes disturbingly […]
In no geographical order, Zommer presents 13 islands or island groups from our planet’s estimated 600,000. For each, the author includes blocks of chatty commentary scattered around a stylized aerial view decorated with outsize flora, fauna, and volcanos or other geophysical highlights. Signs of human presence in these diverse locales are largely confined to glimpses […]
Poliquin’s epic journey opens, naturally, with an orange. Fast facts and anecdotes follow; though presented seemingly randomly, they coalesce into a rich exploration of the color through the lenses of culture, history, and nature. The rooster from The Canterbury Tales, “dreaming of a fox whose ‘colour was betwixe yellow and reed,’” precedes a spread about […]
Physics is at a stalemate. Its two best theories—Einstein’s theory of gravity and quantum mechanics—can’t both be right. Vedral, a physicist at the University of Oxford, is placing all his bets on the quantum. Our physics woes, he says, come from our failure to see quantum theory as truly universal, governing everything from atoms to […]
Maven Blackthorn hasn’t been home since her mom died under suspicious circumstances 12 years ago, but the death of her grandmother, Lorinda, forces her return to Solstice, Vermont. Maven’s daughter, Beatrix, has never seen where her mother grew up, but she quickly learns the Blackthorns have a reputation for witchcraft, largely fueled by a centuries-long […]
This fascinating biography by British historian Tremlett gives us dictator Francisco Franco’s Galician childhood, military school, and the “Africanist” apprenticeship in Spanish Morocco before the civil war that brought him to power. The book is also, inevitably, a concise history of Spain during the first three-quarters of the 20th century. Unlike Hitler and Mussolini, Franco […]
When her daughter Noelle’s principal reports that April Soto’s brilliant 10-year old “bludgeoned” a schoolmate, comparing her to a “runaway freight train” and mandating anger management for both mother and child, fiery rage breaks through April’s years of effortful containment. That night, she runs. Though it ignited her ire to admit it, April’s violence and […]
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 […]
In this installment of the Dancing Ever After series, young Peter enjoys a beautiful morning alongside friends Milo the Cat, Ren the Bird, and Roxy the Duck. Suddenly, “a HUNGRY WOLF with a grumbly tummy” swoops in, swallowing Roxy and chasing the others until Peter captures it. A large sneeze launches Roxy out of the […]