Birthday girl Maia, clad in her purple bunny pajamas, runs down to greet her mother. Her excitement grows when she learns that Umma is cooking something special: miyeok guk, or birthday soup. The dialogue-heavy narrative expounds on the dish’s origins. Packed with nutrients, this seaweed soup is typically served to new mothers; Korean people traditionally […]
Over the course of only a few weeks, a toxic algal bloom has spread from the Pensacola, Florida, coast to the Atlantic Ocean. It’s bright red and caused by microorganisms called dinoflagellates, and it’s killing sea creatures and producing life-threatening anaphylactic reactions in humans. In the midst of this environmental disaster, 25-year-old Diane Nelson, an […]
Explicitly pushing back against homogenous depictions of Jewish people, the authors demonstrate the ethnic, racial, and gender diversity of Jews. Each spread includes a brief biography paired with a stylized portrait reminiscent of those in Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo’s Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls (2016). A pull quote or sidebar accompanies each subject; […]
Headstrong 14-year-old Lizzie Novis refuses to believe that her mother, a U.S. embassy clerk who was working in Poland, is dead. After fleeing from her grandmother—who’s attempting to bring her back to America—Lizzie locates her 19-year-old brother, Jakob, a Cambridge mathematician who’s stationed at the clandestine British intelligence site called Bletchley Park. Hiding from her […]
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 […]
Thirteen-year-old Sam Kepler Greyson is dealing with “Big Things™”: His Hodgkin’s lymphoma is in remission, but his best friend, Oscar Padilla, recently died of brain cancer. When Sam returns to school, he’s greeted with hostility—thanks to a rumor spread by “former friend, current jerk” Kevin Bellman, who claims that he lied about having cancer. Moreover, […]
Nathan, Isabel, and Suresh, a motley group of misfits, are trying to go back in time to the year 1613. Nathan, who got caught cheating in English class, wants to make sure Shakespeare’s plays are destroyed in the Globe Theatre fire so no one will ever have to study them. Isabel longs to meet her […]
Followers of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and other Frankfurt School luminaries do not typically associate Naples with Critical Theory or any part of its genesis. But as Mittelmeier shows, “that sulfurous, chaotic [and] exhausting city,” along with the neighboring island of Capri, likely played a far greater role both in the intellectual formation of Frankfurt […]
In “The Contagion,” the Dreiyer family’s annual road trip includes a stop at a bed-and-breakfast—that’s where 7-year-old Sylvia peeks into a trunk of dolls, one of which, she swears, moves on its own. Decades later, when looking for inspiration for a TV show she’s working on, she returns to the inn and makes a startling […]
In this short, somewhat whimsical tale, two very different men meet in a ward for patients with mental illness: a short Jewish man named Josh with a brown beard, and Nick,a big-bellied fellow with white whiskers. Josh was just committed by paramedics because he was found wandering in traffic after breaking up with his boyfriend; […]