Zara Persil-Pendleton is a private investigator in Alameda, California, who mostly takes employment-related cases with a sideline involving the museum world, particularly regarding Judaica-related works and their provenance. As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor who hid her Jewishness after the war, Zara finds this heritage connection becoming important to her later in life. That […]
The book’s opening essay, “Breakfast for Dinner,” sets the tone for the rest of the work with its blend of childhood trauma, comedic storytelling, and poignant reflections. The essay opens with the inaugural family dinner in Staples’ new home. In attendance with his wife and in-laws was the author’s mother, who (with “the calm of […]
In her fourth book set in a region unknown to many readers, Kassabova examines the threats facing one of the few remaining nomadic peoples in modernity: the Karakachans, “Greek speakers of mysterious origin” whose homeland is “impossible to know.” Moving their animals in search of fresh pasture, they have spent centuries breeding ancient races of […]
In humanity’s space-colonizing future, would-be Mars settler Michelle Arensen tries to put the suicide of her father behind her, working with her husband and brother to build a lasting Red Planet base. Suddenly, a bizarre phenomenon engulfs Michelle and other women on the expedition who find themselves held prisoner by faceless, noncommunicative humanoids. After a […]
British publisher and diarist Allen brings his love of notebooks to a lively, wide-ranging history of bound blank pages. Notebooks, he writes, “interest me as a technology that has had tangible effects on the world around us.” The author started keeping a journal in 2002: “Writing a diary made me happier; keeping things-to-do lists made […]
At the playground, Nadine hears a girl her age speaking to her doll in an unfamiliar language. Eager to learn more, Nadine asks the girl, Yan, if she has a “coming-here story.” Yan replies that she’s a recent immigrant from China, and the two children bond. Later, on her way home, Yan asks a woman […]
It’s the 1970s in Walnut Creek, in an unnamed U.S. state, long before cellphones and social media, and preteen Jimmy Hamilton daydreams about big league baseball, throws crab apples at the neighbor’s cat, and hopes his mom doesn’t order him to tear down his tree fort. On the plus side, summer and Little League are […]
On an environmentally devastated Earth, Leah and Rachel Silverton, orphaned sisters born a year apart who can pass for identical twins, struggle to get by. Leah has severe asthma, but each year the government offers 16-year-olds the opportunity to try out for a chance to live in the Floating City on Venus. Only 50 boys […]
Rather than construct narratives for their 20 randomly ordered selections, Pintos and Iannuzzi toss pithy fact bits and spot images across each spread around a full body portrait, with inconspicuous arrows here and there to link related items. Though at least systematic when it comes to providing range maps, typical sizes and weights, conservation status, […]
Newly 15-year-old Cat really wants her new girlfriend, Morgan, to get along with her friends, but they’re just not gelling. English Cat is part of the fashion-conscious, makeup-wearing group surrounding her school’s queen bee, Siobhan, while Irish Morgan hangs with an edgier, goth-leaning cohort. To make matters worse, Morgan and Siobhan are both running for […]