This volume is organized into four thematic sections—“Family & Friendship,” “Immigration & Belonging,” “Witness & Activism,” and “Identity & Self-Love”—which pair entries with the prompts that inspired them. Each section opens with a warm and insightful exchange between the co-editors, Shout Mouse founder Crutcher and 21-year-old Shout Mouse author Aakil. Readers will encounter a wide […]
Ramona Sadler’s carefully curated life unravels after the loss of her professorship and her townhouse lands her in a mobile home at the Nearly Heaven RV Park in Jackalope, Texas— similar to the one she grew up in back in Snap Peas, New York. With her academic career in shambles due to apparent budget cuts […]
Knowing that he only gets a few more kid birthdays before the gifts start turning from cool stuff into things like dress shirts and nose-hair trimmers, Greg is determined to make his upcoming celebration something special. Unfortunately, due to a household mishap, his mom forgot to mark his birthday on the family calendar—and his dad […]
This debut story collection lifts its title from a 1909 manifesto co-authored by urban designer Daniel H. Burnham, which also provides the epigram invoking the city’s motto: “Urbs in Horto—a city set in a garden.” More than a century later, that garden is no Eden. There are way more cracks than flowers: cracks in the […]
After Rue Holloway was caught kissing a girl, her mom enrolled her at Sacred Heart Academy, “in the middle of East Jesus Nowheresville,” where students are instilled with values of purity and deference. Rue, who’s labeled “too much,” has no desire to be a “good girl,” so she’s intrigued by her classmate Charlotte Savage—the rule-breaking, […]
The book opens with an introduction that encourages readers to explore its contents however they wish rather than feeling constrained to read in order from beginning to end. Science writer Thomas divides the information into six sections: “Earth,” “Near-Earth Space, “Our Solar System,” “Stars,” “Galaxies,” and “The Universe.” Readers can tighten their Kuiper Belt and […]
Williams has long worked magic with stories that, on the surface, seem quite quotidian, save that something unspoken—and occasionally sinister—lies beneath. The interactions of a woman and her driver in the opening story, “Flour,” are a case in point: She is well-off, but she invents an excuse to get rid of an expected weekend guest […]
It’s 1817. Young widow Lily Adler, who’s earned a modest reputation for unraveling mysteries, is known as a Lady of Quality—that is, a discreet investigator. So it’s no surprise that Sarah Forrest and her fiance, Mr. Clive, ask for her assistance in unraveling a mystery surrounding her inheritance. Did Sarah’s father really put it under […]
In this loose sequel to the author’s Turkey Shoot (2018), Anna Burmeister is in transition, raising her 5-year-old son, Ramadi, in Piraeus, Greece, while still mourning his father, Mahmoud, who was killed in the earlier book. Mahmoud isn’t as far away as she thinks, as he’s been denied entry to Paradise (“Where I find myself now […]
When a bridge in Austin was renovated in the 1980s, the crevices beneath it became the perfect home for Mexican free-tailed bats, which moved in by the hundreds of thousands. Their human neighbors didn’t welcome them—until a bat biologist, Dr. Merlin Tuttle, explained how beneficial the bats were to the environment; they ate insect pests, […]