Trip’s baseball roots run deep: His dad’s team won the Little League championship when he was 12, and Grandpa was a minor-league ballplayer. Trip is well aware of the family legacy of baseball, but he feels the heavy expectation to achieve and struggles to carve out a legacy of his own. After his father, who’s […]
Unlikely platinum albums don’t come any more unlikely than the Violent Femmes’ self-titled debut: The trio hailed from a city with no national profile (Milwaukee), had a lead songwriter still in his teens, and played acoustic instruments in an era of punk guitars and New Wave synths. But their snappy songs, inspired by alt-rock misfits […]
With regard to his four decades as a Springsteen fan, Pethes knows he’s not special. But the magic of Springsteen is that he makes his fans feel that they are and, often, that he has altered their lives. How does Springsteen do this? Pethes, a literature professor at the University of Cologne, thinks he has […]
In 1990, Sen. Ariana Peters of the United States Shifter Council encounters an unusual sinkhole in California. It exudes a silver, tendril-like substance that interacts with her directly and raises concerns about general public safety. The senator, prioritizing containment, authorizes the use of a substance called oblivion tincture to wipe locals’ minds and then relocate […]
Do you know that you shouldn’t order fish on Monday? Have you enjoyed The Bear, the collected works of David Chang, or food memoirs like Blood, Bones, and Butter and Crying in H Mart? If so, you owe a debt of gratitude to Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain wasn’t trying to change restaurant culture when he wrote […]
In 1974, the 21-year-old author, motivated by the early death of his father from a heart attack, embarked on an ambitious attempt to answer two deceptively simple questions: How does one determine the optimal human diet, and what diet would one discover with that method? Spitz clarifies early on that he’s neither a physician nor […]
An unseen narrator warns of Great White Shark’s “toothy scowl,” though Filipina’s illustration shows a disarmingly goofy grin and googly eyes. Cuttlefish, Flounder, Dresser Crab, Leafy Dragon, and Octopus immediately exhibit their camouflage or concealment skills and escape being eaten. With no hiding place left, Puffer Fish seems a goner. The little fish then inflates, […]
Ruby Spencer has two missions: She works to free men who are wrongfully incarcerated and facing the death penalty, and she searches for missing women. Mitchell Brown is the latest in a long line of death row clients, some of whom she has saved, many of whom she has not. In the small town of […]
Two stories are told in parallel: scenes of a dad with his child, rendered in mostly blue with English dialogue, and scenes depicting a mother and her child, portrayed in a yellow and sepia palette, in Vietnamese. Both kids are learning to ride a bike—a process marked by falls and tears of frustration. Phi’s succinct […]
Introducing the main characters of “The Axe,” the narrator—omniscient, omnipotent, and jaded—suddenly pauses: “But none of that matters, because these aren’t real people, and it’s hard enough to hold onto your own memories without holding onto theirs.” Some of Row’s characters are aware that they’re characters; some of his narrators struggle against the constraints of […]